Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an amazing anomaly; something that flew over my radar so hard when it came out that I picked up on a whim (while it was free), but it truely made me wish I would’ve bought it on release. I really had no clue what to expect, a card-based RPG featuring Marvel characters made by the XCOM team? I had the (wrong) idea that there would be dating elements too, but chalk it up to superhero fatigue or a lack of interest specifically for deckbuilders, I had ignored it then. Playing it now - with the DLC and all - was a really fun experience.
Griftlands is a pretty meat roguelike deck-builder RPG where you adventure across a small part of the world, completing quests, negotiating, fighting, improving your abilities while trying to defeat a powerful boss at the end of a few in-game days while unlocking new cards for your next runs whether you fail or succeed. I had a really good time with it, even tho this kind of game isn’t entirely my cup of tea.
Inscryption (from the creator of Pony Island) is a surprising, amazing and very interesting card game where a lot of things happen and this review will contain light spoilers. Based on the fictional card game ‘Inscryption’ and the adventures of a card enthusiast messing around with it. Going through different styles of gameplay - but with consistent rules thorough - with light puzzle solving you’ll play a nice card game against a wide variety of opponents, each with their own special gimmicks and tricks. I had a great time with it!
Dawncaster is an amazing deckbuilding roguelike where you fight monsters and build your character using a ton of different cards, powers and strategies. It’s the kind of game that really sucked me in and I would still be playing it right now if I didn’t feel like I had to try other games constantly. I had a great time with it and the sheer amount of content to unlock and ideas to test out makes the purchase completely worth it. Being a premium title, there are no ads or annoying microtransactions as well, another great plus in my book!
Magic the Gathering: Puzzle Quest is an interesting concept; You use MtG cards to defeat enemies but instead of tapping lands to get mana in order to cast spells, you match gems on a board to get mana that goes to the use of your cards. Mana costs are now colorless and you can swap which card you’re going to play next. Instead of having a bunch of creatures on the board, you can stack identical monsters together - and there’s a limit of 3 types - and you’ll attack your opponent each turn with your available summons. The core concept is pretty cool, but it’s just a free to play mobile game with terrible monetization that made me hate it almost instantly.
Pathfinder Adventures is a card and dice based RPG where you control a party of adventurers going through a few quests in order to find loot and improve their stats and skills. To complete challenges you use cards and skills that give bonuses to your checks in order to match specific challenges. You lose if you run out of time and characters can die if their decks run out. I had fun with it even if the dice-based aspects of the game made it very random at times and I had some difficulties wrapping my brain around the concept of losing cards forever in a card game where your rewards are cards. Oh and there are also a bunch of free-to-play mechanics snuck in there that rubbed me the wrong way.
Missile Cards is somewhat a deck building game, somewhat a missile commander-like, but overall is more of a game of chance and strategy where you place cards in order to prevent hazards from hitting your base. Armed with a deck full of weapons, powers and hazards, you must clear out the deck in a few maps in order to win. Objetives are to be completed as well if you want to progress to the next map, and you can upgrade your base and buy some cards with XP and collected resources during matches. I really, really enjoyed this game.
Concrete Jungle is a weird little game where you're trying to build a city using cards from a deck that improve or worsen tiles on a grid. The goal of each level is to collect enough points on each column to advance the board forward, losing you lives if you can't figure out how to clear them. The addition of multiple characters with skill trees and card unlocks as you level up is nice, but I found the game too difficult and a bit too random to be enjoyable for me.
Hex is a pretty nifty CCG with a cool single-player component built like an RPG campaign; You build a character, collect cards and skill points to place in a tree, you complete quests - mostly by playing card games - and you explore dungeons, fight difficult tricky battles and improve your decks and its cards with gear and special abilities. I haven't touched the multiplayer of the game at all, only playing the single-player side of it, and I still had a great time with it, way better than I had with Heartstone back when I played it. If you're interested in an original spin on computer card games, Hex is one for you.
Adventure Time Card Wars is an okay CCG. It uses some tropes of other card games with a few twists and some dubious design choices that made me scratch my head about their presence in the game. Some expected iOS game bloat - energy timers, premium currencies and random card packs - bummed me down a little, but otherwise I had fun with it. I still know nothing of Adventure Time, but it sure added some flavor to the cards and characters. Maybe I would've enjoyed it a tiny bit more if I knew what this was all about.
Compared to Magic 2015 I looked at a few weeks ago, PTCGO is way better. I had a few technical issues here and there with the game but otherwise it feels like you can do pretty much anything you could do in a real game of the actual card game. Some might argue that the Pokemon cards are simpler - there is no 'instant' in PTCG, everything is played during your turn - but that's just the nature of the rules of one game versus another. It had been a while since I had looked at this and was surprised to see that there are now the equivalent of enchantments - such as giving +30 max HP to a pokemon.
What is the main goal of a digital version of a card game? The goal of adding metagaming around the core experience, being either with a story, with cards to collect, achievements to get or quests to complete, is of course the main draw to these remakes of games such as MtG. That being said, the main goal of a digital TCG is to portray as closely as possible the original game and to follow its rules the best it can. MtG2015 is terrible in many ways at doing so, especially since I've been playing MtG for the past 15 years and I was at least expecting basic moves to work.
S&PA is a sad game, it's sad because the core concept of fighting with poker hands is interesting, but it's sad because of timers, premium currencies and 99.99$ best values. It's sad because of facebook requests, it's sad because of things you could buy to make the game too easy. At least it's sad and I'm not saying it doesn't have merit at all.
Card City Nights is a cute and fun little card game featuring things from other fun games I’ve played (Iji, Hero Core) and I was at first pretty interested by its systems, the way you can win battles and the way the game is structured. However, this didn’t hold out forever
A card game where you play your units and other special moves using maths, Calculords is mighty interesting, but a bit confusing as far as the deck building goes. I really enjoyed my time with it even if it felt like the screen didn’t detect my tapping some of the time, which was quite annoying.
I had heard good things about EMPIRE: The Deck Building Strategy Game and decided to check it out! In my head, a strategy deck building game would have you start a campaign with very little cards and as you win fights you'd add more cards to your inventory until you beat the story. That idea sounded interesting in my idea; sadly for me my expectations weren't met. I was wrong about what this game was going to be, and what I got instead was too frustrating to keep me interested.
Hearthstone : Heroes of Warcraft is a card game where you need to lower the opponent's life to 0. To do so, you have a deck of cards (split between class cards from one of the nine World of Warcraft classes (wait, nine?) and creature cards) and a special hero power unique to each class. The game will be free to play and is currently in beta, but as the core mechanics probably won't change, I feel like it's fair to give it a look right now.
Ironclad Tactics is a card-based strategy game, you build a deck of twenty cards from two factions, featuring a mix of Ironclads (strong robots that can equip parts), tactics, parts and infantry (lighter units that are useful on their own), you then take this deck through a multiple of scenarios where the goal is mostly to get your ironclads to the end of the screen to score Victory Points, some missions require you to kill a boss or survive, but most of the time you'll use multiple ways to gather VPs and win. You get AP every turn to use your cards and some maps include ways to make AP faster. I've felt disappointed by IT, but I loved it.
SolForge is a trading card game that would be tough to make in real life. A bit like Scrolls, it uses counters (you increase and decrease stats permanently quite often in this game, compared to Magic: The Gathering where creatures don't keep their life totals dynamic every turn) and a grid-like playing field. There's an interesting level-up system where cards you play can come back as leveled-up versions of themselves after a few turn, making you pick the cards you want to evolve over the ones that are useful right then. Ultimately, I find it light in content and without reasons to play it before future updates.
Card Hunter is a browser-based board game with CCG and RPG elements. You control a part of three little figurines and work your way through a campaign of battles, defeating monsters, getting loot and experience and doing it all over again. I loved it enough to keep playing for a good while, but frustrating battles, low speed of character progression and strange business models make me doubt I'll play it much longer.