A lot of people are saying this is just a re-skinned basic card battler. I disagree. I'm a huge deck building addict and I've purchased almost all of the games in this genre. Although this game has a lot in common with the typical deck building game, it's different in lots of ways. Not only do you have the typical energy points to play cards, but the cards themselves effect your HP... every time you have to reshuffle, you lose half of your HP. A full HP loss means you have to discard one of that character's 5 cards. So, strategy comes in on what card you pick when forced to discard after losing your HP. However, losing HP doesn't mean the show is over, so you get to battle on with less cards until you run out of all 15. It's a really unique mechanic as far as card battlers go and ends up requiring way deeper strategy. Plus, it has the added fun of an RPG map where you can run around and complete quests, cook food to enhance your many quirks, recruit and train new performers and upgrade your circus. It's a pretty deep game for 20 bucks and I think it's well worth it if you're into card battlers.
I will add that yes, the dialogue and voice acting is pretty bad. It doesn't completely ruin the game for me though.

Super lazy game design. Setting is a very thin layer of paint over regular combat deckbuilder. Instead of "attack/block" it's "impress/ignore", instead of HP your people have Focus, and instead of energy to play cards you have Vitality. But none of these mechanics have been otherwise adapted for the setting, they've just been reskinned.

And it makes no sense. Entertainment isn't combat to see whether you can pump 15 units of "general entertainment" into an audience member before they kill you with their boos - boos they emit even if they just took 99/100 of their entertainment HP in entertainment damage this entertainment turn. And why are you generally entertaining one person at once? It's dumb.

Let's brainstorm for 30 seconds, which is 30 seconds more thinking than they did. How about different audience members are entertained by different things? Maybe the kids in the audience want more jokes and animals - and if they have to watch a mime for too long then they boo? Or some other audience member wants "thrills", and if they don't get them regularly then they get bored and leave? Instead of your entertainers "dying", you lose money or reputation if your audiences aren't entertained? Oh look, now our game makes sense, and maybe we have some separate design space that combat games haven't explored.

Ignoring all that and just treating this game like a regular combat deckbuilder (which it is) it's not a great one. A single "run" is super long (WAY TOO LONG), and the shows themselves mostly feel the same regardless of the audience type. Your time in a show is 10% doing the same thing every turn and 90% watching the same 3 bland animations.

Over the course of a run you're making very few interesting decisions - a few upgrades to your people and a few upgrades to your overall circus. Those decisions are the meat of deckbuilding games, and are very sparse here. Between shows you also have to do a bunch of tedium with food and quirks. It's mostly meaningless and boring and I'm glad the game is easy enough that you can mostly ignore/autopilot this stuff.

Each class has a very limited selection of cards, and you get very few upgrade chances, so you just kind of have to hope you get the good cards.

Artist upgrades are super slow, they only get points when performing, and you have a limited number of shows to do (you can't repeat in a city). All that adds up to disincentivizing you from trying out new types of artists - you don't want to split your XP with some new artist who might not be an upgrade. That's lame. Your circus should be constantly growing and having new stuff - not just riding the same 3 acts for city after city.

The game is very easy... but God help you if things were to turn for the worse. There's a bunch of "if the player isn't doing well, punish the player" mechanics. Like, if you can't afford to put up posters for your show, you'll get less money. Other than that you'll always put up posters. That's just inexcusably bad game design: it's a non-decision, all it actually does is exacerbates "death spirals". Who wants artificial extra death spirals in a game where the campaign is like 10 hours long?

The cards aren't balanced, and lots tend towards easy infinite (or at least long) loops. There's cards that draw more cards and give you more energy. Guess what? Those are too good. Shocker.

Oh, and sometimes they game gets stuck in a "not accepting input mode" and you have to force quit and restart whatever show you were doing.

I like deckbuilders and this is a fun setting. But as it stands it's a terrible, tedious game to play.

Interesting premise which is different than normal attack card games but just can't stay interested even after trying to start over several times with different strategies. Frustrating mechanics such as lack of money even after winning all the shows, bias towards negative quirks, annoying audience heals or resurrects that prolong battles, no incentive to develop other artists when at lower level. Then this last time, ran into a bug that others already reported but not fixed. Decided to give up on that artist, replaced with another artist and then ran into another bug with that replacement artist. Stopped there, filed on bug thread with no answer so don't expect dev support.

The Amazing American Circus is a story-driven deckbuilder.

You're the owner of a circus and need to travel through the USA to get famous. On your way, you will need to solve quests, delight the public, get new and better artists, feed and keep them happy, upgrade your circus and keep an eye on your savings. It's okay to lose a show but losing three in a row result in the game's end.

Every show is a battle. They are turn-based. You select three artists, a final event, and some acts, depending on the length of the show. Every artist has five cards, all of them together is your deck. Vitality is the currency you will use to play cards.
Every card has a card cost and gets you some focus to fill the final gauge. When the gauge is full, you can activate your final, doing "damage" to the viewers of your show.

Your goal is to impress the viewers. Their "HP" needs to reach zero for them to be impressed. When all viewers are impressed, the show is over. Every turn, viewers will "attack" your artists. Every artist has their HP bar. If it reaches zero, you need to remove one of the artist's card for the length of the show, then they HP get recovered. Sounds easy? Well, whenever you used all the cards in your deck, all of your artists lose 5 HP (they have around 10 in total), so not just the viewers are your enemy.

You will start with three artists but can hire more. Every artist has his quirks which can be positive, negative or both. Depending on how shows go, they can get new quirks.
Think about classes like in other games. There are clowns, fire artists, a pantomime, etc. They all look different and have different mechanics used in their decks.
For every show they appear in, they get EXP. After every level up, you can either get a new card or upgrade an existing one through you can't have more than 5.

One exception is special cards you can earn during shows. They will automatically get added to the artist's deck. You can remove them with money if you wish.

Talking about all those things. Every time you set down in a city, you can visit all the tents in your circus. You can train your artists if they have enough EXP, hire new ones, cook food, look through your journal, remove quirks, upgrade your circus, and a lot more. This is like your "main base" comparing it to similar games.

You can do one show in every city. If you lose one, you can do it again after attending a few other shows. For every node you travel to, you need to select food for the artists you eat. Based on three different parameters, they will get handicaps or advantages in the next show. There's also a chance you get into events while traveling. They mostly give you up to three different options to select, while every one of them gives one positive and one negative thing.

• The atmosphere is great. The graphics are lovely, the music is amazing and the voice actors are good enough. The story adds to all of that with crazy and very creative quests (distract someone, and use a chicken to open a safe which will end up in a "battle", etc.). The story in general is a bit thin but interesting enough. Characters within the story are a bit crazy like you would imagine them working at a circus this time around.
  
• Through it needs some time to get used to battles, once you get into it, they are fun enough to keep you on your toes.
  
• The difficulty feels just right mostly. It's not like you will lose a lot but it's not as easy as a walk through the park.
  
• There is a lot of content in the game. Different enemies, artists, possibilities of what to do, and quests. The only thing they could add is more cards per artist but overall this isn't a big problem.

• The beginning is a bit rough and you'll need a bit to get into it. Especially the battles aren't beginner-friendly IMO. They aren't exactly complicated but because it works a bit different than most deckbuilders and keywords are very different, you will need to get used to it. Add to that, that the tutorial also isn't exactly beginner-friendly and you will feel overwhelmed at first when just after the first show, you will unlock like 10 tents where you can do different things and just a few text boxes explain them to you.
  
• Leveling up characters doesn't change much. You can't change their playstyle in any way. Every character has one playstyle (like mostly defensive cards, attacks, a mechanic just they can use, etc.), and leveling them up to grants you either a new card or upgrades to an existing card. Upgrades are very minor and new cards are very rare. Through it says "new" card, you will mostly get one card you already have. Three characters I leveled up all got the option to get a duplicate card added to their deck. I have yet to see a new card and I've leveled up 7 times in total.
  
• Characters don't get much stronger when leveling them up. There are no stats to boost. The only chance to make them stronger is by upgrading their cards and as I said, these upgrades are very minor.
  
• Battles are very slow because you can't skip animations. For every card you play, you need to watch the whole animation of an artist. There's an artist who can play cards, which will get you new ones immediately in your hand and these don't need vitality to be played but are rather a week. Still, he's one of the strongest artists in the game but it's really annoying to play him because there are turns where you will play up to 10 cards and need to watch the animation every damn time.
  
• Some keywords aren't explained properly as well as some card descriptions aren't fully understandable. It looks like sometimes there is a word missing. Could be a problem with the german translation.
  
• Feels unfinished. To give some examples: Some names aren't finished yet (_name_artist_ or something along those lines), card animations bug out, translation errors/missing, very small texts with a different font, and some voice lines sounding rather bad compared to the others.

The Amazing American Circus is a fun story-driven deckbuilder. It tries something new, has an astonishing atmosphere, and looks gorgeous. Overall, it feels very rough around the edges, has its flaws and it needs time to get used to it. I had my fun with the game through I did not get into the "just one more round"-addiction phase you know from other games. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad game at all even though it looks like it because the list of "bad" things is much longer but the things that are good, are very good. It lives from the atmosphere and overall great idea. The execution is a bit flawed and that's why the game isn't a masterpiece.

Still, if you're into story-driven deckbuilder, this one will do it!

The current state of the game is pretty mediocre, the twist within the deckbuilder formula in a circus enviroment wasn't a terrible idea, but the execution of TAAC definitely was. I enjoyed it at first, but quickly realised the game at its core is broken.
Your goal is to entertain the audience members until their ''hp'' bar drops to 0, on their turn they'll do things like: hurt your performers, give you g*rbage cards, stun your performes, ''shield'' themselves, etc.
But this only works if they actually have a turn. Getting an infinite loop with your cards is so easy you can actually do it at the start of the game; the artist have 5 cards each, but you can bring one to the show with just 1. Therefore, you only need to remove every useless card and just keep the drawing and shielding ones.
The mechanic meant to prevent you from infinites is that every time you shuffle your deck, all your artists take 5 damage, but you can shield it.
Therefore with a Juggler+Aerialist combo, you have an infinite right from the get go (AOE 6 hit point shield, +1 energy, +1 draw and 0-cost impress), it's tedious to pull off, but you CAN do it. And it just gets faster and easier with other artists.
Having this in mind, the game just isn't challenging at all. The last achivement that I got was the ''Fail ten shows'', because losing is hard. Also, the game over (losing 3 times in a row) just takes you to the menu, so... there are no consequences for losing.
Therefore, the rest of the game makes almost 0 sense, the food mechanic is interesting, but you'll always have money because you will almost never lose. Special mention to the top food bar, which is more usefull half-way full (+3 impress to all) than full (effects from the audience last less; but they won't have a turn anyways).
Every time you upgrade a wagon, further upgrades cost more, that's fine. But some upgrades are... kind of ridiculous. Magnifying lens upgrade? Us*less. Ingredients cost less? If you get if after the recipes upgrade (which you should) it costs more than 1000 dollars, so it's best to just spend that money on ingredients. The same goes to the ''chance to get double dishes'' upgrade.
Also, if you have into account that you can get infinites from the start, 90% of gifts (meant to be helping) are pretty much useless, so you are better off removing them.
The recruitment is kind of lazy work as well, once you are see the artists available, they will not change. You have 1-2 types per city, if you want a specific one (e.g: for achievements) and you forgot to upgrade the recruitement wagon, you might get screwed with RNG because the artist don't reset by upgrading after you already saw them in a specific city, easily fixed by a ''available for X days'' mechanic. I mention this because it happened in my last playthrough, and I got an acrobat in the last map.
Which brings me to the next point, leveling up is a nightmare, you get a lot of experience from new performances (cities/missions) but a path*tic amount (this also applies to money) from already visited places.
In earlier versions, they did not have the mechanic to perform twice in a city, but they added it... and it is p*intless. You get almost no experience and almost no money. Also meaning you need several playthroughs to get all the ''get X artist to max level'', because it's unbearable to do in just one.
Special mention to performance issues: changing the resolution makes the game almost unplayable, crashing, long loading screens, softlocks... I can't recall all, but there is a bug that made me specially angry in which the Fakir is applied with all buffs from other artists.
The game also desesperately needs a ''turn animations off'' option. You can make them faster (200%) but basically 50% of the gameplay is looking at animations rather than playing.
I probably have more to mention, but at this point it doesn't make a difference. This is definetly not worth 20 dollars, I bought it cheap, but I still feel like it's a waste of money.

Alright, 13 hrs in traveling around the US and we gave PT Barnum, Teddy Roosevelt, and Queen Victoria the show of their lives.

Some quick thoughts in no particular order:

• The tutorial is long and even with that, the mechanics are not intuitive, this is a problem. In the world of game design, there is a spectrum of tutorials. On one end, you have no tutorial, just have players jump in to the game and have them figure it out as they go. On the other end, you have an excessively long tutorial that finely breaks down, mechanics, interactions, pretty much everything the player should expect to encounter and its effect on the game. This is a design choice and both have their place. The problem arises when the length or lack of length of the tutorial doesn’t serve the game as a whole. This is what we have here. The tutorial is long, in both exposition and game play but at the end of it, I really don’t feel like I have a grasp of what is going on. That leads me to the next point.

• There is just too much going on. The game tries to have too many tents, huts, upgrades, mechanics, abilities, characters, encounters… and most, if not all of it, become irrelevant after the first few stops on the amazing circus tour.

• The Recruitment Tent – You’ll quickly discover that some classes are far better than others in their card design. Some are needlessly complex, adding cards that transform or cards that add other cards to your deck. No pun intended these seem to be just for show. There might be a world where you would want to use these characters but I did just fine with characters that stuck to primarily “impress” and “ignore”. You really only need 3, possibly 4 performers to beat the game (they get tired but you can get around this). Once you find a “team” that you like it actually becomes advantageous to not use other performers. At whatever point you figure this out, the “recruitment tent” becomes largely irrelevant. All of the performers, even with full upgrades on the tent will never match the ones you have been using that have positive “quirks”, “perks” and upgraded cards. The only thing I used this tent for after a certain point was to buy a few more performers to increase the probability that a random negative encounter would hit a performer I didn’t use so I could ignore it.

• The Cookhouse – Food is a very weird element in the game. It makes sense that you would need to feed your troupe and maybe at the very beginning of the game when money is tight this plays a role but after a certain point this too becomes completely irrelevant. There are a lot of recipes but it becomes pretty easy to balance the 3 categories to make sure you have all the of the wildly overpowered bonuses. The ingredients become too cheap relative to the money being made to have any effect on anything and it just becomes an annoyance. By the midpoint of the game I had as many as I wanted of every dish and never lost the bonuses.

• The Voodoo Wagon – Your performers receiving negative and positive effects after shows is fine but removing negative abilities is not commiserate with the cash you receive or the effect on the game. With an upgrade or two, it ends up costing 40 gold to remove a negative effect. Again, after the midpoint of the game if one of the 3 performers I primarily used received a negative effect I didn’t even read it I just paid a negligible 40 gold to remove it like it never happened. To that end, none of the negative status conditions have any effect on the game and might as well not even be included.

• Ringmaster Wagon - Some of the “enhancements” you can purchase in your tent make no sense relative to their price. I just ended up buying them because I had nothing else to do with my money. The two most egregious examples are making the magnifying glass larger and decreasing the cost of food ingredients. In the case of the magnifying glass, it costs around 1500 to upgrade. Using the magnifying glass only costs 75 so upgrading it is equivalent to 20 uses. Since most of the areas a. have a path that shows you where to “look” or b. not very large this makes no sense. I don’t even know if I used it 20 times and even when I did I didn’t need a larger area. The point around the ingredient price is ostensibly the same. The food upgrade is even more expensive and the food prices go down by 1-2 which will never equate to the 1500+ you spent to “upgrade”.

• Finales – There’s a huge delta in power level of the available finales. They range from completely unplayable (even though you are forced to slog through some of the battles to unlock them) to wildly overpowered. In my experience, both the trampoline and knife thrower finales are far, far superior to the others both from a cost and effect perspective. I guess if you build your deck differently some of the others could have an effect but the costs are just too high to reach. Finale is also a misnomer in the world of this game. My entire strategy hinged on performing a “finale” as many times as possible.

• The Oregon Trail like encounters on the map when traveling are unnecessary. Who cares if one of my main three artists get a negative effect in exchange for gold? I can remove it for 40 gold or even better just ignore it forever if I don’t use that character.

The appeal of these types of games, slay the spire, etc… for me is that the run is different every time, cards are constantly being added/changed, new perks and negatives, etc... this game really doesn’t have that. It wants to be too many things and unfortunately fails at making most of them relevant throughout. After I started leveling up the same three performers, the game became boring. Every city was just another click to perform a show and move on. I didn’t have to visit any other wagon save for the occasional negative status removal.

It’s whimsical and fun at points but overall not enough whimsy for me to balance some broken elements. If you’re super invested in the circus, really like this world/time period, and really like these types of games its worth a shot but probably won’t provide the grand spectacle you’re hoping for.

This is not a Slay to Spire, this is not a Monster Train. The Amazing American Circus is not a roguelike-roguelite card game, it is more like a card game built around a campaign, with some management sim built around it, in which you need to cover the costs, upgrades etc from the incomes you get during the shows.

If you more curious about the game, and want to check a short, ~20mins long video in which I showing what content you could expect from the game with one circus show (card battle) included, then here is mine:
https://youtu.be/VmUoQrBY3es

Game completion time: 12-15h if you finish all mission on the path you select
Achievement perfection time: ~3playthroughs required as need to upgrade tomax level every single artist type once. No free roam after the end of the game. You can eventually back up your save file at the end of the first region as most artist could be acquired during the second part of the game and you need to select a region for the second part, while the other region can't be visited during that playthrough.
Achievement perfection difficulty: ~30h.

The game's strength is clearly the originality. It brings card battles to a different perspective while still using the well known stats, interface and mechanics.
What does that mean? The enemies are called as audience. They don’t do damage, they destabilize the focus of your artists with rotten tomatoes, with some “boo”-s, and many other various things. They also don’t have health points, they have boredom, and your artists need to kill their boredom.

As you can see, everything could feel like a well known card battler, just redesigned to make it suitable for the game and the content. This is it, however, what brings the feeling that this is something new, something fresh and what should I say? It worked for me! Mainly because of the fact that a card battle game was placed in an environment which was never seen in such a game before.


The gameplay focuses on 2 different genre:

Manage your circus with the money you earn:
-upgrade your circus, the available resources
-upgrade your artists(and level up their cards), recruit new ones
-feed them, etc.

The other part of the game is the actual shows, which are the card battles. On my video you could easily see the course of the battle. Make the audience entertained before your artists lose their focus (health points).

The card battles comes with nice animation and art works, here is one of the many loading screen:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2603422549


This is a unique game, that is sure. You probably won’t find many others like this, at least not for now. If this will become a hit, then yes, steam will be flooded with this kind of games:-)

Visuals: 9/10, looks great, it definitely has a circus feeling.
Atmosphere: 9/10, same as for visuals, it has the required atmosphere
Difficulty: 3/10, There are no selectable difficulties and it feels so far it is too easy.
Amount of crash: 0 so far, but only at 3 hours
Bugs: I did not find anything that I could describe as bug.


If you liked the review or you like to earn achievements, but in enjoyable, fun and entertaining games, then please follow my Average Achievement Hunter curator or just check out our curated games if you looking for some gaming tips:-) Thanks

A lazy re-skin of a bog-standard deckbuilder with questionable UI, poor explanation of mechanics, and insufferable writing.

The game is basically a generic re-skin of the deckbuilder genre where:

Performers = ally units
Impress = ally attack
Ignore = ally defense
Focus = Ally HP
vitality = action points
audience = enemies
Sneer = enemy attack
boredom = enemy HP

That being said, I cannot recommend this game even if you enjoy the genre because while it copies elements from other games, I don’t believe it manages the same level of quality in terms of game design and balance.

A lot of the game design makes sense in a standard combat deckbuilders, but not for the setting the game placed itself in:
Performers impress one audience member at a time, instead of entertaining the whole crowd as a whole. There are also usually only 2 or so audience to impress, because everyone else is obviously irrelevant.
Instead of audiences jeering after you fail to entertain them, they start flinging produce at performers from the get-go, until you reduce their Health down to zero where they suddenly become docile for the rest of the set.

Where there is some form of discernable logic in other cardbuilder games (e.g. shield bash doing damage based on defense points), the effects of [Circus Trick XYZ] to the audience in this game seems very arbitrary and nonsensical. Frankly you could switch the effects (impress, ignore, etc) of any of the tricks with each other and it would make just as much sense.

There are other management aspects to do in the game such as recruitment of new performers, camp upgrades, several forms of performer management, food management, etc, but I haven’t really delved deep into it because 1) I really didn’t enjoy the core “combat’” experience, 2) the game basically dumps all of these elements into your lap at once without proper directions (it gives a short explanation of what each building does, but not on things such as “when should I recruit new members?”, “should I even recruit new members? Would it not dilute experience points?”, “when should I priorize upgrading X”, etc)

Its fun....

Honestly, I hate the forced progression. Let me play at my own pace, this game has a lot of stuff in it and not being able to replay stages after you beat them is pretty lame. I dont regret buying it, the art is beautiful and the play style is a lot of fun, but the forced progression may keep me from sticking with it. Maybe you can replay areas later, but 13 hours in and so far its a nope. Also ran into a nasty bug that freezes your hand in between acts, only fix I found is to close and do the battle over again, which is very lame.

This is why Steam needs a neutral option.

After giving it an honest try, I lost my patience when seeing game mechanics bugs. The game requires learning a lot of different systems, but in the end, it did not capture my interest. I had trouble caring whether the circus performed well, it could upgrade the carnival tents, whether the actors' quirks were okay, or the right food was cooked. And, I am a big fan of the Darkest Dungeon game, which inspired this one. The Amazing Circus just has too many things happening, so many details that need to be painstakingly understood, and the game just did not make the case of why should care. Had the developers stripped down the mechanics a bit more, then I bet it would have been a crowd-pleaser.