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Exploring the world
While exploring you need to make sure you have enough food.
Every step you take will cost one unit of food and walking through desert or deep snow might cost more (up to 4!).
There are many interesting places in the world and most are marked with an icon: question mark for quests, exclamation mark for special quests, skull for enemies and coins mark treasures.
Complete quests to gain experience and make your character stronger. You can also get other rewards such as gold or food or even trophies or extra attribute points. Many quests contain puzzles or riddles so be prepared, but don't worry if you fail. You can always reload your game and try again.
Speaking of saving your game. You cannot do that anytime you want, instead you need to find special locations (usually a circle of stones resembling the stonehenge). Or you can use a save token - these are earned in some rare quests or every time you reach five levels. Save tokens can be used in any of your playthrough, meaning you can hoard them in scenarios and use them for story mode or vice versa.
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Story, scenarios and random games
The game offers three modes of play. Story mode is a long adventure divided into several chapters (so far just the first one is available). It starts (optionally) with a tutorial that will teach you the basics but after that it quickly becomes very difficult.
You will likely need several tries to finish it.
If you complete the story you can try scenarios. These are custom maps that might even have stories of their own. They are handcrafted by the original authors or members of the community.
Finally you can play the random maps. These are practically endless adventures where you set the goal on your own. You can play freely and just explore or can choose to tackle a challenge - for example try to be the fastest to reach a certain level or hoard a lot of gold.
There are leaderboards tracking these goals - can you be the best of all the players?
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Leveling up
Once you earn enough experience you will level up. For every level you will get three attribute points. Use these to upgrade your main attributes: strength, perception, intelligence or luck.
You should never assign more than two points per level into one attribute - doing so is a waste as you gain no advantage from that (to be precise, there is no reason to have more than 2*level points in any attribute).
Your highest attribute is considered dominant (marked dark pink) and will provide extra bonus. The bonuses are the following: strength gives 20% damage reduction during quests. Perception makes you use 20% less food while exploring. Intelligence grants 10% extra experience and luck 10% extra gold.
If several of your attributes have the same highest value then you will get the extra bonus from all of them. Doing so however means that you will not be good enough in any given attribute to pass attribute checks with almost 100% certainty.
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Fighting
Often you will have to fight to survive or to get to a valuable treasure. Fighting is done through a minigame in the arena.
Once the fight starts, your goal will be to swap two squares anywhere on the grid in such a way that once they change positions they will destroy as many other squares as possible.
When a square lands it will destroy all neighboring squares of the same color.
To do as much damage as possible try to swap squares of different colors that are as far away from each other as possible.
Moreover if each of the swapped squares destroys at least two other squares your combo meter will increase.
However if you fail to do this it will reset to zero. Each level of your combo meter increases damage by 50% so it is crucial to maintain it as high as possible.
Sometimes special icons might appear on the grid - a red flask or a combo indicator. Destroying squares on which they appeared will heal and improve your combo respectivelly.
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Treasures and locks
Almost every map in the game will contain at least one treasure. You will be able to loot them only if you can unlock the mechanical lock. To do this you must get the blue ball into the blue circle.
In most cases there will be red squares guarding the blue circle. You must avoid those at all costs! Fortunately they are quite stupid and move in predictable ways - use that to your advantage.
There are several other mechanisms to overcome though. For example the rotator which looks like a hour hand and points into one of four directions.
You will be teleported one square in that direction if you step on the rotator! Stepping on buttons will remove (or restore) a wall.
A white triangle will boost your speed, allowing you to make one extra turn, but be warned - it also works for enemies!
Speaking of enemies - there are two types. The regular red squares which move slowly and then violet ones which are faster and make two steps per turn!
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Trophies
Sometimes you will be able to collect trophies from fallen enemies. If you complete a whole set you will gain a powerful perk - like the ability to control chance or overall reduction of damage in fights.
Only the strongest enemies have a chance to drop a legendary or mythical artifact. Fortunately your trophies persist between playthroughs so you don't have to worry about collecting them all over again if you finish a scenario too soon.
Several quests also give you the option to pick a valuable artifact as your reward. If you have enough gold and food this is a good alternative. Choose wisely!
