Meet Emma de Beauvais, a burly strongwoman leading a party of medieval mercenaries in endless battles against ruffian rogues and sorcerous ne’er-do-wells for gold and glory. Her ability to bare-knuckle brawl is governed by a deck of cards, and I’m doing everything I can to draw Head Smash every time. Sure, the 10 damage plus 1 damage per combo is nice, but I keep using it just because it feels cool to slam heads against walls and tables, John Wick-style.
Knights in Tight Spaces is a deckbuilding tactics game, and if the idea of a turn-based strategy title where your cards determine what hand-to-hand moves you can use sounds familiar, you might’ve played the previous game from developer Ground Shelter, Fights in Tight Spaces. The follow-up, appropriately titled Knights in Tight Spaces, trades the slick action film aesthetics for a fantasy vibe, while keeping the deckbuilder-meets-tactics game basics intact. In fact, if you play purely as a brawler like Emma, Knights in Tight Spaces might feel like little more than a medieval reskin of its predecessor.
But Knights in Tight Spaces ups the ante with aspects you can’t help but compare to Dungeons & Dragons. Most importantly, there’s now a whole playable party of heroes, split between classes like brawlers, mages, and rangers. Controlling a whole group of heroes at once makes the battles exponentially more complex, but equally it’s that much more satisfying when you put together a massive, party-wide combo that absolutely wrecks the enemy.
Dungeons & draw cards
Each battle in Knights in Tight Spaces takes place on a single-screen, tile-based board representing a location like a tavern or a stable. With each turn, you draw a hand of cards that let you move and attack, and you can spend momentum – a resource that refreshes every turn – or combo points – which build up as you attack – to deploy these cards in the fight.
Some cards have straightforward effects like “deal X damage” or “move X spaces,” but most create more unique outcomes. A sweeping kick will deal less damage than most attacks, but it’ll leave the enemy prone and unable to attack next round. You can use the shift card to move in a straight line, but you can also use it to slip to the far side of an enemy, and it makes for a very useful escape when you’re cornered. Similarly, the grapple card can let you strong-arm an enemy into a useful position, but you can also use it on an ally to quickly yank them out of harm’s way.
The positional game here especially is an absolute delight. Shuffling enemies to advantageous spots, kicking them into each other, and dodging their attacks to the degree that they start beating up each other is incredibly satisfying. The levels are built such that they keep widening the list of possibilities, giving you tables to slam heads on, rock formations to hide behind, and enticing windows to kick the bad guys through.
It gets even more satisfying once you start lining up combos for your whole party to take part in. An attack on a bad guy will trigger follow-up combo moves from relevant allies, whether that’s a nearby brawler who’ll take a free melee attack or an arrow shot from a distant archer who can take a straight-line shot halfway across the room.
The key limitation on your party is that you move every member with the same limited hand of cards each turn. Did you burn a movement card to move your brawler into position to drop kick that opposing mage into oblivion? Now that card is no longer an option to get your own spellcaster out of imminent danger.
Never reaching the end
All these layered systems help keep the battles engaging, but it also makes them really complex. There are plenty of difficulty options to help mitigate the pure challenge if you want that, but the game demands a cognitive investment from you that’s going to keep expanding.
I like tactics games and I’m generally decent at recognizing the consequences of my actions, but Knights in Tight Spaces has so much to keep track of that I’ve regularly found myself committing to a move and immediately regretting it because of some reactive effect I’ve completely forgotten about.
That’s why, for as much fun as I’ve been having with Knights in Tight Spaces, I’m finding myself thinking its predecessor – which focuses on just a single playable combatant with a single loadout of moves – might ultimately be more my speed. Yet, far from finding Knights’ complexity frustrating, I’m fascinated by how its systems fit together.
Knights in Tight Spaces has kept orbiting in my brain even when I’m not playing it. Was I right to build a varied party of balanced classes the first time around? Or should I centralize around an all-brawler party so that I can prune my deck down to just the cards that best suit them? How would I best position my party to get a full, boss-destroying chain reaction going?
The fact that these questions are lingering in my head is probably the best indicator of a great deckbuilder, and even if I might need the training wheels of its simpler predecessor for now, you better believe I’m coming back to Knights in Tight Spaces so I can answer these questions once I’ve fully grokked the essentials. Emma deserves to reach glory, after all.
Knights in Tight Spaces is out now on PC. For more, check out our Indie Spotlight series.
