Portugues
Brewing Disaster
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About the game
Wizards are very polite about it, but they all share a single cauldron. It holds a number, its putridity, and every ingredient you throw in raises or lowers it. Add a worm and it goes up by one, a bat pushes it up by three, an apple brings it back down by one. The rule that decides everything is simple: the wizard who takes the putridity to 13, or down to 0, has lost the duel.
You and your opponent take turns playing one ingredient from your hand, so the game is a game of timing. A big number is a great move when the cauldron sits low and a trap when it is nearly full, and your rival is hoping you run out of safe cards first. Each wizard has their own deck, and from the second meeting on they also have a passive trick of their own.
Between duels the game turns into deck-building. Every victory lets you pick a new pack of ingredients and, sometimes, an improvement for one you already own, so a plain starting deck slowly becomes a plan. You face four opponents, and each one twice: the first meeting is easy and the second is tougher. Win eight duels in a row with a character and the next wizard becomes playable, with their own starting ingredients.
Adrien Guéret made Brewing Disaster for js13kGames 2024, where the whole game had to fit in 13 kilobytes; the competition's theme was "Triskaidekaphobia", the fear of the number 13, which is why 13 is the number nobody wants to reach. All the sprites are his own pixel art, and the music and sound effects were made with ZzFXM and NoteCraft.
Playing it here
Click Play, then click "Click to start". Pick a wizard (at first only one is unlocked), read the rules and press Start; the next screen shows the opponent you will face and the ingredients they hold. Play a card from your hand by clicking it. Your unlocked characters and progress are kept in your browser, and the "Enable sounds" checkbox under the game turns the audio on and off. A touchscreen works too, and the game is happier in portrait mode than on a tiny landscape phone screen.
Brewing Disaster has an optional feature, outside the game served here, that lets you build your own starting deck through an online page. That feature is not part of this version.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click / tap a link or button | move through the menus, start a duel |
| Click / tap a card in your hand | add that ingredient to the cauldron |
| Click / tap a reward pack or improvement | add it to your deck after a win |
| Enable sounds box | sound on and off |
A few things worth knowing
Count the room. Before every card, check how far the cauldron is from 0 and from 13. A card that is safe for you may leave the opponent a winning move, and the reverse.
Keep a few cheap cards. Small ingredients are what you play when the cauldron is full or empty, so do not fill the deck only with the big ones.
Read the next opponent. The screen before every duel shows their ingredients. Pick the reward that answers them.
Credits and licence
Brewing Disaster was made by Adrien Guéret and released under the Apache License 2.0; there is no separate NOTICE file in the repository. The licence text, with the notices for the ZzFX and ZzFXM sound libraries (MIT) that play the music and effects, is linked from this page, and the source code is on GitHub.