If you’ve ever wanted to recruit a who’s-who of characters from folklore, mythology, and the public domain, then send them to fight and die on your behalf, Storybook Brawl is the game for you.
Designed by the Olympia, Wash.-based Good Luck Games, Brawl is free to play and currently working its way through Steam Early Access since its debut in mid-June. It’s a card-based auto-battler, which makes it an entry into a relatively new genre of strategy. If you played last summer’s Dota Underlords from Valve, you should be in good shape here.
In Storybook Brawl, you pick a hero character to control, such as Merlin, Loki, or Morgan le Fey, which gives you a particular passive bonus. On each turn, you’re given limited resources with which to put together an offensive line of up to seven characters, which are chosen from a randomly generated pool of heroes, villains, animals, fantasy races, and monsters.
In the combat phase, your characters then attack your opponents until one side loses all its minions. The losing player takes some damage and is returned to the planning phase. In each round, the winners are those who survive to earn 1st through 4th place.
It’s admittedly a little hard to explain, and it doesn’t help that Storybook Brawl doesn’t have a tutorial at time of writing. Right now, it’s just got a short YouTube video that’s meant to walk players through the highlights of the game.
It doesn’t take that long to figure out how the game works, though, and once you do, it’s got a solid, addictive quality to it. Matches are quick, occasionally vicious, and easy to jump in and out of. Once you reach turn 10 or so, you can usually get enough randomly-generated passive abilities, active buffs, character upgrades, and special treasures together to get really silly.
The designers at Good Luck Games are a distributed team that works in Colorado and California in addition to Washington. What got my attention about Storybook Brawl in the first place was its pedigree.
Its development team is headed up by Matthew Place, the former lead designer for the first three sets of Blizzard’s digital card game Hearthstone and the World of Warcraft trading card game. The team also includes Josh Utter-Leyton, a former Magic: The Gathering pro, working as an engineer, and Matt Nass, who has five Magic Grand Prix wins under his belt, coding the client.
They also recently added Magic hall of famer Luis Scott-Vargas as Good Luck’s vice president of marketing. The team currently consists of 7 full-time members, with art and 3D modeling tasks handled by a variety of contractors.
The core members of the team started Storybook Brawl as a work-from-home quarantine project among friends in February 2020, after having previously collaborated on the card games Eternal and The Elder Scrolls: Legends.
Patch 0.60.2. This is planned to be the tournament patch! https://t.co/AXCp3JhL8u pic.twitter.com/Ea1Ur3CIlq
— Storybook Brawl (@StorybookBrawl) August 9, 2021
They were able to get the game to Steam Early Access about 14 months later, which is incredibly fast for any game project, Early Access or not.
“It’s been shockingly stable,” Place told GeekWire. “We’ve had a few bugs, but it’s funny. Coming from working at a few big companies, like Blizzard, Hasbro, and Wizards of the Coast, we’re having way fewer issues. I don’t get it. We feel kind of lucky. The engineers, the people on the team, are just super talented.”
The big commonality between Storybook Brawl and Hearthstone in particular is the character design. In Brawl, public-domain characters like Cinderella, the Three Blind Mice, Humpty Dumpty, and Peter Pan are given a strange coat of paint, in order to transform them into the sorts of action heroes that this sort of game demands.
Here, Snow White is a vampire who grows stronger every time one of her dwarf retinue dies, Cupid is a flying archer who can turn enemies against one another, and Romeo is a powerful front-line fighter who, if he’s killed, summons the even more powerful Juliet back into the fight.
“Part of our goal with this IP is to take things from all over the world,” Place said, “and twist them in a way that makes them interesting and surprising. It’s something that we’d do when we were working on the initial design for Hearthstone. We’d take World of Warcraft and say, ‘How are we going to twist it, make it fun, make it silly in the Hearthstone way?'”
“It’s a different angle, but we’ve kind of taken the same approach here with Storybook, where we know that people know these characters. But let’s make them interesting still, not just what they know, but twist them in a way that makes people lean in. ‘What’s going on here? That doesn’t look like Snow White. What’s her story?'”
Storybook Brawl is currently planned to leave Steam Early Access at some point in late 2021 or early 2022. Good Luck Games is internally debating at time of writing how it plans to handle features like content and balance patches; Place suggested that they may release new heroes in the future in batches of 3, alongside more characters and cards.
