// PC GAMER — GAMING
Shroom and Gloom is my new deckbuilder obsession thanks to its fantastic fights, beautiful artwork, and tasty mushrooms
I've never been so happy to be killed by a mushroom.
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A fun fact about myself is that I love mushrooms. I love finding them in the wild, I love putting them on pizza (please don't put wild mushrooms on your pizza), but most of all I love seeing them in games. It's quite a niche passion to be sure, but that hasn't stopped me from running around as a little mushroom man in my current DnD campaign. And now, I get to run around fighting them in my latest roguelike deckbuilder obsession: Shroom and Gloom.
Travelling through a subterranean dungeons full of vines, bones, and (crucially) shrooms, the aim here is to fight your way through areas to complete quests and unlock new characters, gather helpful items, and explore the different pathways.
Pretty standard, right? Wrong. Because Shroom and Gloom isn't just any old deckbuilder, it's a deck builder with two decks.
The first deck is for exploration, there's shovels to dig for new cards, lighters to start campfires for warmth, and tools to break through doors so you can progress onto the next area, among many, many other things. The catch is that you can only use so many of these in one go, thanks to your limited stamina.
This means you have to be strategic with what you do and when. Early on I made the mistake of getting way too excited digging holes and breaking open treasure chests. I soon had no stamina left to break the lock on the door to progress and I was forced to take a rest.
Now, that doesn't sound too bad, but resting in a fungal forest full of gloom isn't very comfortable. You can make campsites more bearable by lighting campfires, killing any shrooms lying around, and removing any human remains. But even then there are some negatives which you can't avoid. At each campsite you'll be able to see how much damage you'll take if you decide to sleep there, and let me tell you, it's almost never worth the rest.
You also replenish your stamina after each fight, so most of the time you'll want to just forge ahead and chew through some mushrooms, which brings me onto the second deck: your combat deck.
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