f13.net

So a couple of years ago, a Japanese mobile game came out called Dragon Poker.  It's a co-op where you and four other people fight monsters by each throwing out one card and trying to make the best possible poker hand with them.  Simple, right?  Well at heart it is, but the complexity ramps up fast when you start upgrading to cards that have special effects when played, as well as player powers that you can buy from a charge meter that increases more with stronger hands.  Players had a lot of good things to say about the game, its gameplay and how relatively non money-grubby it was compared to other freemium Japanese games.  The game currency flows fairly smoothly and the system as a whole isn't riddled with paywalls.  Unfortunately there was one minor problem: The game was only in Japanese.  It was still possible for someone to play without understanding Japanese if they had a few translation guides handy, but by and large it was a hassle for players in North America.

Fast forward to a couple months ago and Dragon Ace appears, in English.  And it's the same game!  Not a knockoff, but literally the English version of Dragon Poker, released for the southeast Asia market with more English speakers.  It's on a separate server and a few months behind Dragon Poker as far as events go, but they seem to be having the events with greater frequency to attempt to catch up.  It's still not available through the Google Play store in the west, but the developers aren't even bothering to be subtle about the wink, wink, nudge, nudging going on, having a link to the installer right on their homepage: http://dragonace.magicboxasia.com/  They've also mentioned on their social media sites that they're fine with international English users, so between those two facts it looks like there aren't plans for a NA-specific app or server, this's the best we're getting.

Quick and dirty tips:

1. Know poker hands.  Any spaces on your team not taken by a player will have an AI player, they're decent at working with you to make hands but won't use any of the player powers that improve capture rate and stuff that are really nice to have.
2. Get friends.  As mentioned above, humans are generally better than the AIs for teammates, so having other people online who can jump into your fights is always handy.
3. Use my referral code that I'm shilling: k5f3851  It gives you some free stuff out of the gate and more free stuff when you hit level 20 and should be enough to start rolling for better cards.
4. Roll for cards on the weekends.  The special card machine thing apparently gives out rarer cards on weekends.  You'll know when it's a special event because the gacha button on the main screen will be yellow instead of blue.
5. New players get a free super duper card of their choice if they go to the menu button, select codes, then select 'SS Giveaway for Everyone'.  You have an option to take one of nine cards.  I've been told to avoid number 2, 6, and 9, which corresponds to a buffalo guy, a mermaid, and a wolf thing.  Players with more experience than I say they suck.  Number 4 is a healer, I picked her because I didn't have any.  The others are all offense and are pretty much on the same level, so just pick one from a color that you don't have a lot of strength in.

Ingame as Ghambit.   Would be nice if you'd, y'know, post your screenie instead of just your invite code.   :oh_i_see:

It auto-friends you to anyone who puts in the invite code, already got you on my friend list.  But yeah, I'm in as Kalrath for anyone to add outside of the invite ID.

Meh, I'm not playing anyways because the game depends on population, which seeing as how there is no Droid installer on play yet, is pretty low.   First two games were with bots so I uninstalled.  Decent game design though, with a lot of potential depth.

The game population is top-heavy.  The early levels are going to be pretty much all bots, because the bulk of the players are up in the high level areas.  As I've been leveling up, I've encountered more and more real people, especially in areas that tend to collect players like the special events and daily dungeons.  I'll see players over level 100 showing up in the low level daily dungeon from time to time, whereas ordinarily I don't think they'd have much incentive to be slumming it in the starter areas.