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Storybook Brawl

Beginner

Overview of the game

See LSV's article

Or try playing it yourself, seriously, it's a free game

Intermediate

Tactics

  • Certain cards pair well with other cards
  • Support + Spawn
    • Nim + Black Cat
    • Sword + Black Cat
  • Good synergies

Positioning

  • Top left (position 1) characters are more likely to get to attack first. Good for ranged or slay
  • Bottom left is second best for this, as it'll usually live to get in an attack. Plus, the remaining
  • Bottom right is good for weak characters that provide buffs to the board (Good Unicorn, Fairy Godmother), or accumulate buffs as others die (Vulture, Snow Wight)
  • Summoned creatures spawn in the same location (e.g. Black Cat), which is good for support
    • Pattern of multiple summons can be used (Bo Peep) to fill in

Hero selection

The three parts of a game

Every Storybook Brawl game consists of 3 main parts:

The early game: Levels 2-3, where you're trying to fill up your board gold-efficiently

  • None of the minions you buy here will carry on to the late game
  • It's really hard to die here, but watch out for your health anyways
  • The number of possible play patterns is not that large

The mid game: Levels 4-5, where people are starting to die off

  • You start making upgrades instead of pure purchases
  • Powerleveling becomes an option
  • Some of your purchases will make it to the endgame
  • Easy: falling into a particular comp (animals, royals). Just pick what's on theme
  • Harder: Having a mishmash of strong cards

The end game: Level 6: Determining who gets the crown

  • Treasures will make or break your comp; each one adds
  • Only a handful of viable options and you should be angling for one of these. Strongest to weakest:
    • Good Boy
    • Treants
    • Royals
    • Pumpking
    • Animals
    • Dwarves

Tempo (Who's the beatdown)

One of the things that most informs your Storybook playing is, "who's the beatdown"? Or in other words, how ahead are you?

If you're very far ahead of the other players, you can start making investments in the long game by sacrificing your short game. Ways to do this:

  • Buying XP (Turkish Delight, For Glory), which does nothing immediately, but improves your position in future rounds
  • Buying gold investments for the future (Spinning Wheel, Prized Pig)
  • Buying characters that permanently scale (Vainpire, etc)

On the flip side, if your board is weak compared to the group, you're trying to scrabble for as high of a place as you can before dying. Just greedily buy the things that most improve your board strength. Another way to improve your short game at the cost of the long term are combat spells like Meteor or Shrink Potion.

Once you have a sense of how strong you are in the entire group, you can think about how strong you are relative to your next opponent. Of course, you may not know what their comp is going to be, but their health is one helpful metric. Another example: if they're a ghost, chances are they will be weaker and you can invest beyond this turn.

At higher levels (once there's fewer players), it's also worth memorizing what kind of the board one opponent deployed.

Gold management

Characters: Generally, you always want to be buying the most expensive characters you can. Why? As a rule, characters that cost 3 gold are so much better than ones that cost 2 gold.

  • E.g. with 4 gold, you could buy 2 2/3s, or one 7/7 Juliet — a ton more stats
  • A single 6/6 is usually better than than two 3/3s; first, it kills e.g. 4/4s easily. Second, it takes up less board space, which is one of your most limited resources.

Corollary: Try to maximize your gold on the turns that you first hit a new level. This could be through piggy bank, spinning wheel, etc.

Spells: Because spells rarely advance your board space, the default is to spend your gold on characters, NOT spells. Spells tend to fill in the cracks between your extra gold. The exception, again, tends to be if you're ahead

Rerolls: In the early game, rerolling tends not to be worth it, as the cost of 1 gold is a large chunk of your total budget. In the mid-game, the variance in the power level of different cards tends to be a lot higher, so you start spending your rolls to find comp-appropriate and high-level characters, as well as duplicates for treasures.

In the end game, rerolling is a huge chunk of what you do, because very few characters are actually relevant or improve your endgame comp.

Time management

Your three basic resources in Storybook Brawl are: Gold, Health, and Time. The last one is the most interesting, because in most other card games like Hearthstone or Magic, time is rarely a bottleneck. But in Storybook Brawl, a new set of options is always just a reroll away, so individually analyzing w

Part of getting better at the game is seeing the patterns (which late game comps are strong, which characters are never worth picking up)

Advanced

Strategy

Comps