Because no one conquered the Orx in a day.

As an indie mash-up of the tower defense, deck-building, board game, RTS, and roguelike genres, ORX is a beast that’s as strange as the hordes of them that besiege you in the game. With so many game genres at place, you’d think it would all be too discordant to keep track of, but the game mixes these styles in an interesting, fun, and at times frustrating experience.

Related: The Best Tower Defense Games Ever Made, Ranked

That being said, the game’s bare-bones tutorial isn’t super helpful. If you want to survive the ravening hordes from turning your lands into a barren waste, then here are some things you should know before starting ORX.

Timers figure strongly in the gameplay of ORX: you get your gold at set intervals, while enemy waves come on a timer. It can be stressful when you’re making decisions on the clock and with the impact your decisions have, mistakes are costly.

Fortunately, not only can you pause the game at will with a press of the spacebar, but you can also control the speed of time with the 1, 2, and 3 keys, toggling between normal, twice, or three times the game speed respectively.

Unlike most roguelikes, you can restart a stage without consequence if things don’t turn out how you want them to. This is a pretty useful feature, since decisions have a lot of impact when you do a level, and it only takes a few to lock you out of a victory.

While this might seem like a get out of jail free card, keep in mind that this doesn’t shield you from the consequences of your macro decisions. That includes how you composed your deck, how high you let the World Corruption get, and which ORX cards you’ve picked up.

If enough of these things turn against you, no amount of restarts is likely to help and you’ll have to abandon your run and start over from the beginning.

For being the base and most important mechanic of the Dune Wardens, making castles is a pretty opaque process. In general, you build them by connecting compatible castle pieces and when they’re built, the more pieces you used to make them, the more powerful they are.

Related: The Best Video Game Castles We'd Love To Visit

As simple as that sounds, it’s not very clear which castle pieces fit. A good rule to have is to build them contiguously, with no open spaces, so that you’re less likely to accidentally make unviable castles. Also, keep an eye for a purple marker when you’re about to place a castle piece, since those indicate that putting that piece there will go towards finishing a castle.

Speaking of unviable castles, ORX is unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. Not only will the game let you make bad or useless placements, but once you commit a card to the board, you can’t take it back.

This can lead to situations where you end up laying down a castle piece that can’t connect to anything, or even invalidate a tile from any placement at all. Unusable tiles will be marked, but it would be nice if you couldn’t make them at all. Luckily, this doesn’t happen much to the Dune Reavers.

Though the game is no cakewalk to begin with, after you reach the second act and unlock the Dune Reavers, the game takes a sharp spike in difficulty. The next time you play as the Dune Wardens, you might find yourself struggling as early as the first level, with enemies having excessive hit points and the ability to bulldoze your castles. While it’s not impossible to surmount, it’s shocking how much harder the game gets after the honeymoon period.

Related: Best Tutorial Bosses In Video Games

To a lesser extent, this also happens to the Dune Reavers. At least with them, the difficulty doesn’t ramp up until act two. And though the difficulty spike is near vertical, at least the back half of a run is when you'd expect things to heat up.

An easy mechanic to overlook in ORX are various elemental traits called Sefiroth. Not to confused with the silver-haired dreamboat of FF7 fame, Sefiroth are often granted by playing certain cards. Rune cards are applied to castles and units for the Rune Wardens, and certain class and dictate cards for the Dune Reavers, as well as weather effects that you typically choose before a stage begins.

In addition to the usual, there's an elemental rock-paper-scissors that you’ll have to think about. Certain ORX clans taking on elemental traits and the elements you use against them will deal either bonus damage or less damage depending on if you’re picking elements that are weak or strong against them. A more potent effect of the Sefiroth comes into play when you have multiples of the same elements at the five, 10 and 20 intervals, granting bonus stats to all units and castles in play. For example, the Fire Sefiroth grants all your troops 50 percent more damage at the low end.

Next: The Best Roguelikes On Steam

A Bachelor of Science in Journalism and lover of all games, Chris originally got into games journalism as part of the longest and least thought out scheme to get into E3 and has since developed a love for journalism and the written word. Never got those E3 tickets, though.