We all remember Storybook Brawl, right? It was a cool card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of Shrek meets Grim. In 2022 it sold to scrappy little company called FTX, and in 2023 it was shut down when everyone involved in FTX was being prosecuted for 16 billion dollars in fraud.
As far as I can tell, at least some of the people in Good Luck Games went on to make Once Upon a Galaxy. It’s a cool little card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of pop culture references meet Grimm.
Write what you know I guess.
Making a game, getting it popular, selling it to a Crypto company1, then making a new company to make a new game that is pretty much just a better copy of your old game is a bold strategy. It seems to have mostly worked out for Matthew Place and the team at Million Dream Games, presumably because everyone who might be upset about them doing this is currently in prison2.
But I’m not here to recount the one time in the last 20 years that financial criminals were held even remotely responsible for their actions. I’m here to talk about Once Upon a Galaxy.
I’m gonna be honest, I feel like I should put an in-depth explanation of the games mechanics here, but I’d just be rewriting paragraphs 3 through 5 of my Storybook Brawl write up, so just go read those real quick. We can pretend I put them here.
There’s a lot of things in Once Upon a Galaxy that were copied over from Storybook Brawl. The core conceit is pretty much the same: Pick a captain3/leader card, build a team of units, have them fight each other, stay alive the longest to win. But there’s also a lot of fat trimming going on here, places where Once Upon a Galaxy looks at Storybook Brawl and goes “No, I don’t think we need that.”
Most notable is probably board size and reserve. Storybook Brawl had 7 combat slots, and 3 reserve slots. Once Upon a Galaxy has 5 slots. There’s no gold to managed for buying units either, instead every shop is just a 4-pick-1 rogue-lite style set of choices.
Of course, there’s also a fair amount of stuff I haven’t seen before, or things that are tweaks from existing mechanics. Treasures existed in Storybook Brawl, but they were limited to a max of 3 per player, requiring you to throw one away when you got your fourth. In Once Upon a Galaxy, they are no longer locked down in that way, opening up a whole bunch of interesting space, such as dragons that care about creating them, and get buffs based on the number, to characters that manipulate the stat buffs they grant.
I could probably write multiple paragraphs about Candy, a cross card type mechanic that influences a global “Sweetness” value, and is used as both a modifier of spells and card abilities. It’s also a good example of how the game creates glue for it’s archetypes, with various candy cards adding the Candy type to non-candy cards, allowing them to be slotted into an archetype they otherwise might fall out of.
Generally speaking, the game feels fun to play even if a few strategies feel over represented, or good across multiple captains.
Probably the biggest mechanic (or the one I will attempt steal at some point) is slot buffs, where buffs can be applied to a slot, and not the characters in the slot, so that you can replace them without losing the picks spent on those buffs. And of course, some characters interact in a cool way with those buffs!
One of the genres core mechanics has also been adjusted in a pretty clever way. Most auto-battlers have a mechanic where drafting multiple copies of the same unit powers that unit up, usually three copies. This could put you in a difficult place if you got the first two, but never found a third. Once Upon a Galaxy, banishes this, instead making each copy after the first a promotion, first to silver, then gold. Picking a silver unit gives an extra shop, and picking a gold unit gives a treasure.
There are some things that are just copied, like the Slay4 keyword, which has been renamed to Hunt. I’m okay with that. I think it’s fine to copy your own mechanics.
Then there’s the things they copied that I wish they didn’t.
I have a limited number of complaints about Once Upon a Galaxy. Many of them are small to medium sized annoyances, like how some Captains have a single line of voice acting, and others don’t.
The games UI is clunky5, and signing in to make an account has been the biggest stumbling block to actually playing. Every time I press the launch button, there’s a 2/3 chance that Steam doesn’t actually launch the app. I’ve gotten a few bugs where the games just kinda… crashes out a bit, and shows me a card named “404 Shop Not Found”.
But none of these quite compare with the monetization.
The monetization is “hmm”. I dunno even know that it’s bad, in a traditional way? I am a sucker for garbage6. Despite the fact that I’ve played 15+ hours of Once Upon a Galaxy in three days, I’m uninspired to buy anything it. Partly because it feels like a bit of a bad deal, with characters/decks running for about five to six bucks each. Partly because it feels a bit pay to win.
It just feels kind of off.
Most of these are small things. The monetization isn’t even egregious. There’s no gacha, the battlepass is easy to farm, so while there is some FOMO, there’s no limited daily progression. Still, I wish it was a bit better.
I generally like Once Upon a Galaxy. It gives me the play experience that other people get from Balatro, that of just sinking into a small math puzzle of upgrades, builds, strategies and signposts.
I do think there’s a bunch of cool stuff here as well. A bunch of vestigial stuff that Autobattlers have involving things liked gold/level management has been cut. There are neat new mechanics.
So yeah. Go play it before it turns out Million Dreams Games hasn’t figured out how to monetize the genre yet, and they have to sell themselves to an AI company, then remake this game a third time.
Also, if two of your use my pyramid scheme referral link here7, I can get 500 more gems total.
I would like the gems.
- Good Luck Games was sold to FTX in 2022. ↩︎
- Or maybe not? Sure, Sam is still in prison, but some of these people only got 2 years. They say crime doesn’t pay, but apparently it does if you’re white collar enough about it. ↩︎
- Captains grant some sort of permanent build around passive or trigger-able ability. ↩︎
- Slay/Hunt is a trigger-able keyword that occurs whenever the unit attacks and kills another unit. The important bit here is “Attacks.” If a unit with slay is attacked, and kills the other unit on the defense, that doesn’t trigger the keyword. Using slay effectively means either gambling that your unit will get the first attack, or buffing it high enough to be able to take a hit, and smash back. ↩︎
- I had one friend who I showed this game to, who immediately stopped playing after 10 minutes because of how aggravating he found the on-boarding/UI to be. Knowing it was his sort of game, I persuaded him to give it one more shot.
He proceeded to play for literally 12 hours in a row. I went to bed, woke back up, and he was still playing. The game is that good, and the UI is that bad. ↩︎ - I spent $50 on an arcade versions of Minecraft Dungeons yesterday, because it spat out collectible trading cards. The bright side to being an unemployed miser is that I now have a lot more free time to spend the money I spent the last 10 years shoving into a pile. ↩︎
- This is the only referral link in the article. All the other links are normal ones, and will just link to the Steam page. Figured I’d just put that disclosure out there. ↩︎