What is Puzzle and Dragons (Pad)?
Puzzle and Dragons is an award-winning card collecting puzzle game made by GungHo where you feed your hard earned money to a sadistic gold dragon that shoots curiously decorated easter eggs from its stomach. These eggs contain not chickens (or dragons if that’s what you were expecting) but all manner of being from ancient egyptian fire birds to scantily clad vampire ladies with almost everything in between. You, as the player, then go on to complete the game’s incredibly vague quest of defeating the legendary dragon (or something like that). In all seriousness, Puzzle and Dragons is a game about two things: collecting and puzzling. So if you have an interest in one or both of those things, you won’t find a more satisfying game than this.
What to expect:
After going through a data download, maybe a couple of title screen menus, Puzzle and Dragons will give you the chance to pick your starter. For those of you that have played Pokemon, this screen may seem like an incredibly weighty decision to make within the first few seconds of opening the app. Fear not though, for unlike in Pokemon, your PaD starter is pretty much useless, go ahead and pick whichever one is your favorite color. After picking your starter, you’ll soon find yourself ushered through a series of really fast, far too complicated tutorials which leave you overwhelmed by the all-too-new-to-you user interface. Just try your best to keep up and understand what’s going on, if you don’t, no big deal, that’s why you’re reading this guide.
Puzzling:
Within the first couple of screens you’ll find yourself in a “dungeon”, on the bottom half of your screen is a bunch of colorful circles, on the top is an innocent looking red blob that you need to mercilessly destroy. Dividing the two is your beloved starter and a couple more of those innocuous blobs: they’re there to help you with the destroying.
Listen to what the tutorial has to tell you, and then check back here for a list of the most important things you should’ve gotten out of it.
Puzzling: This is not bejeweled. Repeat: This is NOT bejeweled. Third time, THIS IS NOT BEJEWELED. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, if you’re reading this, you should have already been through all 5 tutorial stages, if not, go do them. Great, now if you completely understood the puzzle part of the tutorial, skip this section, you’re good to go. If not, here are the main things you should keep in mind while you’re in a dungeon:
- Your own HP: that’s the pink, horizontal bar above the puzzle but below the images of your own monsters, pretty intuitive, just try to keep it above 0
- Enemy monsters: you can see them on the upper half of your screen. Each monster has a counter to the upper left that says “In 2” or some other number, that’s the number of turns until that monster attacks you.
- Orbs and colors: match orbs in groups of 3 or more on the bottom half of the screen to make a combo and have every monster matching that color attribute attack your enemies. (i.e. if you make a Blue orb combo, all of your Blue (Water) colored monsters will attack. The color/type of a monster is denoted by the color of the frame around their image.)
- THIS IS NOT BEJEWELED: once you pick up your orb, you can move it as much as you want within the time limit. That means you can move it all the way across the board, in a loop-de-loop, and then back to where it started, all in one.
Feeding Monsters: Leveling up monsters makes them more powerful. In order to level up a monster, Power-Up Fusion is used to feed other monsters to the one that you want to strengthen. In this game, when you feed away a monster, it’s gone forever, one monster literally eats the other one, therefore, you should keep a couple of things in mind.
Important Points:
- Never feed away anything you get from the REM (rare egg machine).
- Feed monsters of the same color/type to each other for an exp. bonus.
- Feeding monsters of the Enhance Monster type, gives your selected monster a lot more exp. than what you would get from feeding normal dungeon monsters.
- Never feed away anything you get from the REM
Magic Stones: Per the tutorial, magic stones have many uses! Some of which are good and some of which are wasteful.
Things you should use your magic stones for:
- Rolling the Rare Egg Machine (REM) during Godfests to obtain more powerful monsters
- Expanding your box capacity
Things you should not use your magic stones for:
- Continues (when you die in a dungeon)
- Refilling your stamina bar*
- Rolling the REM when it does not say “Godfest Live!”
You can either buy magic stones with real money (this is called IAP or in-app purchasing) or get them for free as handouts from GungHo by logging in daily or for completing dungeon sets (first time only). You can expect to get about 15 magic stones (give or take) per month in the mail for free. That being said, if you don’t plan on spending money on this game, magic stones are a limited and valuable resource. Take care to use them effectively.
*see late game guide
Rolling & what to expect (or not to expect): “Rolling” the REM is the process by which you sell your soul to GungHo. As you feed the dragon many sets of 5 stones at a time, a new player can expect to experience one thing: confusion. As you grow to become more knowledgeable about the various monsters inside the dragon’s belly, that confusion will become a mix of joy and (mostly) despair. Nevertheless, rolling the REM and riding the emotional rollercoaster it entails is a required part of progressing in this game.
Good Online Resources:
For monster, dungeon, and metal dragon time information: www.puzzledragonx.com For announcements: www.facebook.com/PuzzleAndDragonsOfficial/timeline
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