How to pick charms in Norigae

Your three units

Your side's power is the sum of all three units that are still alive. So when one goes down, you get that much weaker. A Shield that lasts long is what keeps your total firepower up.

8 charms

Tips for picking

While building this we ran many pick strategies for real. We ran five simple fixed rules over sixty days of September, and no rule cleared all five fights on more than one of those days. That means there is no set answer.

• Stacking only power goes well early and falls apart late, because the enemy gets stronger each fight.
• Stacking only HP lasts a long time but cannot win. You get no firepower.
• Piling onto one unit collapses the whole squad when that unit goes down.

What you are offered each day is fixed, so the furthest path is to see what came up in the early fights and fit the later picks to it.

If you lose, it ends right there

In most roguelikes a loss sends you back to the start, and that penalty pushes people away. Here a run is short and just ends where you lost. Everyone gets the same board on the same day, so if you try again you can see where it went wrong.

What each unit is good at

You start with three units. They behave differently, so what to grow becomes a choice.

• The Sword is in the middle on both HP and power. It pays off whichever way you grow it.
• The Bow hits hardest of the three but goes down fastest. Growing the Bow wins quickly, but one slip and it all collapses.
• The Shield lasts a very long time and barely hits. If you grow only the Shield, the enemy does not die even after twenty rounds and the run just ends.

How a fight is calculated

A fight runs on its own and has no random numbers. The same squad against the same enemy always gives the same result. So a lost run was not bad luck. The picks did not fit.

The attack power of every living unit on your side is added together and chips away at the enemy from the front row. Leftover power carries over to the next enemy. The enemy hits you by the same rule. Because of this, making one unit very strong and raising all three evenly are worth different amounts.

A unit that goes down stops attacking. So if you grow only the Bow, which dies easily, you win the early fights easily, then the Bow falls first in the later ones and your remaining power drops sharply.

Enemies grow with every fight

The first two fights have two enemies, and from the third fight there are three. HP and power grow together as the fights go on, so an enemy of the same kind in the last fight has more than twice the HP and power of the first.

So if you barely won an early fight, that squad will not get through the later ones. Look not at whether you won but at how much you had left when you won.

Three things to check when you pick

1. What dies first right now. If one of your units went down in the last fight, raising its HP is the cheapest way through the next one.
2. Charms for everyone versus charms for one. A charm for one unit is worth more, but it is lost entirely if that unit dies. A charm for everyone is small, but it stays.
3. How many fights are left. Before the last fight, power matters more than HP. If you cannot get past the enemy within twenty rounds, it just ends.

One board a day, the same for everyone

The day's enemies and the day's charms are drawn from the date. Everyone who shows up on the same day meets the same enemies and picks from the same charms, so you can compare how far you got.

The fights and the picks all run inside your browser. There is no sign-up.