On starting a new game, the player is given a starting deck of cards, consisting of equipment, hero class, and encounter cards. The player earns more cards as they progress in the game, which they can use to customize their deck up to a fixed size. Furthermore, the dealer has his own deck from which surprising elements such as more challenging encounters and monsters are drawn that also grows as the player gains cards and progresses through the game.
In the game's Story Mode, the player must defeat thirteen bosses: twelve court cards and the Dealer himself. These bosses, representing the royalty of each suit, must be defeated in order, but the player can return to previous bosses to challenge again and unlock new rewards. After a certain number of these bosses are defeated, the player also unlocks Endless Mode, which provides an infinite number of "floors" of increasing difficulty for the player to challenge with every card they have collected up to that point.
To progress in Story Mode, the player must complete a "dungeon" by exploring two or more "floors" created by a tableau of randomized, face-down encounter cards dealt from the combined deck of both player and Dealer. In addition to random encounters, each floor also includes either an exit encounter that lets the player reach the next floor or a boss encounter on the final floor of that dungeon. The player starts with a limited amount of health, food, and initial equipment, modified by the player's selected class card and certain conditions obtained over the course of the story. To navigate each floor of the dungeon, the player moves a token across the tableau one card at a time, revealing it if face down. When each card is encountered, the Dealer narrates the event and resolves its effects.
Events can include meeting non-player characters, shops to buy and sell cards that benefit the player for the remainder of that dungeon, enemy encounters, or chance events that may benefit or hinder the player. Some of these events include a tree of options that the player can choose, while chance is presented as four shuffled cards representing rates of success or failure. Each movement step consumes food, and certain events can cause the player to gain or lose health, food, gold, blessings, curses, or equipment. The latter three can augment the player's attack power, defensive power, health, speed, or provide special abilities or conditions both inside and out of combat.
If the player encounters a monster or maze of traps, the number and type of enemy are determined by cards drawn by the Dealer (if any). The game then enters a third-person perspective action mode, where the player can attack, dodge, reflect and counterattack enemies and traps represented by the cards that were drawn. Damage taken is reflected in the player's overall health, which can be recovered normally with food or at certain shops and healers. On completing some encounters, the Dealer will present special tokens representing new cards that the player will receive at the conclusion of that dungeon, regardless of whether they won or were defeated.
If the player's character loses all of their health (i.e., by encounter or starvation) or chooses to forfeit from the in-game menu, they lose that dungeon, and the board is reset after they receive their tokens. If the player successfully beats the dungeon's boss, they progress one step forward in the story. The Dealer awaits the player for the final showdown and confrontation, so the player must pay close attention to deck-building, strategy, tactics, and chance in order to succeed.
Development
Hand of Fate was first shown at the 2013 Game Developers Conference. A playable demo build was shown to the public at PAX Australia in July 2013. By this point, the game had been in development for under six months. Defiant Development are a team of approximately fifteen based in Brisbane, they described Hand of Fate as their "first big push" onto PC platforms following their previous mobile projects. Like all other Defiant games, Hand of Fate is built in Unity.
The game was part funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. It was one of the first Australian projects to launch on Kickstarter. The campaign launched in November 2013 and concluded in December 2013, achieving its A$50,000 target. Not only was the campaign a financial success, it also allowed Defiant to build an audience and get feedback on pre-release builds. A Greenlight campaign was launched simultaneously so that the game could be released on Steam, and the game was approved in January 2014.
