Tag: Card game »

[Want to know if it’s worth investing your time in Earthcore? Check out our review]

At first glance, Earthcore: Shattered Elements seems like a rather simple card-battling game. Once you’re introduced to skills that will change quite a bit. Even more so once you start to acquire hero cards. But it’s not so complicated that we couldn’t put together a beginner’s guide for all you Earthcore neophytes.

Due for release sometime in May, Earthcore: Shattered Elements has been in soft launch on the Canadian and Danish App Stores for a while now. A fair bit of effort is clearly being put into ensuring that everything about Earthcore: Shattered Elements is polished. It’s showing too, with this game steadily shaping up to be something quit special for CCG fans.

You’ll immediately notice that Earthcore: Shattered Elements looks quite gorgeous. Each card is attractively designed, easily rivalling the likes of Hearthstone in terms of looks. It’s an ideal way to encourage you to want to collect them all, not just for the sake of progression, but because of how they look.

Each match involves taking it in turns placing cards down, with you not able to initially place a card directly opposite your opponent’s, until the second turn. Besides elemental values at play here, with the usual fire beating water, and fire beating earth, there are also skills to use. These can make all the difference, so it’s important to note that you can only use one skill per turn. Some skills are simply a matter of inflicting extra damage to your opponent, but they can also be used to change elements and more.

There’s an extensive card crafting side of things too, which soon opens up. Earthcore: Shattered Elements promises that you can create over 500,000+ unique card combinations and I can see that being likely. There’s a plentiful supply of depth here.

That’s perhaps where the longevity for it will lie - enticing you into creating the ultimate deck to defeat others through PvP. In which case, it makes sense that Earthcore: Shattered Elements has been in soft launch for so long with balancing issues being ironed out.

As it stands, Earthcore: Shattered Elements already seems pretty appealing and potentially quite challenging, even for experienced CCG players. With further refinements planned for its already seemingly extensive campaign mode, as well as some tweaks to balancing, it can surely only get better. Earthcore: Shattered Elements is due for release sometime in May. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop.

Manipulating your opponents and betraying your friends are the main themes of Coup the card game. Using hidden roles, players try to achieve goals while figuring out who is on their side and who is trying to take them down.

Recently Banana & Co teamed up with Coup's designer, Rikki Tahta, and La Mame games to kickstart a mobile version. The app will have all new art, 5 new cards with a unique set of characters, ranked matches, achievements, and will support up to 4 players. The art style of the new app game vs. the original card game looks cartoony but very polished.

Coup is set to join the long list of other board games that are now on iOS this May.

Hearthstone is, well, kind of popular. So it's a bit of a surprise that it took as long as it did for the first expansion to roll out. Still, Goblins vs Gnomes is a welcome sight all the same.

The expansion centers around the titular groups of diminutive tinkerers, and it adds (what else?) a fair number of new cards - including the brand new "Mech" minion type, which can apparently be quite powerful when you use several of them together. These new cards are available to draft in the Arena, or you can buy them in packs from the shop. A new appropriately-themed board is also available, and Spectator Mode is finally up and running for those times when you'd rather study other players' techniques instead of watching your Murlocks get squashed (for a change).

The Goblins vs Gnomes expansion is live now, and you can download Hearthstone for free whenever you feel like checking it out. And we both know you feel like checking it out.

Indie games development can be tough, especially when you’ve got a good idea for something but you’re not quite sure what way to take it. Having heard about Booya Squad, a Wisconsin-based team keen to turn their childhood comics into a mobile card battler, we wanted to learn more about their journey.

Booya Squad is a joint effort between Mike Bloom and his brother-in-law, John. They’re currently working on a social card game called Mario Italiano Four Families, but the story starts much earlier than that. Based on a comic book world they created over ten years ago, it’s been a long time coming. In that time, they've had to juggle big moves across country, raising a family, job changes, health issues, and many more challenges. The team’s blog explains the full story, such as how Mike skipped on a regular sleep pattern in order to get work done, but we also had a chat with him to learn the pertinent details behind everything.

148Apps: How much have various free internet resources helped you in your quest to go into game development? What would you recommend to other aspiring developers?
Mike Bloom (MB): We used the internet to learn how to do everything we needed to know. When we started, we were very naïve to the amount of knowledge and skills we would need to complete the game. So as we progressed through the project we often came upon an obstacle where we needed to learn or come up with something. So we would Google it or search for it on YouTube. We were constantly amazed that if we dug deep enough into these sources, we would always find exactly what we needed. The trick is to use different search phrases. We did this for everything from balancing stats, building a clean UI, all the way to marketing methods.

The idea here is to not be scared to start down the development path because you don’t know how to do everything you will need to do, or better yet you don’t even know what is all needed. Since we went in half blind, we just found the answers when we needed them, and that was actually fun. It was like, oh we have to do that? Well, I’ll do that one, learn the skill and put it to use right away.

Card Dungeon, by Playtap Games, has gotten a major overhaul that adds new features and fixes some old bugs.

Playtap has increased the speed of game play by shrinking the max room size and allowing Crusaders to move faster across the map when there are no monsters lurking nearby. Card Dungeon now also saves your game for you after every turn, making it easier to pick up and put down when you need to.

Last but not least, when you beat the boss on each level the dungeon will begin to collapse. You must race to the exit before time runs out.

You can download the newly-updated Card Dungeon for $3.99 on the App Store.