Recent reviews by xploring

It's a very nice, chill card game. There is no broken combos, op pay-to-win cards, annoying mechanics or toxic emotes. Quality of life features in this game is among the best I have come across. And with the small player base, everyone seem to be playing their own decks so lot of room for experimentation and variety in gameplay. At first, not much seem to be happening but it grew on me with time and you see more interesting interactions as collection and experience grew. You get like 20 packs for completing tutorial so collection grew quickly and it's easy to make a few different decks even as a new player. The only drawback is long queue time.

Gameplay is very interesting and I like the simple, casual feel of the game. But progression and currency system is complicated and predatory from what I have heard, I wouldn't recommend getting too serious about it. Beware, it's easy to get hooked. It's hard to stop playing lol.

Really fun. I wasn't very into Slay the Spire but once I started this I kind of couldn't stop playing. For Faeria players, it's nice to meet all our old friends again from Faeria.

It's easy to get into and quite fun. There are a lot of achievements/quests which offer rewards so collection builds up quite easily early on, but I am still missing many standard cards. It will be more difficult now that I did most of the easy quests. Perhaps because most players are still new to the game, I ranked up to Field Marshall just over a week after starting without crafting any card, so it's definitely not pay to win. Perhaps the highest level is a different story. I bought the welcome pack but you can get those 10 packs by playing for a few days more.

Here comes the negatives. Replayability may be a worry, playing the same deck for a few days feel a bit boring. The deck builder is also very basic and not user friendly. Can't see the whole deck on screen, but you can copy a code for the deck. Right click and double click does nothing, need to drag to add every card, but once you get used to it, it's not too bad. It's still early access so there are room for improvement. I enjoyed it so far.

The first 20 cards were a bit underwhelming but the rakoans and subtypes are really fun :D

I played Stormbound for 10 hours over the last 3 days. It's a fun casual ccg on 4x5 board. There are only 12 cards in any deck but they replenish once you have played it, you get to mulligan once per turn and your hand is 4 cards at the start of every turn. Mana can't be saved and increase by 1 every turn. Not as simple as it looks and the mechanics are fun. But after the initial phase, games tend to drag out sometimes with a lot of back and forth and it kind of feels repetitive sometimes. There are not many cards to collect but the one big problem is that you can upgrade any cards 5 or 6 times, increasing its stats each time and it makes the game totally broken for paying players vs free players. There are not that many cards to collect and the rewards system seems quite good if you don't upgrade, so it's fun if you play against friends of the same level.

After 160 hours, I reverted my recommendation. Playing the game can be fun occasionally, but the rewards for doing well is to be matched against higher level decks where most games you really have no chance at all if both players are of similar level and you just get smashed game after game. I spent $10 and got the best legendary Ubass luckily and that helped me climb 3-4 ranks but after that it's just a repeat of being smashed again. It leaves a bad feeling overall, discourage experimentation and playing feels like being on a treadmill at times.

Recommended. Can have fun without spending money and everything look polished and lot of strategic depth and decisions. Variety of cards and effects are good too. (I don't have previous experience though.) Pandora mode and even normal multiplayer are exciting. Good single player mode too to get started. I can see myself playing this for hundreds of hours.

It's only minesweeper in hex, albeit in different shapes and sizes each time. Didn't like it.

Better, more complicated game than Ticket to Ride, but not casual if you want to win every game even with AI. Starts to get boring after 30-40 hours with the same map all the time. Some of the races and powers are unattractive almost in any situation, balance still needs work.