Storybook Brawl is about drafting a set of cards from a card pool and trying to make the cards work together as best you can.

Sometimes luck will carry you. Sometimes it will be your insight into card synergy. Sometimes you will pick something that looks cool and powerful, but you won't have the support cards to make it strong.

Your task while playing this game is to maximize the effectiveness of your cards and to minimize the influence of luck on your brawls.

Your hero selection will influence your early game the strongest in most cases. Sometimes you play the gimmick of your hero for the whole match. Sometimes you just have to go with what the game gives you.

There will be games where you get stomped into oblivion very quickly, and that feels *awful*. But sometimes that's just how a brawl goes. Don't dwell on how some setup beat you handily or how unfair a matchup might seem.

You must treat every match as its own entity. Past occurences should not influence how you play in the present (except for perhaps avoiding clearly weak cards, if at all possible).

Clicking on "Play Brawl" in the main menu will match you up against human opponents. Each round is timed. You have limited time to make your decisions in the shop. At first the timer seems cruelly short. Once you get used to the cards and can tell them apart easily by the card art, the timer will start to be quite generous.

One more thing to keep in mind is that if the combat phase takes too long, it will start to eat into your shop phase. This tends to happen if two high health but low attack cards take ages to resolve the combat. There are more examples, but you get the idea.

Why does it deplete your shop time? So that everyone starts the next round at the same time. Otherwise the entire lobby would have to wait for one match to resolve. It might not seem like this makes sense, but cases where this can happen are pretty rare.

Clickin on "Practice" will put you in a brawl with bots only. In this mode there are no timers and you can, well, like the mode is named, practice all you want.
You can take your time and familiarize yourself with all the cards. Once you are ready each round, you click on the "Brawl!" button to start the combat phase.

Once you find a brawl (match) to play in, the game will give you a choice of four hero cards.

The first slot is comprised of heroes from the current free hero rotation. It's a set list of 8 heroes:

As of 0.59.1:
Geppetto, Krampus, Mrs. Claus, Jack's Giant, Hoard Dragon, The Fates, Merlin, and Pup the Magic Dragon

The second slot is a random hero from the whole hero pool. This gives you the opportunity to play heroes you don't own yet.

The third and fourth slot are also selected from the whole hero pool, but you must own the heroes that appear in these slots before you can use them.

So basically slot 1 and 2 are always available to select and play from. Slot 3 and 4 present you with heroes you can unlock and play, or heroes you already unlocked.

Now you have your hero selected and once everyone else selected theirs or the timer runs out, you are presented with the main play area.


Here you are presented with cards you can buy from the shop (2). You are shown some character cards and one spell.
You can buy as many cards as you have gold for and you can cast 1 spell, unless the spell itself says you can cast another spell this round - some treasures modify this as well.

This is where most of your thinking will happen. You draft your cards from this selection every turn until your gold runs out or there is nothing worthwile to get.

You can lock (4) the selection in the shop for the next round, if you want to buy something later, but don't have the gold for it. Or if there's a spell you want to cast after you rerolled (5) the shop, but you can't cast a spell currently.

Rerolling the shop costs 1 gold at all stages of the game. So later in the game you can roll more often, and sometimes you also get the F.ree Roll spell that costs 0 gold.

At the bottom you have 7 spaces for your cards (3).Characters in the front get attacked first. So keep stuff you don't want to get hurt in the back row. Flying characters can attack the back row directly, so watch out for that!

Directly below your card slots is your hand. Here you can store up to 4 cards. So you can hold additional copies of cards you want to upgrade, or cards you want to hang on to there. Depends on what stage the game is in and how developed your board is.

Your hero is shown in the bottom right (7). Your health is here and the currently cast spell shows up in this area.

(6) is where treasures appear. You get treasures by completing quests from your cards or by collecting 3 of the same cards (tripling), which consumes the 3 cards and gives you an upgraded version of the card.
You get to choose from a selection of 3 treasures.
Treasures have powerful effects and sometimes change the way you approach your game.
Treasures can make or break a game.
You can have 3 treasures equipped. Any new treasures you find you can "skip" to get 2 gold or replace an old treasure with the new one.

You can sell your cards back to the shop (1) for 1 gold. The only exception is the Gold Chicken, that sells for 2 gold. Keep this in mind.

Buying and selling are the most critical actions you take in the game. When to buy something and when to sell to make room for something stronger takes time to master.

Coming to terms with the play area is important!

So you bought your first card and the first automatic battle (brawl) starts.

Your and your opponent's cards take turns attacking. The leftmost card in your front row attacks first.
Then the order moves towards the right to the end of the row and starts over on the left side of the bottom row.

Who attacks first? It's random. There's a treasure, Hermes' Boots, that guarantees you get the first attack each round.

Generally, the front row has to be empty before your cards can attack the back row.
However, cards with flying can attack the back row directly. This can not only be very useful, but also critical in defeating some card combinations.

If anything in your front row survives, it has to wait for all the other cards on your side to have a go before attacking again.


There are some exceptions to this, usually clearly stated in the card text. For example, the Lightning Dragon states that it makes an extra attack at the start of each brawl. So if you put it in the first slot, it can attack twice in a row. If it survives the first attack.


Once a player's cards have all been defeated, the round is over and damage is applied directly to the hero card.

This is how that damage is calculated:

Your Hero’s current level + 1 damage for each surviving character + 2 damage for each surviving Upgraded character.

So you can imagine that later in the brawl losing a round is going to cost you a lot of hero health.

If BOTH players have an empty board at the end of combat, it's a draw and no one loses hero health. A draw also occurs if players only have cards left that have 0 attack.

As stated before, what you buy each turn and how you manage your hand and board is crucial.

Don't hang on to a level 2 double for too long if your hero is beyond that level. At some point these cards just won't show up anymore (or will show up very rarely).

You have to balance getting treasures with getting stronger cards. If you don't have some mechanic on your board that gives your cards higher stats every brawl, you need to find stronger cards.

You can get great value out of early cards that you keep buffing every round or close to every round from round 2-3 onwards. It's difficult to deal with a card that has been accumulating buffs for the entire game, even if it doesn't do much beyond just the base stats.

Even then, level 6 cards outstrip the performance of lower level cards very quickly. You do have to take care to pick the right level 6 cards for your lineup.

For example Bearstein:


He just has so much power baked into his card text. So if you're already invested into animal summoning and buffing the summons, having this will just catapult you forward in power.


Perhaps the most useful cards to get when you're behind and need to deal with a big threat are the Medusa and the Cupid.

Personally, I do like the Medusa more than the Cupid. Medusa completely neutralizes a card by deleting its card text and transforming the card into a Statue card.

A Cupid is useful to make your opponent's cards kill each other. You could get unlucky with how that combat plays out, though.

The card pool refers to the cards that show up in the store for players to buy from.

This pool is shared by all eight players in the brawl. It is thus possible that you might never find enough cards if everyone else is also buying them.


There are 15 copies of each card and 10 copies of each level 6 card.

So pay attention to what the other players in your brawl are buying. You can even try to deny others a few cards they might need, but I wouldn't recommend this unless you're very sure of your own lineup and know how many cards are left in the pool.

There are some interesting interactions with cards like Knighthood (a spell) and the Hero Wonder Waddle when it comes to the card pool.

When you upgrade a card with Knighthood, it removes copies of that card from the pool.

When you take advantage of Wonder Waddle's text and upgrade a lvl 2 or 3 animal with just 2 copies, it removes the extra third copy from the pool.

Here's some other examples:

Units that have quests can only be bought once. They don't appear anymore once you buy a copy. Essentially you remove 3 copies from the pool when you buy one. If you knighthood a quest character you upgrade it, but the quest does not get completed. So you still have to do the quest to get the treasure.

Cards of defeated players go back in the pool for everyone

Selling returns a card to the pool. Selling an upgraded card returns 3 copies to the pool.

So in the traditional sense, the winner is the last one standing, right?

The last brawler standing gets more dust, more rank points and a crown to show off with.

But the thing to keep in mind is that everyone from 1st to 4th place is considered a winner, since every brawl starts out with 8 brawlers.

So up to Legend rank, where ELO starts to determine how many points you get for your final place in a brawl, you can slowly gain points by finishing in 4th place.

Of course, should you manage higher placings, that's even better!

It's just something to keep in mind. It's hard to get 1st place.

Most of the time it's completely manageable to get 4th. Add the first win of the day bonus to that, and you can rake in a steady supply of dust and rank points.