Card Hunter Beta
Neil O'Loughlin
Ah, that’s the stuff. I couldn’t have wished for anything more stabilising during a week when the games industry seems of the verge of eating itself. A game about games, a game where all this came from, a game about the purity and the silliness of escapism, a game about boardgames, card games and pen and paper roleplaying games. Console scenesters might have their Monster Hunter; on PC, we have Card Hunter. Card Hunter, I heart you.
I’ve had closed beta access to Blue Manchu’s unwaveringly cheeerful, celebratorily geeky CCG/RPG/TBS/boardgame mash-up for about a week now. I’ve yet to try the multiplayer, but the singleplayer immediately proved as comfortable a fit as that pair of underpants I’ve had since 2003. (They’re red, you know. Or at least they used to be.) In the age old tradition of successful compulsion loops, I’ve found it very difficult to not return to Card Hunter again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Mercifully, that compulsion doesn’t stem solely from the deathless hunger for raised stats and better weapons, though that plays a big part in proceedings, but also from how satisfying and tactical the turn-based, grid-based, card-based combat is. It’s a thoughtful and varying challenge every time, as from turn-to-turn I can only have a limited, if any, idea of what my characters will be able to do next.
Abilities, everything from chopping to magic and, most crucially, simply moving, are granted to each character at the start of every turn based on their ‘hand’ of cards. The deck this hand is drawn from is based upon the items your little cardboard fellows carry – axes mean an assortment of chops and lunges, flame wands primarily mean fire magic, divine trinkets mean heals and buffs. But while your Long Axe of Retribution might add 3 minor heals to your deck, there’s no guarantee these cards will wind up in your hand in a turn when you really need them. Instead you might end up with five different movement cards, or a few puny spear attacks.
That’s great if you were planning to go on the offensive against the assorted D&D-derived fantasy stereotypes you’re up against, but terrible news if you’ve got a party member with one health point left who is taking damage over time from a recent zombie bite. Alternatively, you might start a turn on the other side of the map from your enemies, with a hand full of devastating attacks but no movement cards. So you’re stuck where you are, probably getting pummelled with arrows and magic from afar. It’s low-level gambling – not replacing the strategy of picking and combining your moves wildly, but adding a potentially game-changing element of risk and surprise throughout.
As your party levels up and collects new kit the contents of their deck expands, improves and changes, but it’s not a matter of just sticking the rarest sword or the highest-level armour on them. You need to look at what cards specifically each item grants you, how they stack with other items and other cards, and how effective the new cards will be against certain types of enemies. For instance, a warrior character might wind up with a fancy-lookin’ new Martial Skill of a higher level than his current one, but if it adds bonus effects to any impaling attacks it’s wasted on a guy who’s currently carrying a couple of big lumpy clubs.
Despite the need to manage your inventory, the game isn’t manic like Diablo. This is an elegant roleplaying system from a more civilised age: finding or buying a new item is a pretty big deal, because it makes potentially sweeping changes to your deck and hand, such as transforming a fire-based wizard to an electricity-centric one. As such, equipping should be done wisely and occasionally, for maximum pay-off.
The singular elegance – that word again – of Card Hunter is that it takes all this very very statty, very Magic The Gatheringy stuff but manages to stop the card element from taking over. What you see and what you control is a party of adventurers, having a tense, razor’s edge fight against an assortment of Kobolds, skeletons, dragons and the like. It’s not just that Card Hunter provides graphical context for your chosen battle actions, but that placement of characters, both in relation to enemies and each other, is crucial, in the manner of something like Heroes of Might & Magic. You need to see and manage the battlefield, not just a set of faux-cardboard rectangles with icons and numbers on them. The two elements, the CCG and the RPG, are fundamentally combined – and that also means Card Hunter has twin streams of compulsion, of course.
Surrounding the whole affair is a good-natured and entirely affectionate pastiche of 80s pen and paper roleplaying games, as you’re guided and goaded by amiably dorky dungeon masters, missions are grouped into multi-battle ‘modules’ with brief, breathless storylines about monsters terrorising villagers, and the screen surround shows bowls of cheesy puffs and cans of presumably teeth-demolishing soda of indeterminate origin. It wants to evoke the simple, social pleasures of happy, harmless teenage escapism, and it succeeds so well.
It makes me yearn for the ability to flashback to more carefree times, before games and the games industry required constant analysis and objection, to when I could relentlessly chatter about my AD&D adventures to friends without feeling self-conscious, to when I had the time and freedom to just go and have that experience for a full weekend. Bittersweet indeed.
As is the the decision to make Card Hunter free-to-play, and supported by an optional payment system that primarily exists to make the game easier. The concept of ‘pizza slices’, the quintessential fuel of an all-night RPG session, as the purchasable currency is cute, and Card Hunter certainly takes some care to draw a clear, non-obnoxious line between what you get if you pay and what you get if you don’t, rather than have constant prompts for the former infecting the latter. The primary payment structure is The Card Hunter Club, a sort of subscription system which means you’ll be given bonus loot at the end of every successful battle.
300 Pizza Slices buys you a month of this, at a real-world cost of $10 (with discounts if you pay for a longer subscription up-front), which isn’t bad value at all within the grand scheme of free-to-play. It’s just that, even taking into account that the extra loot will still be random and thus probably of minimal use a lot of the time, it feels as though it’s on the road to Pay To Win. It’s bringing in out-of-game aid to make the fantasy adventure easier-going. It’s so much less cynical and obnoxious than in many other games, but I wish Card Hunter had stuck strictly to the concept of buying new Modules, new adventures. That is there too, as is the option to buy new artwork for the cardboard miniatures which represent your party, and both aspects simply make sense for this game, given how it’s trying to represent classic pen-and-papering and all its add-on books and whatnot. I can well imagine myself buying bonus modules – partly because, admittedly, they have epic loot rewards, but primarily because I imagine I’m going to want more of the meat of the game.
However, it must be said that there’s an awful lot of game here for $0, and the Club and other payment stuff is surprisingly non-obtrusive. Card Hunter is, I think, trying to make sure its players love it first and then maybe, hopefully, they’ll feel warm about the idea of investing cash into it, as opposed to games which try and wring cash out of you the second you’re out of the tutorial. Card Hunter’s clearly steeped in love for its subject matter, and that seems to have translated into treating its players with respect too. Add hey, let’s no forget this is beta – no doubt there’ll be plenty of tinkering with the payment systems before they settle on anything.
It’s so lovely to look at, as well – clean, simple but hugely characterful art that looks straight out of vintage funny papers, but augmented by modern graphic design sensibilities. The die-cut cardboard characters fit the concept brilliantly without robbing party members of personality, and most of all it fuses RPG tropes such as ridiculous fonts with a minimalistic UI and backgrounds. Apple should have got these guys to liven up iOS7. Meanwhile, comic patter from your nebbish GM, as he bickers with his arrogant brother and hopelessly attempts to flirt with the pizza delivery girl, keep up a written charm offensive.
‘Likeable’ is one of those words that risks sounding like a back-handed compliment, but I can’t think of a better summation of Card Hunter, and it’s one I employ only positively.
Card Hunter is taking closed beta applications now.
Alatar
Neil O'Loughlin
On Friday, 2 August 2013, Alatar wrote:
I'll try it Neil! Pity its not iOS though
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Neil O'Loughlin
Tel # : 0044 (0)7894088352
Armand
With me getting some beta keys (only have 1 left) I thought I should go back and play some more. Having had a little more time to commit to it this weekend, I’m glad I did. Cardhunter has charmed the pants off me. So much so I dropped $20 on it which I guess is about the best recommendation you can give for a F2P game.
For me its part nostalgia, the fantastic mechanics, excellent visuals and that something special charm it brings that’s hooked me. It also helps that it has a pretty good F2P system in place. It’s not in your face and it does not hinder you. You will have to buy modules at some point but you are many many hours in before you need to and at which point you either like the game enough to drop some cash or you can reroll and start again. I was not even at the point (6+ hours in) where I needed to commit any cash but i did anyway. Right type of game, right time I guess.
I know you mentioned iOS Alatar. I could see this working on a tablet but not so much on a phone. Card games on a phone in general don’t tend to work, alot of what makes the game so charming would be missing on such a small screen. Much the same reason Magic is not on iPhone. I’m pretty sure at some stage we will see this on tablet (their info page even mentions it). But I have read that Photon flash Player for iOS works ok...
Alatar
Wot I Think: Card Hunter
By Adam Smith on September 17th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.
Unless you’re reading these words on a device that doesn’t allow you to play Flash-based browser games, there is absolutely no reason for you not to toddle into another tab and start playing Card Hunter right now. If you have a terrible time, you can always come back, read the rest of this post and then jump straight into the comments to tell me how incredibly wrong I am. The rest of the post, you see, is made up of paragraphs of praise for one of the finest games of the year.
Part deck-builder, part tabletop RPG and part turn-based tactical brilliance, Card Hunter isn’t as simple a thing as the rather unenticing title suggests. There are cards and it is imperative to hunt for them, but not in the manner of a frustrated dad trapped inside on a rainy day, with a deck a couple of kings short. In Card Hunter, cards are derived from loot. Each piece of equipment attached to a character adds a selection of cards to their deck. Broadly, cards allow for attack, defense, movement or short-term ability modifications.
A rusty old sword could grant three weak attacks, unlikely to penetrate a decently armoured foe, and may also carry the possibility of a fumble or a rare piercing strike. Conversely, a magical diamond-edged blade might grant five armour-shattering slashes while also occasionally slicing through the bearer’s own flesh, causing double-edged damage in both directions.
During combat, characters are vulnerable to the luck of the draw. It’s possible to have a mighty warrior spend an entire turn shuffling across the battlefield, unable to bring himself close enough to crush a gang of goblins with his Mallet of Mashing. Rather than frustrating, this adds to the pleasure of inventory management. It’s all well and good having an inventory stacked with high-powered melee attacks but they’re meaningless if the enemy can prance out of range, firing sparks and arrows, or skewering the heavy-footed heroes with polearms and spears. Balance is key, whether across the party of three or in the loadout of each individual.
After a few adventures, the loot stockpile is high, although it will probably contain a few duplicate items. Anything can be sold for a few coins but it’s worth hanging on to a diverse set of items so as to counter the specific threats of each of the game’s many quests. There’s an enormous amount of content, far more than I realised when I first created my account. Like everything else in the game, the map is a digital representation of a fictional tabletop RPG. It sits atop a table and clicking and dragging scrolls the screen across it, revealing lands far away from the kobold-infested corner where the game begins.
Apart from the portraits of the dungeon master siblings, which lack personality, Card Hunter’s aesthetic is delicious. Everything has been designed as if it were a copy of a real object. Quest briefings are printed on adventure sheets, with branding, logos and instructions listed. Characters are two dimensional cut-outs lodged in plastic stands and their depiction follows the logic implied by their physicality, as I noticed with delight when I first saw a fire elemental – rather than simply hovering above its stand, it was elevated by a strip of white card, holding it aloft.
There’s a level of commitment to the creation of this fictional game that I admire and the detail of every element makes even the most predictable fantasy tropes a pleasure to discover. As well as being a visually intelligent game, Card Hunter has a clever approach to narrative. While the mode of depiction makes even a zombie interesting, the two separate plotlines work together to make dungeon raiding intriguing.
Alongside the usual heroics of the player characters, there’s a slow-burning story of sibling rivalry between the games master and his older brother, who has his own ideas as to how unforgiving and sadistic a GM should be to his group. Kill ‘em all, he reckons, to teach them that life isn’t fair. Meanwhile, the hapless youngster messes up nomenclature and quest plotlines, becoming distracted whenever the pizza delivery girl arrives.
Some people may find it irritating that the player’s character is always (presumably) male, given the flustered reaction to a female presence in the game space, and that’s a fair complaint, but there’s a surprising nuance to the burgeoning romance. While the games master tries to hide the fact that he’s playing with miniatures and dice whenever she visits, the delivery girl just wants to be invited to play. She’s a gamer, locked out of the group because they’re too bloody pig-headed, introverted and stubborn to realise that she might want to spend time with the people they are rather than the ciphers they pretend to be.
Given the talent that worked on the game, it’s probably daft to be surprised that it unassumingly delivers a nostalgic, comic and thoughtful tale, in brief and easily ignored snippets of dialogue. If you care to engage with it, the text of Card Hunter has something to say about awkward adolescence, the sociability and insularity of gaming groups, and how personality can define the way we play together. It’s a far better proposition than the series of geek references and jokes that I expected.
The combat itself, which is the heart of the game, is superb. At first, it seems simplistic, with few obstacles carving up the maps and monsters that walk forwards and then die by your swords and spells. As different abilities are introduced and maps become more cluttered, wizards and priests must be positioned with care, as their spells can only buff and bludgeon figures that are within range and line of sight.
At the beginning of each round, each character receives a hand of cards from the individually assigned deck determined by the items equipped during the planning phases. No replacements are dealt until the round ends, which only happens when both the player and the GM pass. Two cards can be kept and the rest are discarded, so unless there’s an unpleasant trait that a character would rather be rid of, it can be best to take action rather than waiting for the perfect moment. Traits must be played as soon as they are drawn and they have various effects, from removing a character’s ability to make killing blows (squeamish) to automatically teleporting him/her to a new location at the beginning of each round.
Even if defeated, characters don’t die, instead simply removed from that particular adventure, leaving their companions to fight on alone. Some quests have victory points, locations that can be held to earn points toward a set total that grants success, but most just involve eradicating the opposition. There’s a great deal of variety in the opponents faced but I won’t spoil their behaviour here – exploring the map, and realising how much there is to see and to kill is one of the game’s great pleasures.
Completing an adventure, each of which contains several battles, unlocks new locations. Most of these are further adventures, but there are also shops, which restock daily or weekly, and special treasure hunts that grant unique loot. These, along with some character reskins, are the only specific unlocks that require actual cash expenditure. Skipping them does not prevent progress and by the time I completed the first, I already had better equipment than the item I won at the end of it, so I doubt they’ll even speed progress particularly. It’s also possible to buy membership in monthly instalments. Members receive one extra piece of random loot at the end of each adventure.
I’d hope that people will come to the game because of its quality and then feel happy subscribing or buying the Basic Edition, which provides access to all of the special treasure adventures, nine figures (cosmetic only), 100 slices of in-game currency and a month of membership. The in-game currency doesn’t provide boosts or unlock anything other than cosmetic items, further months of subscription or additional treasure hunts that may be added at a later date.
Card Hunter is an enormous, accomplished and complete game before a penny is spent. I’m excited to see it grow, even though I haven’t finished all of the launch content yet despite spending three days doing little else but playing. I haven’t had to grind either, although it is possible to replay adventures after a cool-down period. When I find myself struggling, I switch equipment and try again, and eventually, the breakthrough comes.
Every minute that I play, I’m considering options, cursing or cheering as cards come into play, and learning new tactics. Don’t stay away because its free-to-play – from the player perspective, this is the ideal of that model. I just hope it works as well for the creators as it does for me and that the generosity and lack of paywalls and nagging hindrances doesn’t prevent people from parting with their cash. deserve profit as well as acclaim, and Card Hunter is perfectly suited to expansions. I’d be happy if it kept growing for years.
By creating a game that mimics the tactility of a tabletop experience, Blue Manchu also present the rules of ever encounter and skill up-front, though without drowning the player in numbers and stats. Even the interface is commendable, quietly displaying the relevant equipment for each character class and inventory slot as the contents of treasure chests, inventories and shops are explored. It’s as good a turn-based skirmish game as I can remember any studio releasing in a good while, exquisitely presented and mechanically solid.
Go and play Card Hunter now! I’ll share thoughts on multiplayer soon.