A recent Humble Bundle was focused solely on card games. I picked it up and one of the games I was interested in giving a go to was Star Realms. I had it installed on my iPad mini for a while but hadn't started playing. Since the bundle gave me a full unlock to the base game, I was happy to spend some time playing around.
Star Realms is a deck building game from some of the same designers that made Ascension, several of whom were also professional Magic: the Gathering players back in the day. In a deck building game, both players start with a similar set of basic cards and there is a shared deck of advanced cards that they can select from on each turn. Cards are purchased from a "trade row" with resources gained by playing cards from your hand. See the pictures below - they show the cards in hand and the play space. As a player runs out of cards, they reshuffle their discard pile and start drawing cards again. In that way, cards from the trade row end up in their deck and are available to be played.
Basic game layout - my hand on bottom, my bases to the left
Star Realms gets increasingly complex from there. In the game each player has authority (hit points) and generate trade or combat points that are used to attack your opponent or to buy cards from the trade row of cards. The object of each game is to reduce your opponent to 0 authority. Simple enough, right? The game packs a lot of complexity from there. Individual cards may offer trade, combat or authority or any combination of them. Further, some cards are associated with factions like the Federation or Machine Cult or Blob and may, if multiple cards from a faction are played on the same turn it can result in additional effects. At times these effects might be more trade or combat or force an opponent to discard a card or you to draw a card. The cards in the trade row are either ships or bases; the difference being that bases stay in play once played until they are destroyed. Ships are played and then discarded at the end of each turn.
Mid-turn play
One of the great things about deck building games is that they add the additional strategy of choosing the right cards that come up to build an effective deck throughout the game rather than honing a deck prior to the game. This makes it easy to jump into a new game and makes each game different. The digital app for the physical card game, which is available on PC or iOS and Android devices allows you to play the basic game against the AI or a human opponent. It also includes a campaign of crafted scenarios where your starting deck or modifiers are added to make the game more challenging. Some of them can be quite difficult and are available in normal and hard version. There are also expansions available adding more cards and variety to the base game deck. The only drawback I have found is that the visuals are little small on the iPad mini, but that is more an effect of the device not the game. You can zoom in on any of the cards you want easily.
Campaign chapters
Scenario description
If you are a fan of card games and want to have it available on the go, Star Realms is a great option. If you want an easily accessible but deep game, give it a try. Star Realms gets 4.5 Mick Happies.
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