What do you get when you cross a Strategy RPG with a Collectible Card Game, and a Tabletop RPG? You get Card Hunter. A comedic online game where you complete dungeons straight out of a D&D-style quest book, and win equipment that provides cards for your decks.
This game contains examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: The Elf Wizard and Human and Dwarf Clerics are girls, and they kick just as much ass as any of the men.
- Anachronism Stew - All of the content in Expedition to the Sky Citadel is sci-fi themed, in a game predominantly in a fantasy setting.
- An Adventurer Is You
- Artificial Stupidity: A yet subtle, positive example. If the battle is clearly won for your team without any chance for the AI to make a comeback, you will notice them doing stupid things like moving right next to your characters. Normally AI enemies will keep a space free so YOU move into their range.
- A Taste of Power: The main tutorial quest is Greenfang's Challenge, meant for characters level 18-22, with Gary letting you use his brother Melvin's characters. After you win, Melvin shows up and chews both of you out for not starting at level 1.
- Boring, but Practical: Positioning is of utmost importance in this game. It allows you to avoid long ranged attacks, blocks off chokepoints, bypasses enemy defenses, and more. Similarly, a number of cards deal minimal amount of damage, yet disrupt positioning so much it can absolutely wreck an enemy's attack plan.
- Blocking Stops All Damage: Zigzagged. Block cards do stop all damage, but only work once, while Armor cards can activate multiple times, but rarely if ever stop all damage unless the overall reduction outdoes the damage of the incoming blow. There's also one or two blocks, like Jarring Block, that do damage to you in the process of blocking the attack.
- Some blocks do more damage than the incoming attack. And since blocks trigger automatically, you can't go "Wait, I think I'd rather take the damage than hurt myself worse trying to avoid it."
- Character Level
- Class and Level System
- Comically Inept Healing: There is a spell called "Misguided Heal" that does two damage to the selected target before healing the target for four health. Considering that it calculates the damage first, it can be effectively weaponised on armourless, low HP enemies. It also triggers armor cards, so if you're lucky with your rolls, it can heal double it's normal value.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: You can retry any quest three times without repercussion, and failing a fourth time only means paying a pittance of gold to keep going without having to start back at the first battle.
- Decapitated Army: Averted. The winning condition is acquiring victory points, and while killing the boss enemies usually provide more than the mooks, players frequently will need to defeat all comers to complete a mission. Can lead to infuriating/hilarious losses wherein a brainless zombie finishes a extremely complex ritual to reverse time.
- Equipment-Based Progression: Partially. While characters do have experience and levels, the main benefits of leveling up are getting more equipment slots, and getting Power Tokens, which are required to use equipment with better cards.
- Expansion Pack: Attack of the Artifacts, which includes several new cards, equipment pieces, and quests. And as of the Steam release, Expedition to the Sky Citadel adds even more new equipment and cards. An Acquisitions Incorporated-themed expansion was released just before PAX East 2016.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: Dwarves, Humans, and Elves form this type of dynamic thanks to their respective racial skills. Dwarf Skills tend to focus on offense and defense, Human Skills on party support and card manipulation, and Elf Skills on movement and sabotage.
- Fragile Speedster: The Elf race. They gain stronger and more various long-range movement abilities, but have the least health of the three races.
- Gamer Girl: Karen, the pizza deliverywoman.
- Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": Melvin's DMPC, Melvelous The Magnificent.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Melvelous The Magnificent is only beatable because Melvin insisted on making him ridiculously large, meaning he can't fit through narrow gaps and making it possible to snipe him from safety.
- Jack of All Stats: The Human race. They have middle-of-the-road stats in both mobility and durability, in contrast with Elves and Dwarves.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While Melvin is, for the most part, an egotistical, hypocritical braggart, he does have his moments of humanity, showing he does care about his little brother. One of the most prominent is, in response to Gary lamenting that no enemies ever listen to diplomacy, Melvin recommends a different board game to him, one focused mostly on diplomacy, stating that it would help with his confidence and social skills.
- Killer Game Master: Melvin. Though it's not as bad as it would be in most TTRPGS even ignoring the videogamifyed nature of the game.
- Lampshade Hanging: During an adventure against magical enchanted chess pieces, your characters muse about their absurd turn-based style of combat, and decide to ignore it in favor of your "usual dynamism." Card Hunter, of course, is a Turn-Based Strategy game.
- The Leader: Human characters tend towards this role, as they can use cards that affect all other party members at once.
- Lethal Joke Item: Some cards are bad at a glance, due to horrendously low damage (eg. Weak Strike) or only blocking incredibly weak attacks (Flimsy & Weak Block). However, weak attacks are useful for stripping away enemy defenses, and low-damage blocks are very useful in preventing position-disrupting cards, as these tend to deal low damage.
- Lightning Bruiser: Take a Dwarf Warrior, and hand him boots that allow him to do more then Walk, and you will have an unholy terror charging around the battlefield.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Subverted. Wizards have plenty of control abilities, manipulating the battlefield in a game where positioning is of utmost importance. However, Warriors can deal tremendous amounts of damage per hit compared to a Wizard. In fact, the current final boss can be killed in ONE hit from a Warrior.
- Luck-Based Mission: It's depressingly easy to lose due to a bad card-draw or bad die-rolls.
- Mighty Glacier: The Dwarf race. They have higher health and durability than other races, but pay the price in mobility.
- Not Now, Mom!: In the final campaign adventure, when Gary's stressed out at having to find the final boss' game piece (as Melvin will not count the win as "official" without it), Gary's mom keeps calling out to him...and he repeatedly rebuffs her. Until the end, when she just tells him that she found his "yellow dinosaur action figure" in the laundry...which, of course, is the very game piece Gary was looking for.
- Obvious Rule Patch: The draw limit
- Retraux: The game's board is portrayed in the style of a tabletop RPG's map.
- Palette Swap: Many of the items in the game are color-swapped versions of each other.
- Schizo Tech: The laser weapons are clearly Sci-Fi, but act like regular swords and spells. Some figurines in the expansion are also clearly Space Marine material.
- Shout-Out: When your characters encounter a puzzle-door, one the things they try is shouting 'friend' in various obscure languages, a shout-out to the door to Moria in The Lord of the Rings.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Of the "Taking the ball home with you" sort. When Gary's first custom scenario is a systematic Take That! towards Melvin, the latter party is less than amused and storms off, taking the board with him.
- Spring Time For Hitler: Those times when you want to FAIL your Armor saves (due to powerful Aura effects), or when you want your enemy to SUCCEED their Block/Parry rolls (stripping their defense off in preparation for the really big attack). Even worse if you used roll-reducing spell on your own party, yet they still succeed their saves.
- Squishy Wizard: Wizards. They have impressive DPS, can attack at really long range compared to the other classes, and are very good at repositioning in a game where not being good at repositioning will result in your death, but their health is the lowest out of all the classes, have no shields, and their armor tends to provide more attacks or special powers rather than defenses.
- "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Melvin is very insistent that Card Hunter be played a certain way, and looks down on Gary for failing to live up to his expectations. Melvin: Never give in to demands to make the game "fun".
- Stylistic Suck: One of the adventures is a "homebrew" one created by Melvin in which you fight his ludicrously overpowered (invoked) alter-ego. When you win, you find that he didn't even bother to write the ending, because he didn't intend for Melvelous to be beatable.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Amy, the multiplayer AI character, seems to possibly be a spoiler-free substitute for Karen.
- Talking Weapon: Whorl, Riptide, and Blackhammer. They're rebellious ones too, having "Impetous" cards that target EVERYTHING in a area, meaning you're likely to hit a firendly with Whorl or Riptide, and heal enemies with Blackhammer
- Take That!: Later on, you play a homebrew scenario written by Gary (noticeably better-made than the Stylistic Suck one made by his brother Melvin). His villain is "Morvin", a sewer-dwelling monstrosity who threatens the town with his vile stench.
- Tim Taylor Technology: The Laser weapons from the Sky Citadel expansion. Each can do more damage with a die roll, but you get a random drawback if you roll too low, including a complete meltdown that turns your square and every adjacent square into lava squares.
- Timed Mission: A few maps provide victory points each round if only the player's characters are within a marked area on the map. This goes for the enemies as well, who frequently occupy those positions to start the mission; if the player cannot reach them in time to contest the space, the mission will be lost.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Mauve Manticore levels, which give you special (often OP) characters to complete unique challenges. Some of them are fun and engaging, if a bit simple, and others are so daunting and confusing many players quit the adventure upon beholding their buffonery. For reference, the first is a relatively simple one where you play a rust monster who destroys anyone who gets into close combat, so your only REAL threat are lizardmen with spears and have to run away from the brutes and goblins until you build up enough attack cards to burst them down quickly. There's also another where you have to kill multiple 50 HP boulders with special armor cards requiring dedicated removal, and you have to do kill them all in the same round as well. Context? It's a circus act performed by flying monkeys. Most unquiet is the one where you play as a kobold healer who can only move adjacent to blocking terrain, and you have your wizard continually slinging terrain spells so you can reach the house and quickly heal the dying noble inside.
- Violence is the Only Option: Lampshaded by Gary every so often, noting the ineffectiveness of diplomacy in most situations.
- You All Meet in an Inn: Taverns are where you go to recruit new heroes.
