Other games I have a 95%+ win rate and recommend over this: Backpack Battles (best in the genre) and The Last Flame (I did write a negative review of this but I got 27 hours out of it).

You might even like Astronarch.

You can feel that you're making smart decisions and yet you lose. The game doesn't do anything to tell you what decisions you made were wrong. Graphically inferior to all other games mentioned above. Like other reviews mentioned, I got to the final boss in my first run, only to die in less than 2 seconds. The game requires unlocks to do anything is what I learned and that is horrible game design.

If I can win most of the time in other games of the genre except yours then yours is the problem.

Thought I was steamrolling the game in the first PvE run. My board destroyed the first two opponents in the top 8 of the tournament, so I thought I was doing well and had a good chance of succeeding on the first run. Nope. Final boss absolutely flattened me. Didn't feel good, didn't see it coming. If the previous fights were at all close, I would've understood and not felt awful. I couldn't really comprehend what I was supposed to do differently either, I guess I just have to unlock a load of ♥♥♥♥ and do the run again, but I really can't be bothered considering how easy the first 99% of the run is. Hard to recommend a game that blindsides you like this.

Update: Attempted another run with all the upgrades I could get. Mostly tier 4 units, including rare and mythics, saved 3 potions and temporary skills for the final fight, same thing happened. Weird game. The DM had no advice for me at the end either so I have no idea what to do. Repeatedly slamming your head against an impenetrable wall is not fun.

Update: Don't fight River.

Tales & Tactics is a rogue like auto chess game that combines two genres that feel like they were meant to go together.

Pros:
-Fun and unique class/race unit sets, not just clones of other autochess games
-You can gradually unlock more playable options (at a very fair pace), or just choose to unlock everything from the start
-Like any roguelike, you can replay with different characters for different special traits and unlock different modifiers to make runs harder.

Cons:
-You naturally cap at 6 units on your board. This can really limit how big you can go in terms of combining synergys and making some crazy board. You're often forced to just choose some limited routes as a result.
-PvP isn't classic autochess pvp, its just playing against boards other people have had before. Just pure rng.
-Nice little lore additions at the start of runs, but endings are literally cut and paste copies of each other.

Overall Tales and Tactics is a neat little genre combination. I really appreciate the effort given into making it feel unique from other autochess games, but it does end up feeling limited in pure scale, almost as if the game scaling ends at mid game and doesn't truly get to reach a satisfying end game. Enjoyable for what it is, but I was left wanting a little more out of it.

Rating: 6/10

Very cool so far

Fun time killing game.

It's like playing chess if the chess pieces had personality disorders and occasionally set themselves on fire like the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. Can feel like having an unstop bale army till a goblin sneezes and suddenly everyone is dead.

It is so much fun! I haven't enjoyed the autobattler as much as I do this one since Underlords and of course Super Auto Pets.
I enjoy the mix and match of classes, characters and units.
The graphics is very pleasant to the eye.
The difficulty levels are suited for everyone.
The replayability is great.
The RNG is a real c**t
:D

This is a fantastic auto battler. In large part because of the difficulty scaling and the way you can modify the game.

Everytime you play, you get points and you can use those points to unlock more and more stuff in the game. Then, there's that every time you win you unlock a new challenge mode that makes the playthrough harder with more ♥♥♥♥ thrown in.

Such as the last run I did added starting the game with 2 curses already (curses cause a unit to be locked in the shop, only unlocked by sacrificing a heart). So you're just stuck with that till you get to the first item store where you can buy an item to remove curses.

But it doesn't stop there! The customizing here is nuts. Do you wanna just get all the ♥♥♥♥ unlocked immediately? You can. Do you wanna actually use the points but don't like some things you unlocked? You can disable them. You can COMPLETELY customize your experience here and it's lovely! For instance I don't like there being trap hexes on my board, so I disabled that. Now trap hexes only show up as part of special events.

You can make this game as difficult or as easy, complex or simple, as you damn well please. That's great for someone like me! There are some aspects of this game I struggle with and some I don't.

It's also great for people like my husband. He's (I think) Diamond in TFT and this game is a cake walk for him so far, but he watched me on the struggle bus at a certain point in the difficulty and realized that the game doesn't stay as easy as it is at first. Though easy is also relative! He won his first match and lost his second. I lost my first 4 matches.

It's also nice to have a single player experience because you don't have to deal with people just doing whatever is the new meta. You're free to ♥♥♥♥ around and experiment in ways you just generally can't in TFT. There also is a multiplayer mode! Though I haven't gotten to mess with that yet.

But what makes it stand out against something like TFT besides the single player experience and the customization? You have a smidge of a story going on here. You'll have random events happen that are either a pure game of chance, a thing where you can combine items to make cool new items or units, and you sometimes get ones that are just straight up a game of chicken.

You also unlock new characters that YOU play as you go. Each character has different perks. The one I like to play so far is the second character I unlocked Alidanna, because I get to start out with a hex that gives life steal and attack damage to whatever unit I put on it.

Just overall I feel like it's a very well rounded game and that it can be fun for casual players like me or players that like more difficulty. You just gotta stick with it.

But what are my complaints? The game... doesn't give the best tutorial. At first I couldn't figure out what things I could click on to get more info, what I could hover, and what I needed to use the compendium for. I didn't know what a lot of things my units abilities really did for a while because I didn't realize that I could press esc, find the compendium that is on the main menu, and look up terms in the game to find out what they meant. Like Stifle (which is like silencing).

I do wish the game did a better job of explaining things like the UI. The UI is great for the most part, but I just wish that it was explained better in this regard. Now... granted... I did start on Vanilla mode because I picked that I had some experience with Auto Battlers... so I didn't start with the tutorial... but I feel like something as non-universal as menu's should be explained in Vanilla mode as well. It's not as they couldn't do it in the beginning section of a run that is skippable after you can do an instant run.

There are also some items that feel WAY overpowered at times, which *can* be fun if you enjoy just mopping the floor with everyone. I just had a special unit made from an event that multiplied it's self with it's ability.... but then I made it a mage so it could cast it's ability twice.... and let me tell you at a certain point I could NOT keep track of what was happening on the board lol. There were too many!!! lol But it was fun in the long run. It's also fun to try to find those little hidden cheat codes.

However I know it can be a con for some people to have items that are pretty broken. Just kind depends on you as a player.

But so far those are my only complaints other than little things like the occasional spelling error and stuff like that.

For the most part the game feels pretty balanced. The different classes feel good. The customization is a HUGE selling point for me. The little events that happen are generally fun. The design is nice and easy to look at. Sound design is good.

It's just a really well rounded game.

So if you are looking for a single player experience that is the in the same vein as TFT. This is probably the game for you.

Check out my Curator Page

Pretty much just Single Player TFT.
Quite a lot of cons (other autobattlers have rotating rosters and regular updates to keep fresh), with some choices that almost made me uninstall and never come back (kept picking River as my boss and losing every finals, only to find out River's hardest by far and just easily winning first game with other boss despite having less than half unlocks)(also why does "Unlock all" button also unlock all challenges and gives out achievements in the process?), but still it's an auto-battler and good ones come super rarely, so we have cherish even the mediocre ones.

like tft but better