The Tar Pit

I have no idea who Team Wood Games are, and while I absolutely despise the Unity abomination, I think Super Auto Pets must be the best poker-style strategy game that I've played in a very long while. And no, I don't care that it's not available for "Linux" either¹.

The gameplay of Super Auto Pets is centered around items (cards, in poker-speak) called "animals". Each animal has the following properties: a health counter, an attack counter and an effect. The first two of these properties are obvious I think; while the third occurs upon a trigger -- for example when you buy or sell the animal, or when the animal dies, i.e. "faints", in gamespeak -- and, as the name "effect" suggests, has some well-specified effect upon the game. Effects are inherent to each animal type and they are fundamental to Super Auto Pets gameplay, as you will see later.

Each round of Super Auto Pets, whether you're playing the Arena or the Versus mode, is structured into two phases: the preparation phase and the battle phase. In the preparation phase you are presented with a number of (five) battle tiles (which in the first round are empty and in subsequent rounds contain animals bought in previous rounds); and a number of store tiles which contain (randomly-selected) animals, on one hand, and food, on the other. In this first phase, food and/or animals may be bought, i.e. dragged from the store tiles to the battle tiles, which spends a number of (three) coins -- at the beginning of the round, you are given ten coins to spend. Food cannot be placed on empty battle tiles, it only has an instant effect on a previously bought animal; buying the same type of animal multiple times may stack, i.e. when dragged on a tile with an existing animal, it provides health/attack upgrades and level upgrades; while animals on the battle tiles may be sold for a number of coins equal to the level of the animal (minimum one and maximum three). Additionally, the player may spend one coin to "refresh", i.e. re-roll the store tiles.

You still following me? Because this is when things get interesting, that is, in the battle phase of the round. In the battle phase, the battle tiles of two players are placed head-to-head and this is when it becomes obvious that tile ordering matters: at this point, animals in the front tile (right for you, left for the adversary) will damage each other's health with the number of attack points they have (plus-minus whatever effect is provided by food) and when an animal's health goes below one, it shall "faint", i.e. it will disappear and the animal behind it is left to perform attacks. At the end, the round is won by the player who still has animals left standing, or otherwise if no animals are left after all possible attacks have taken place, the round is declared a draw.

The game is played in multiple rounds, until one of the players is left without "hearts". At the beginning of a Versus or Arena game all players start with a number of hearts, and depending on the current round, the player who loses (if the round was not ended in a draw) will lose a number of health points and the player(s) left with health points may play another round, up until someone gains a number of (ten) victories.

The interesting part is that animal effects may be used together to gain advantages over the adversary: for example, placing an elephant in front of a peacock will cause the elephant to hurt the peacock on each attack, which sounds quite stupid on a first glance (why would an animal attack its own team members?), only the peacock's attack is raised by a number (e.g. two for level one, four for level two etc.) when it gets hurt. So if the elephant gets to perform enough attacks without also killing the peacock, a super-peacock will have enough attack power to blast the adversary, which is a great strategy for early rounds.

So just like poker, the player is provided with random (food or animal) cards to pick; and just like poker, there is a probabilistic "best" combination of animals/food to be picked, based on your chosen strategy and the adversary's configuration. Regarding this latter aspect, the Versus mode is much simpler than Arena, since the former involves iterated rounds with the same adversary, while the latter involves iterated rounds with randomly-picked adversaries, meaning that yes, Arena is also much more difficult, but it may also be less boring if you're feeling lucky.

At the time of writing, Super Auto Pets is still in beta, so it's likely that the developers will make changes to animals' properties for balancing purposes. Here's to hoping they won't fuck up this brilliant little game. And if they do, this article may at some point in the future stand as an ad-hoc specification for my own private Super Auto Pets clone, with blackjack and hookers². Am zis!

Filed under: gaming.
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