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hey look it's another kickstarter game that no one's ever going to play

Kickstarter YouTube Blog InfoDoc Reddit

Game itself (although you can't play it unless you have a key)


This one has a couple of interesting stories behind it, though. The developers have been working on this for years since dropping out of their PhDs at MIT(!!). At one point, they went to some sort of fan expo to showcase the game (an expensive endeavor) and got a bunch of people interested and collected an mailing list in a google spreadsheet. Apparently they lost this spreadsheet, so they lost contact with all of the people who went to the expo and effectively flushed $6.5k down the drain. One of the devs posted this story on /r/TIFU and the repost on /r/BestOf is currently the top thread of all time on that subreddit.

Hilariously, the dev made a second post detailing the whole story and it's currently the top post on /r/BestOf.

Anyway, the game itself:

The best way to describe it is turn-based starcraft macro condensed into a non-collectible card game. You build economic units to build attacking and defensive units with the goal of wiping out all of your opponent's units. Every game has a set of base units that appear in every game and an additional 5 or 8 advanced units that are randomly chosen from a large pool of advanced units. The important thing is that nobody technically "owns" any of the cards like you own cards in Hearthstone.

For combat, all of your attackers pool their attack power together and your opponent chooses the order in which the blockers take the hits. If you have more attack power than he has defender hp, you "breach" and can choose what to damage.

At the moment, there are about 150-200 people online at any given time, which is pretty impressive since the game is still in alpha. The devs know what they're doing--if you watch more videos on their YouTube channel, it's clear that they've playtested the game with love and care and developed a lot of theory themselves (which is possible since it's a deterministic game). They also apparently have their AI student friends from MIT working on bots for the game, and they're pretty good. Honestly, for a symmetric, deterministic game, I wasn't expecting this to be so addicting, and it deserves as much attention as it can get.
 
Saw this on TrumpSC's stream. I thought it was really interesting and signed up for a beta key. Still waiting for it but I think it could be really good.
 
Yeah, it's really cool. And a lot of popular Hearthstone streamers (Trump, reynad, Kripp, Kolento, sjow, etc.) played it recently in a dev-sponsored tournament. Kolento won it and continues to play it in his offtime.

Here's Kripp talking about the game.

 

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