Dave Reviews: Space Battle System #468

Star Realms

I've been told that my reviews are, and I quote, "funnier when (I) lose". I strenuously deny that I review games differently based on my personal results; I am always funny.

To that end, I will now review a game that is good and which I never, ever win.

Star Realms is a deckbuilder with, somewhat obviously, a space warfare setting. Like other deckbuilders, it uses some core mechanics deckbuilding veterans will be used to along with its own twists on the genre.

The familiar: a starting deck of ten cards, eight with money for buying other cards and two with attack so you have a bit of uncertainty early on. A resource for buying cards (trade) and a resource for doing damage to the enemy (attack). Cards of varying price with effects that strengthen as their cost goes up, creating a bit of a luck-based situation if one killer card hits the board and the first person who draws enough money to buy it winds up with a notable advantage.

The main difference: All cards in the deck are one of four colors. These colors are used to trigger team bonuses on a large percentage of cards. Those familiar with Ascension may recall an expansion where each player takes the role of a hero relating to one of the four factions in that game, making the purchase or use of that faction's cards a bit more useful, but in Star Realms this is core to the gameplay loop.

Each color has its own style. Green cards are nearly all attack-focused, with some card draw tied in. Yellow is aggressive with discard effects and decent attack resources, but it offers more gold than green. Red is built around scrapping cards (removing them from your deck). Blue offers the most gold and authority (which is Star Realms' version of hit points, so you can think of it as life gain), and its combos can dominate if given a chance to work, but they take more time than the other colors to get going.

Most modern deckbuilders offer some way to remove starting cards from your deck. How useful this mechanic is varies by the game; in Star Realms, because playing multiple cards of one color is central to winning most of the time, getting rid of non-colored starter cards is a huge benefit. So you want red, right? But the scrap cards come at the expense of having fewer resources than other cards of the same cost, so if you have access to more cards of a different color, it should be fine to get those, right? Well...

In general, you're trying to avoid building a deck with a few of each color. Some cards are individually powerful and don't have a team bonus worked into their design, so if you rely on those, not focusing on a color might be fine. But, when you play a couple of Cutters (two-cost blue cards) and you earn four authority, two trade, and four attack from each one, it feels like you robbed your opponent blind. It feels especially good when you're used to other deckbuilders, where you work to scrape together a few more resources each time through the deck, and here you land a couple cheap cards that work together to bring in a veritable bounty.

The real upshot is that while expensive cards certainly are powerful, and you pretty much always want them, the right set of cheap cards can have powerful effects as well when they work together. More over, because you want combos, there's a certain benefit to buying more cheap cards, since you're more likely to match them in any given hand. And, because so many cards are attack-based, it's less likely for you or your opponent to pile up early trade cards to buy something expensive quickly that might break the game.

There's another difference which explains some of the plethora of attack cards: bases. Once played, they stay on the board until destroyed, and each one requires a certain amount of attack to remove. Some of them, the outposts, must be destroyed for you and your other bases to be attacked at all, meaning they provide a certain amount of effective health each time through the deck, just like cards that give you authority. Other bases can be bypassed, but bases trigger color combos, so unless you're close to beating your opponent, you usually want to destroy the optional ones as well. Bases that stick on the board for more than a turn or two are usually big benefits to your side, which is why they tend not to stick on the board. It's also why blue offers such massive amounts of resources—going hard into blue means you'll be less likely to break bases on any given turn, and your opponent can start to come back with monster combos using the bases they have on the board.

Star Realms one-ups its competition by being, for the most part, balanced. I have learned how to bend my strategy towards each of the colors, and I have been able to lose terribly in every instance. Sometimes I lose to the giant card the opponent landed before me; sometimes I get combo smashed into the dirt. I have lost to small clusters of yellow ships, giant armies of green ships, and red decks that threw half their ships in a junkyard before beating me with the rest. I have lost this game, where each player starts with fifty authority, by 100. I have lost by wide and narrow margins, disastrously and hopelessly, with every gaming trick I know short of actually sleight-of-handing cards out of the deck.

It's, frankly, impressive.

Score: Five blob ships in hand out of six in the deck.