Recent reviews by Nova

Familiars.io is a stripped down pokemon like. The dex is tiny, just 20 as of the time of writing. There is no difference between one familiar of a species and any other of the same level, aside from the possibility of being a different color. However, this is all for the sake of accessibility. You can start the game and have a fully leveled team in minutes, a full collection in just hours, and then you can dive right into the pvp scene, collecting rares (this game's version of shiny pokemon) or try your hand at the dungeons, a relatively new pve resource management dungeon crawling mode.

The battles are deeper than you'd expect given how simple the teambuilding and creature raising aspects are, making high level PVP surprisingly complex. Do you spotlight now to deny that cobby the ability to set up fog after it knocks you out? Do you ooze now to forcefully win the speed ties, overall winning the exchange but losing your Gary for the rest of the match? These questions and more are ones I've had to ask myself in battles with other players.

For the low cost of 0 dollars and maybe an hour of your time, I think Familiars.io is worth a try if you like this sort of game.

I didn't expect this game to be as good as it was, but the graphics are very well polished, the puzzles are really challenging, the components force you to use some ingenuity, and you can do some really neat things with the tools provided. If it had a level editor it would be perfect, but I can forgive that because you can put ICs inside of other ICs.

I've played this game for years now, way back before endazu even existed and back when there were weekly releases of new cards or balance updates. It's seen some hard times, but I'm hoping to see this phoenix rise from its ashes. Seriously, this game deserves it.

To the uninitiated, this game is a deckbuilder. Think Dominion or Ascension if you've ever played either of those. If not, well the gist is that during the game your deck isn't what you're drawing from: You start with an inventory full of coins, which you then use to buy cards from your bank which stocks from your deck. Those cards then go to your inventory, meaning it's entirely possible to deny yourself enough coins to keep going if you don't think things through!

The strategy is pretty unique and there are lots of little quirks you can learn to take advantage of, if you're into that sort of thing. The lore's pretty cool too if that's your thing, the community has done a pretty good job of piecing together the clues in the cards and the devs used to give lore dumps that have been saved. There's also plenty of different playstyles within the current four factions to choose from, and with any luck we'll be seeing a fifth and sixth faction at some point too.

It's also got one of the most consumer-friendly premium currency systems I've ever seen. You never have to pay a cent (I got to be a pretty high level before I ever did) but even if you do want to grease the wheels a bit you only need to drop some cash once to permanently unlock the fast track packs which then can be bought with currency earned through matches, and there's no energy system at all unless you count tickets for tourney mode.

In short, if you like card games, War of Omens has a low cost for entry and it's worth the look if you ask me.

A modern classic. It's like a free time sinkhole.