So, I read
Numbuk's post about Hearthstone, and that reminded me that I haven't talked about a few other digital card games here. Rather than hijack a thread about a specific one (in a buried subforum, no less), I figured I'd make a new thread where I could highlight the one I've been playing off and on, the one that I've played briefly and am waiting for the alpha to open up to more Kickstarter backers to dive into more deeply, and a few other things.
So first up,
Solforge is out and free to play on Steam, as well as the App store and coming soon on Android. It uses a fairly standard model of "free to play, but rarity distribution-based card packs can be bought for cash or slowly earned via playing games daily." This was a Kickstarted game, and I think it's technically in an open beta now. Some of the card art is unfinished, and I think they're still working on the Mac &/or Linux version (I've started to lose track of what games have promised what cross-platform compatibility).
Solforge is made by Stoneblade Entertainment, who are some high level Magic: the Gathering players who designed a Dominion-esque game called Ascension in meatspace, ported it to iOS, and then got excited about design space a digital medium would open up in card gaming. They partnered with Richard Garfield, and came up with Solforge, which they then successfully Kickstarted. It plays with familiar concepts, and its two standout features are that you play your creatures in 5 "lanes" which limit blocking to only blocking creatures opposite you in the same lane, and that cards level up as you play them. So the lane-based playing field creates a little bit of positional strategy, especially when cards come along to riff off of it further, such as a creature that buffs adjacent cards or ones with the Mobility trait which allows them to move from lane to lane on your turn.
What drew me to it, though, was the levelling up mechanic. Each card has 3 levels, with different stats, art, and sometimes abilities. When you play a card, it stays on the board (if it's a creature; if it's a spell, the original gets removed from the game) and the next level higher gets added to your discard pile (if the card you played was level 3, then a level 3 copy gets put in your discard). Each turn, you discard your hand and draw a fresh one of 5 and may play two cards. Every 4 turns (after going through 2/3s of your deck, since card draw is fairly rare), you discard your hand, shuffle your discard pile (with several levelled up cards) back into your deck, and then draw your fresh hand, with a chance to draw higher level cards, now. It's a concept that opens up a bunch of design space -- you can actually have strong early-game cards that become
explicitly weak in the late game as other cards outperform them at higher levels, and you can have growth cards that start weak but gain lots of ground as you level them. You can make cards that reward you for playing your lower-level cards, and so on. In addition, there are a lot of copy effects; one card I play a lot is called Hunting Pack. When you play it, there's a 50% chance that you can play a duplicate in an unoccupied lane.. which can trigger another 50% chance to play yet another... These are all simple design elements that would be logistical nightmares in a physically distributed collectible card game, not to mention cumbersome to even play with physical cards (who wants to carry around 3 copies of each of their decks, and go sorting through the level 2 and 3 copies to find cards to add to their discard pile?).
All in all, it's a nice little package. Fairly easy to pick up and play with the starter decks, but with some subtleties swirling under the surface for deckbuilding and, to a somewhat lesser degree (dependent on the deck, really) more advanced deck piloting. The card art is fantastic (I love the touch that each level has different art that shows a progression of power), and the client's gotten to a stable place that even utilizes a unified matchmaking environment across PC and iOS. It's out, it's eminently playable. I played my daily 3 games (to get the daily login reward, the first win of the day reward, and the third win of the day reward) for a month or so, and then kind of ran out of motivation to chase rares off free rewards, because there are, simply put, a LOT of cards at the higher rarities, and the pack distributions available for not-real-money don't guarantee the highest. I collected my fair share, but as I watch my commons stocks grow to 30+ copies per common (a playset is 4, IIRC), I can't muster the motivation to keep chasing them. Especially with no player-to-player trading currently implemented. So, I log in and play a game or two when one of the couple RL friends I know who also dipped their toe in feel like it. If the game sounds intriguing to anybody and they want to play an opponent with either default decks or you want to try your hand against my constructed deck, let me know, I'm up for a game.
Next up is the Hex TCG. It's also a digital-only CCG, but it bills itself as an MMO, too, which is kind of odd. It's made by Cryptozoic Entertainment, who you may recognize as the guys who've been running the WoW TCG for the past few years. They also successfully Kickstarted their project earlier this year, are in alpha, and are closing in on a beta release soon as they work on broadening their alpha userbase and tackling some scalability refinements with their infrastructure. Their system is such that there will be cards which are distinctly for PvP play, and cards which will be distinctly for PvE play (as well as most cards which can be used in either, IIRC). This lets them go off the deep end with PvE cards, and do some stuff that might end up being a negative play experience for the opponent. It also lets them do asymmetrical things like cooperative play against one enemy deck, and so on. They're talking about having a bunch of strange, themed opponents in the "MMO" PvE experience, which will see you wander around themed areas almost JRPG style, except when a fight breaks out, you'll be playing a CCG match.
On the PvP side, it comes back to some familiar M:tG concepts and play, with some interesting digital twists. There's a faction of cards whose entire schtick is creatures which add keywords to other creatures you play, for instance. While doable in the physical medium, that would get messy,
fast. In Hex, it works naturally. Buffs are prevalent, and the cards' text changes to reflect them. Copy and "shuffle in a 1/1 creature" type effects are all over the place, more stuff that would be a nuisance in person.
I'm not in the Alpha, yet, but probably will be within a few weeks if their progress to date is an accurate basis to judge. However, they did have a playable version of the game at GenCon, eight or nine prebuilt decks. I played a dozen or so rounds, I think, and walked away pretty pleased. There was some strong theming going on, but nothing that looked so overbearing that your deck would build itself. The different decks did an excellent job of having different personalities, and many of them were quite fun. I can definitely see this game, with its loot elements drawn from MMOs and Diablones (get it? Diablo clones? Diab-lones?), having the quality where it gets under your skin and you get the itch to play one more game now that you've socketed this card and completed a set bonus for your deck.
My strongest criticism here is that its resource system is a bit of a limiting factor when it comes to play. You can play one gem a turn, and the gems act as refreshing resources to pay for as many other cards as you want to play. And you draw one card a turn. So it's a very controlled buildup, but easy to stall out if you go dry on resources too soon or run out of creatures to play. The play strategy comes in more in deciding with what, against whom, and when to block and with what to attack and when, since usually choosing what cards to play is a pretty trivial matter of "can I afford to play the card I just drew? Okay, play it. Is there anything else I can afford? Okay, I'm done." My second beef, which is hard to really place as either a major issue or a minor quibble due to the alpha status, is that the frequency of passing initiative back and forth through several phases of a turn (there's a lot of opportunities to play responses in the opponent's turn, and thus a lot of acknowledgements-cum-declination-of-action) can really cut the legs out of the pace of the game where Solforge and, it appears, Hearthstone, both specifically exclude interaction during the opponent's turn to streamline that in a digital interface.
And now, the extra bit thrown in. I also play Android: Netrunner online when I have the time. There's a free card table platform out there called OCTGN, and the FFG LCG community is quite good at supporting it. It's Netrunner plugin is updated very efficiently, despite the roughly monthly mini-expansion schedule FFG uses for LCGs. I've talked about Netrunner elsewhere, so suffice to say it's an amazing game that really pushes in-play options to new levels among constructed deck card games. The OCTGN plugin has a fair amount of automation, but takes a few runs to get used to the hotkeys and whatnot that help smooth out the interface. Even so, it's definitely not a hyper-polished, official app version of the game, so unfortunately games tend to take about twice as long as in-person tournament games do, heh.
All that said, I'm looking forward to a wider beta for Hearthstone, too. It'll be interesting to compare against Hex (which shares things like hero abilities and freeform one-to-one blocking) and Solforge (which has a similarly tight and rigid deck size) to see how they all utilize the digital medium differently.
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