I dragged myself away from my PC (yes, I’m playing ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’, like everyone else) last night to play a game that was not on a screen. I was still in the fantasy adventure mindset though, so I went with the choose-your-path card game ‘Spire’s End: Hildegard’ by Gregory Favro.
In ‘Hildegard’, you draw from a deck of over 400 story cards one by one, following the rules similar to the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’ - you read the story, choices are given and based on your decision, you find that card in the deck and go from there. You will collect items, face challenges, and also battle it out with random characters who cross your path.
Challenges and face-offs require dice rolls. Each one has a rule about how many dice you get and how many “sets” you can reroll all of them. Each roll, you have to lock at least one die result and then you can reroll the rest until you’ve locked them all, hoping that the faces you saved will create a bullseye symbol. If you manage to roll enough bullseyes to complete the challenge or defeat the enemy, you go on to the next card! But sometimes you fail, and this can mean consequences or even the demise of our heroine!
It was interesting to flip from Baldur’s Gate 3 to this. In a video game, especially one like Baldur’s Gate 3, many gamers start “save scumming” - the act of saving every few minutes so you can roll back a bad decision, party wipe or even a result you’re not happy with without having to play through hours of game again.
But you can’t do that in a tabletop game like Hildegard. You’re discard pile is a visual reminder of the paths not taken. Your inventory pile fluctuates every game based on the first few cards you go with. When I failed to complete a challenge in my game last night, and flipped the card with ending XIII, that was it. The game was over.
Could I have fudged it and just said “yeah yeah, I made it” and kept going. Sure. BUT I WOULD KNOW! Could I have attempted to reset the deck a bit further back and started over? Maybe, though there are a lot of moving parts that “rewinding” would not be easy as you have hundreds of cards scattered across your invenstory, discard pile, and other hidden places.
No, as the clock struck midnight, I realized that this was the end of this Hildegard story. Having found this ending was it’s own achievement. It was the furthest I had been in the story. It was time to reset the game for another night.
And that was okay.