Spank the monkey as a RPG

So some people took offense to my comparison with spank the monkey to a permadeath rpg, so i wanted to write this post to clarify what i meant.

The reason i thought that i was interesting is that it’s not immediately obvious that this is what is going on. While building your defense cards and such and such, you might consider this a fun family game with no strategy to it. However, nestled beneath the seemingly simple exterior is a complex system. And the best way to describe this system is like an RPG battle system. With attacks, defenses and “Health”, and different stats interacting (armor and attack types, special cards that only couple with other cards.) the game can manifest in many different ways. In some cases the strategies involved resemble that of card or paper based rpgs.  This was my point, and it was kind of interesting to see it in this family friendly game, from which i had no idea could spring such wonderfully complex gameplay.

Now about the mentioned permadeath, the point was that the game, if you look at it LIKE an rpg, had a “death” state where you lose progression, the cardinal sin of any RPG. When testing the game, i found that a lot of times, all of which we had been building towards was reset back to virtually zero. The earthquake and missile cards basically guarantees that this happens at least once per game, and any number of strong attack cards and the collapse function makes anything but the most robust towers fall down. This could, in a way, be characterized as permadeath. Your progress is reset, you keep your cards (items).
ANYWAY. This example was just a little fun thing we found that i thought was intresting and is in no way shape or form any serious analysis, so take it face value. Just wanted to clariy what i was trying to say.

Peace out.

-J