Humble Bundle - Digital card games

[Lucas]

Here it is:

https://www.humblebundle.com/

Games included (up to the $12 price) :

- SolForge (note: it's an Early Access game)
- Scrolls
- Talisman: Digital Edition (and Prologue)
- Dominion (official digital version; up to three expansion packs)
- Star Realms
- Magic 2015 special edition
- Card Hunter (basic edition; includes a 30 days subscription)

Regarding Card Hunter, if you feel like trying it again but would like to start over (maybe you last checked it out 10+ months ago), there's a good chance that they will grant you an account/tutorial reset if you mail them at support@cardhunter.com ; Worked for me, they replied in under aN hour.

[HaemishM]

And saw this and wondered if any of them were any good. Thoughts?

[Lucas]

And saw this and wondered if any of them were any good. Thoughts?

Never played SolForge, Scrolls or Star Realms.

The most important thing when approaching these, IMO, is putting aside HEX, Magic or Hearthstone (at least for its polish value) and see if you can enjoy them for what they are.
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- Regarding Star Realms, there is a demo available for free:

http://www.starrealms.com/digital-game/

I think it's the tutorial plus standalone games against the A.I. (no single-player campaign mode, no multiplayer); but, I think you can get a good idea about the card mechanics and see if it's good for you.

- Dominion: the digital version at https://www.playdominion.com/Dominion/gameClient.html includes the whole base game for free (and, again, a tutorial); the expansions that have been released added mechanics and new cards, but anyone can tell you that the base game is very good on its own; so, again, you can get a very good idea about it without spending anything.

- Same goes with Card Hunter: the tutorial takes you through the initial steps of the campaign, so by the time you hit the pay wall, you probably know if you're willing to spend a little more to go a bit further. I love the art and how they replicated the feel of those early D&D basic edition modules.

Sorry for the vague answers; hopefully someone have played some of these titles a little more in-depth.

[Hawkbit]

I played Star Realms on mobile, iPhone 6+.  It felt like spaceship Ascension, which is okay I guess. The biggest difference seemed to be that in Ascension a player could decide to build power cards and gain tokens through cultist kills.  In Star Realms, I just dumped excess "power" at the end of each turn on the enemy.  Otherwise it really felt similar. 

Mobile Ascension: Art is terribad, cards are large and readable. 

Mobile Star Realms: Art is good, cards are too small to read, requiring double tapping on everything. 

[Lucas]

Two more games have been added to the bundle:

- War of Omens (successful KS) :

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1564141972/war-of-omens-a-digital-deck-builder-ccg-hybrid
http://play.warofomens.com/login/

- Bloodrealm: Battlegrounds (Early Access) :

http://store.steampowered.com/app/311700/

[Goldenmean]

SolForge is a decent lane combat game. It doesn't have the depth of Magic or Hex, but if you don't go into the game expecting that, it's not horrible. The free to play aspects of it aren't incredibly onerous either. Supposedly their next major content patch is going to involve a single player campaign, and you can already play against (mediocre) AIs if player interaction isn't your thing.

Talisman is mindless junk. I don't really know why it's in this bundle, I wouldn't consider it a card game. It's a roll and move boardgame, though admittedly one with a lot of cards. The PC port of it seems fine, and there's a ton of expansions to the base game, all of which are meant to hit digital eventually, but there's really no depth here. Roll, move, draw a card, if it's a creature, roll some more and see if you beat it, repeat.

Can't speak to the PC port of Dominion, but there's a reason the original card game started the deck building genre. It's a good game, though a bit dry.

Star Realms is another decent deckbuilder. More in the style of Ascension than Dominion. Probably of more interest if you like more player interaction. Dominion can be multiplayer solitaire with certain sets of cards. Star Realms is all about blowing the other person up. Also has single player capabilities.

I'm sure most of you already have an opinion of Magic 2015, so not going to bother talking about that.

Card Hunter is great. Takes longer to play a game than most of the other choices on here because you need to deal with moving around a map instead of just clicking cards, but it's a really great game, especially if you come from an old school D&D background and can appreciate some of the in jokes. Probably the most benevolent F2P system of the bunch also.

War of Omens is weeeird. It's a deck builder/CCG hybrid, and doesn't really play like any other game out there. They're actively developing this. There's a patch pretty much every week that tweaks cards, adds new ones, etc. There's a lot of single player options, and daily quests that can pay out a draft ticket if you do all of them. Also lots of persistent leveling of your cards if you like progression. Like most of the other things on here, it's free to play, so you can try it online and see if it's for you.

Bloodrealm is another lane battler, except it doesn't have the unique gimmick that SolForge does of cards leveling up over the game. It's a free to play browser game, with everything that entails. Gougey F2P options, slow development cycle, etc. With that said, I blow a couple of evenings on it when I was unemployed before I started hitting the pay walls.

And Card City Nights is just irredeemably bad. Nothing good to say about that one.

Haven't played Scrolls, haven't played Escape from the Aliens in Outerspace.

[ezrast]

War of Omens has some interesting mechanics and the way each faction is differentiated by its own power curve means each matchup is interesting, but the monetization scheme is awful. Just awful.

[Goldenmean]

Heh. If you think the monetization on WoO is awful, you should take a look at some other web based CCGs. It doesn't have anything on Tyrant Unleashed or the like.

The only thing you can't get by grinding are the Kickstarter backer coin and now the Humble Bundle coin. You get a gem every week just for logging in daily. You get daily draft tickets just by doing the quests, which can gives you packs as rewards. And even if you do want to drop money on the game, gems are less than 2$ at almost every bundle pricing and buying a gem pack gives you the choice of three cards, so you're more likely to get something you need.

And there's no energy system, so you can grind your brains out for silver if you want. Really, it's one of the kindest free to play systems out there.

[ezrast]

It's more that the power progression is mostly vertical, and there's no stratification in multiplayer so you're competing against people with strictly superior decks. Also two bucks a pop isn't that great when it takes, what, 30 duplicates to max out a card? And I've never found one of the fancy coins even after playing enough to max out all my deck's commons and some of its uncommons.

Ingots and drafts weren't a thing when I played though, so that's an improvement I guess.

[Goldenmean]

Oh, yeah, if ingots weren't a thing when you played, that definitely helps with maxing out specific cards that you want, though it's still a looooot of grinding to max out rares. I also didn't mess around with multiplayer much, so the player inequity doesn't bother me as much (and I backed on kickstarter, so frequently had the better cards of the people I was matched against). I will agree that they need a better match making system, though drafting does help with that (and honestly that might already have improved, I haven't tried PvP in some time). BTW, you get one of the shiny coins for maxing out a draft champion, guaranteed.

I guess it really depends on how you want to play the game. I like progression and don't really care all that much for PvP, so the steady pace of slowly improving my deck through the dailies is appealing. If you want to be a top tier player out of the gate, then yeah, you're going to drop money. You're also probably going to end up really pissed off, because they rebalance stuff like mad. They seem to have leveled off some on rebalancing existing cards, but new cards are still getting added all the time which can turn your perfect deck into junk.