This week you’re in for either a treat or an ordeal, depending on how you feel about recent games designed around the concept of a character as a deck of cards. Tom Chick, Rob Harvey, and first-timer Scott Lufkin talk about Card Hunter, Pathfinder: Adventure Card Game, and Sentinels of the Multiverse. And we furthermore welcome the creators of those games for an epic-length, star-studded podcast featuring Jon Chey, designer of Card Hunter; Mike Selinker, designer of Pathfinder; and Christopher Badell and Adam Rebottaro, the designers of Sentinels of the Multiverse. We hope you’ll enjoy the entire podcast, but you can skip to the Card Hunter interview at the 18:00 mark, the Pathfinder interview at the 1:14 mark, and the Sentinels interview at the 2:29 mark.
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Card Hunter features one of the most unique deck building mechanics I’ve experienced in the collectible card game genre. In most strategy games, the difference between a short sword and a mace would largely be in the damage dealt and possibly the damage type. And actually I think a short sword and mace usually deal the same damage. Anyway, Card Hunter instead assigns cards that are the very actions you perform during combat to a given piece of equipment, and these action cards form the deck you draw from while you engage in battle.
After the break, what makes this system work so well. Continue reading →
With Card Hunter out and running very well since it’s had a bit of time to stabilize, and now that I’ve talked about the basic mechanics on how to play, I thought I’d next take a minute to look at the actual cards themselves.
After the jump, card mechanics and details Continue reading →
Today’s diary entry will focus on the meat and potatoes of Card Hunter –the combat. When I first watched some gameplay I was able to figure out the general idea behind how the game works – you play a movement card to move, you play an attack card to attack, simple. However, it was confusing to try and wrap my head around who was taking a turn, when a turn ended, and why someone would want to pass their turn with a handful of cards. Roll up your sleeves and grab a beverage and I’ll take you through a tour of what is happening during a match of Card Hunter.
After the jump, to arms! Continue reading →
Not long ago I would roll my eyes at a free-to-play game, web based or otherwise. This year has seen a few terrific gems that have changed my mind, such as Path of Exile, Neverwinter, and Mechwarrior Online. But the only free-to-play game to actually get money from me is Card Hunter. A few days ago, I spent $20 on in-game currency, called pizza, even though I’d seen most of the game’s content already in the beta.
After the jump, why would I do such a thing? Continue reading →
Contributor Scott Lufkin, a card carrying Card Hunter fan, will be covering the first week of Blue Manchu’s tactical fantasy combat meets deck-building game, which you can play here. Scott previously wrote our Tactics Ogre game diary, which starts here.
At last year’s Penny Arcade Expo, I saw a demo of an indie game called Card Hunter. The gameplay featured a player moving virtual cardboard units straight out of a boardgame on a tile based landscape lovingly detailed to look like a cardboard map, complete with dice and pencils off to the side. It was called Card Hunter. It was a free to play, browser based game, which at that point I believed was a pox on gaming.
After the break, what changed my mind? Continue reading →
