Wildfrost is an upcoming tactical deckbuilding game developed by Deadpan Games and Gaziter and published by Chucklefish. Set in a world plagued by an eternal winter, it’s up to you to gather a band of heroes, take on enemies, and restore the balance of the world.

If you enjoy titles like Slay the Spire, Banner of Ruin, and Monster Train, the overall premise of Wildfrost will feel familiar. Much like other deckbuilding games, a game of Wildfrost will see you traversing a procedurally generated map consisting of battle, merchant, and event and treasure encounters. You’ll start with a base deck consisting of some attack and item cards and you’ll be able to collect more cards as you complete encounters, collect gold, and defeat bosses.

Card battles are turn-based and happen on a grid where your units face off against enemies in two rows. Every turn, you get one action that you can use to play a companion card – which means placing one of your units on the grid – an item card, or an attack card. While companion cards are collected along the way through encounters, you’ll always start a run with a hero character card who’ll lead your troops on their adventure. They’re the nerve centre of everything: if your hero dies on the battlefield, the game is over.

Before starting a new game, you’ll be presented with three options of starting hero. You’ll also be able to choose a pet to accompany your hero. While initially, you’ll only have a handful of pets to choose from, you’ll unlock more throughout the game. Pets’ health and abilities don’t change, but your hero’s health and attack stats are randomised, and their additional abilities will depend on what tribe they belong to. Wildfrost comes with three different tribes: the Snowdwellers, the Shademancers, and the Clunkmasters. Each one comes with unique abilities, perks, and drawbacks. The Snowdwellers deck revolves around dealing high damage and delaying enemy attacks, whereas the Shademancer deck is focused on summoning temporary allies that can aid you in battle.

Drawing cards works a little differently in Wildfrost, too. Rather than drawing a new hand of cards every turn, Wildfrost comes with a ‘redraw bell’, which also has a counter of its own. At the start of a game, the redraw bell counter will count down from four. If you want to draw a new hand of cards before the redraw bell counter reaches zero, you can hit the bell and do so, but you won’t be able to perform any other actions during that turn. When the counter reaches zero, however, you’ll be able to draw a new hand of cards at no cost.

There’s also a ‘wave deployer’ visible on the battlefield. This counter shows the number of turns until the next wave of enemies appears. If the counter reaches zero, no more enemies will appear after you kill the ones currently on the battlefield, and you’ll win the battle after all enemies have been slain. In boss battles, however, the battle ends whenever the boss is killed, no matter whether there are other enemies left on the battlefield or not.

On top of your companion’s health, you’ll also have to be mindful of status effects on the battlefield. Whether it’s poisonous shroom clouds that deal damage over time, or the ‘demonize’ effect that doubles the amount of damage a unit receives, you’ll have to keep a close eye on every unit between turns to ensure victory.

Even though all of this may sound complicated, it’s remarkably easy to wrap your head around the mechanics after a couple of runs, and the nature of each effect feels suitably complex to keep things challenging as you progress through the game. Added to this, you also have the options to collect charms as you traverse the map. Charms essentially function as one-time upgrades that can be attached to units for the duration of a run. Be careful though: once you equip a companion with a charm, you’re not able to unequip it, and, if the companion dies, the charm will be gone, too.

The only feature that felt like it was missing was an in-game glossary. Most players who are familiar with deckbuilder mechanics will be able to figure things out for themselves pretty quickly, but if you’re new to the genre, there may be instances where you find yourself wondering how a specific ability works turn-to-turn. Overall, however, this is hardly a drawback as the game’s design is very sleek; it’s easy to learn but hard to master, making it a good fit for both brand-new card game fans and seasoned players.