Friday, September 20, 2013

A Card in the Hand



Dungeons and monsters and loot, oh my! Don’t forget the precious loot. You can have all this and more in Blue Manchu’s great interpretation of the Dungeons and Dragons formula with Card Hunter.


So far I have slain only a few Kobolds and am still a mere pipsqueak compared to the great Heroes of Legend, but this flash game is more than mere skull bashing. It puts far more emphasis on strategy with a card-based system forcing you to plan your actions carefully for the best results.

Characters have action cards which you play to have them perform said action, and you draw a new set after the end of each combat round, which occurs when both sides of the combat pass their turn because they’ve got no cards left. What you get is random, you might not draw any movement cards leaving you stuck in a possibly bad position. Do you use your weak attack cards to flush out their defence cards or try to finish them off quickly? Has your ranged Spellcaster ended up in melee combat, perhaps your Priest has a handy card to shift them away? It will take clever use of your actions to keep your party members alive, especially during the harder battles, but the whole system is very well fleshed out, letting luck only determine your options, rather than your actions.

The whole premise is made even more fantastic with a cardboard-cutout style design, making it feel very much like a tabletop game. It comes loaded with effects, despite its flat appearance and so far I’ve found the levelling up characters to be both sensible while allowing a great deal of customisation for your personal tastes.


You can play Card Hunter for free, only account registration is required, here. There also isn’t much in the way of gimmicks yet (ie, microtransactions or advertisements), but they are there, but not imposing, which is nice.

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