Games need to find you at the right time. Well, this Ethereum game found me on the toilet.
My favorite gaming experiences have come when a game is fun and fits perfectly into my life. Think Blood finding myself locked inside during the pandemic, oh co-op gem It takes two when I wanted to bond with my partner.
Guild of Guardians comes to you during those natural pauses in your day, whether you’re taking a suspiciously long bathroom break at work, waiting for the bus, or making dinner. This mobile fantasy game has enough complexity to keep you interested, but thankfully packs a fast enough gameplay loop that you can pick it up and put it down easily.
Screenshot from the Guardians Guild. Image: Guardian Guild.
Fight through the dungeons
Guild of Guardians is a mobile trading card game on iOS and Android that draws on the rogue-lite and auto-battler genres for a convenient and addictive gaming experience.
You’ll fight through dungeons, completing each up to three times to get maximum experience points and loot so you can continue improving your team. Each dungeon has multiple rooms filled with enemies that you have to fight to get the final reward. Likewise, each room has a variety of enemies, loot, and the odd neutral terrain to heal or level up your gear.
You start out with the ability to field three Guardians, gradually adding more as you level up. These range from tanks to mages and support guardians, and it’s vital to ensure your team has a balanced mix of attributes. Once you’ve chosen your group of Guardians, you’ll carefully select your formation, making sure to put your tanks at the forefront, then click Fight.
Taking inspiration from auto-battlers like Riot’s Teamfight Tactics (TFT), your Guardians will automatically fight for you. In Guild of Guardians, however, you choose when everyone casts their ultimate ability. This strikes a great balance between being passive enough to play in natural breaks in the day while still being engaging and requiring at least one little Attention.
As you go through the rooms of each dungeon, you are asked to select a rune that will give you a slight buff in the future. Sometimes you have the misfortune of picking up a “curse of destiny”, which will buff your enemy and make him more powerful. This gives enough variety to each run of a dungeon, as I adjust my strategy based on my team and the runes I’ve collected.
The entire cycle takes no more than a few minutes at a time, with plenty of downtime to put the phone down, get on with real life, and then come back. That’s why it’s perfect for those natural breaks in your day.
My only complaint about the core gameplay is that the “domain synergies” and how they interact with each other seem hidden. Even once you look for it, it doesn’t seem entirely clear or unique. It seems like having multiple characters of the same “domain” improves your team slightly, but the boost is pretty similar for each domain… so it seems slightly redundant.
In other auto-battlers, this is often the most interesting part of the game, so I’d like to see Guild of Guardians develop some complexity here, like synergies that grant healing, the ability to stun, or something else unique.
Personalize your party
After completing a few dungeons, you’ve probably gathered enough resources to really start building a team that works for you.
Guild of Guardians has a fairly extensive character leveling and equipment system that requires just as much, if not more, attention than dungeon clearing. Each guardian has their own level which goes up to 30, which influences their health, attack, defense and the skills they have available to unlock.
On top of that, you can equip each character with equipment like armor, a wizard’s hat, or an ax to boost certain stats. This all seems quite intuitive, and when it isn’t, thankfully the game holds your hand.
Screenshot from the Guardians Guild. Image: Guardian Guild.
Up until this point, I had not interacted with any cryptographic items or NFTs. I played the game every day for almost a week, doing just fine without any Web3 components. Once you log in to your Immutable Passport wallet, however, using a simple Gmail login option, new benefits come your way.
Notably, you can “ascend” your Guardians, which gives them a 30% boost across the board. By doing this, you turn the guardian into an NFT on the Ethereum scaled network zkEVM immutableallowing you to sell them on secondary market.
You can currently purchase the resources needed to ascend to Guardian for $6.99 for 40 Seals of Ascension, but you can also earn them by climbing the ranks. The number of seals needed varies depending on the popularity of the guardian, but from what I’ve seen, 31 Ascension Seals would be enough for most purple rarity guardians.
Before doing so, Guild of Guardians game director Chris Clay encouraged me on a Zoom call to level up my guardians as much as possible. Ascending your Guardians should be the final step in upgrading them and a way to solidify the value you put into the game.
As someone who has invested countless hours (as well as a painful amount of money) into games that return nothing, I like the idea of being able to sell my assets when I decide I don’t want to play anymore – the Web3 element of this game allows it.
Guild of Guardians has an extraordinarily addictive gameplay loop. You’ll dive through dungeons trying to get all the loot at the end. Couldn’t get there? Then use any loot you can find to level up your team, craft gear, or unlock new Guardians to take you to the next level.
Now, when I’m sitting on the throne, I’m not doom scrolling on Twitter. I’m leveling up my guardians, fighting skeletons in dungeons, and fighting to one day get my entire group up in the Guardian’s Guild.
Edited by Andrew Hayward