I’ve been playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon virtually every day for years, through I don’t know how many updates. I’m far from convinced that every run is winnable, but there are some patterns that I’ve observed.

Mage and Huntress seem to be my best classes. The Mage’s staff means that you are guaranteed to have something that’s worth upgrading. The Huntress’ bow and her special abilities like growing grass by walking can make for some truly interesting gameplay changes, whereas I feel like most of the other classes’ abilities are more about moderate improvements to quality of life.

A Ring of Haste is probably my favorite ring to find, since being able to kite monsters is a great path to victory. Tenacity, Elements, and Strength are boring. Wealth can be good if it comes upgraded, but I wouldn’t put scrolls into it. Evasion always seems to turn on me sooner or later. Energy and Arcana can improve quality of life but are otherwise pretty mid.

A Wand of Regrowth is almost always a path to victory, especially if it comes upgraded, doubly so if you become a Warden, and triply so if you can combine it with the Sandals of Regrowth.

A Wand of Blast Wave is incredibly useful when used to knock enemies off ledges or into traps, saving yourself the trouble of killing them.

Other wands are a super mixed bag, depending on what you can manage to do with them, but I’ll say that some of my most fun and successful runs are putting a Wand of Corruption into my Mage’s Staff and becoming a Corruption Battlemage. You whack an enemy, Amok him on his friends, then corrupt them, then rinse and repeat until you win.

I’ve already mentioned the Sandals, which I’d say are incredibly useful if you’ve got a Wand of Regrowth or a Blooming enchanted weapon, but are otherwise hard to keep getting enough fresh grass to make worthwhile. I think the Ethereal Chains and Hourglass are my favorite and most useful artifacts. Horn of Plenty is okay but not great, unless you can combine it with being filled by the Battlemage’s energy generating ability. Other artifacts are mid, but I’ll make a special mention of the Unstable Spellbook which seems to screw me as often as it helps and yet I can’t deny that I have a great time with the mayhem it adds to my run. The Alchemist’s Toolkit is terrible; I hope a future patch significantly alters or replaces it, because honestly why bother using it at all?

I think my favorite runs are Corruption Battlemage or a Sniper with a nicely upgraded Boomerang; I always get a lot of fun out of using the boomerangs.

There’s no end to the conversation but that’s all I’ve got for now. It’s far and away the most played game on my phone… possibly my most played game ever, measured by eternal hours. The publisher is an absolute treasure and he deserves all the praise and success in the world.

There was a fork a while back which changed the board into hexagons but I don’t think that fork has bee maintained for quite some time, and their build pipeline is hopelessly broken so you’ll have to roll your sleeves up and compile your own from source with a lot of dependency chasing/substituting