When sheet hits the fan
The tabletop equivalent of “buying books and reading them are two different hobbies” is surely the difference between buying sexy tabletopRPGmanuals and actually dragging your mates on to Discord for a few hours to stumble your way through a module. It’s the dogeared Fighting Fantasy from a carboot sale kid in me, I think. Something about reading worldbuilding snippets organised into numbered tables just hits in a way a novel doesn’t. Such tantalising ephemera is the name of the game in Microprose-publishedCrossOver: Roll For Initiative. It’s a wave defense where you play match-3 to collect dice, then spend them on fireballs and mace swings to stop tiny bastards from marauding all over your actual character sheet and attacking your stats.
You get a single move to create a line of three dice in the match-3 tray, and different abilities cost different dice. Ithinkthe tray is seeded so more powerful dice are rarer, though I can’t be sure. Seems like there’s a lot of variety too, even in the limited demo build. Some spells do damage, some slow down the tiny pixel enemies attacking you or carry other status effects. There are also different classes and species to play, so you do actually get to customise your own character sheet before choosing a module from your virtual bookshelf.
