Developed/Published by: AP Thompson
Released: 02/02/2018
Completed: 12/01/2026
Completion: Finished it!

I was looking to stretch my legs during a deep dive on some other games for research recently, and when the IGF Award shortlist was announced there was an avalanche of people in my feed expressing excitement that they could finally say how good AP Thompson’s upcoming Titanium Court was. So I took a quick look, saw that Thompson had previously made the game Fortune-499 which at least looked visually similar, and thought “why not!”

Fortune-499 is styled as a JRPG, but it has a really beautiful mechanic, one that I think–because it sounds complex, but has to play out simple–would be very easy to fuck up completely. It’s a rock paper scissors prediction deckbuilder. In each JRPG-style battle, you hit your opponent if you win rock paper scissors; you get hit if you lose, and you both take damage if you throw the same. Now, as we know from Alex Kidd, rock paper scissors is an absolutely rubbish, frustrating mechanic in a video game, but Fortune-499 fixes it completely by giving you a fortune telling deck. Before each hand you can draw up to four cards which “reveal” (well, affect the probability of) which hand your opponent is most likely to throw. So if you draw paper +4, you can be pretty confident they’ll throw paper, so throw scissors. As you play the game, you can shred cards in your deck and power up cards, so you could, for example, have a deck that’s got nothing but strong rock cards in it, meaning that you can always throw paper, because it’s extremely unlikely your opponents will ever throw anything else.

I love this design. It’s so elegant. But it’s also, I think, a little limited, which Thompson has had to work around. The game is played across a series of in-game days (which basically work as a series of dungeon levels) and after each day your deck resets, because otherwise you’d quickly build an unstoppable deck. There are also a few more mechanics layered on, which muddy things up a bit: you have magic points, and can cast spells, and stick cards aside to replay them, allowing you to break the game a bit by spamming a mana card repeatedly.

I think these design decisions are included because Thompson–probably correctly–felt that the base design didn’t really have enough challenge or variety to sustain something like a roguelike deckbuilder¹ and Fortune-499 does put me in mind of Dicey Dungeons, because it similarly is less interested in letting you play out a power growth fantasy than making you solve puzzles built around the game mechanics.

The issue I have with this in Fortune-499, unfortunately, is that the puzzles are usually… annoyingly fiddly. Fortune-499 doesn’t have manual saving and on certain levels punishes you for dying by charging you to retry (boo!) but it asks you often to move around the level to trigger certain things or change your deck and spells in pretty specific ways to defeat certain enemies, and you can… just get it wrong and not really understand why. I’ll admit, I spent far too long on an early-ish puzzle that required me defeat a group of enemies at once that should have been quite obvious and easy because I hadn’t noticed something important² and a later puzzle, that required you shaping your deck to defeat an enemy in one turn… phew (at least that one let you restart the level for free.)

It’s just a little, you know… clunky, and never quite as rewarding as you’d hope (there’s some player-hostile moves too, like a section that lets you shape your deck in preparation for a battle that doesn’t come. I get the joke, but it’s annoying!)

Narratively, too, Fortune-499 is… fine? You play a depressed, cursed witch stuck in a dead-end office job who finds their workplace infested with demons, and it largely goes the way you kind of expect it to go. Like many people these days, I’d probably fucking kill myself for a dead-end office job with any sort of salary, so that aspect is a fucking lead banana in 2026, but there are parts that work: I loved an entire section where a wizard co-worker is summoned to “help” on clearing out the demons but ignores your pre-existing knowledge, eventually cutting you out completely (when he fights an enemy that he doesn’t have to fight, and it takes forever… now that’s a player-hostile joke that works.) That thread wraps up a little too neatly, I guess, but nothing else pops quite as much–though I like that the game works its way to a conclusion both narratively and mechanically. It’s not quite as breathtaking as the conclusion of, say, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, but what is?

As is sometimes the case, Fortune-499 is the unfortunate recipient of… faint praise. I love the mechanic, I found it generally pleasant enough for the three and a half hours it took, but the moments of frustration just held it back enough to get a “well, if this sounds good to you, play it, but if it doesn’t, don’t.” Dang!

Will I ever play it again? Nope!

Final Thought: Having said all this, the good aspects of Fortune-499 make me genuinely excited to play Titanium Court. Hopefully soon!

1. Though don’t get me wrong–they just might not have been interested in creating a game like that anyway. ↩︎
2. When a summoner dies, their portals explode, not the enemies that were summoned. ↩︎