Areteion

A Blend of Sorcery, Battletech, and Dune: Imperium. As the other reviewer pointed out the game is clearly a well-presented labor of love. The core gameplay is you play lands and units, exactly like in sorcery, to gain resources to play more and until inevitably you clash with your opponent in an explosion of VP scored. However, UNLIKE sorcery where the game ends when a threshold of points are scored, here you have to play rounds and add up scores after. This made some fast scoring strategy like I assume the Hermes road build quite challenging as even a puny foot soldier can blow up your road and cause massive damage. I find the game more similar to battletech the card game, where you scramble to put up a lance of light mechs and start trying to blow up opponent's resources. Only when you see an assault mech on the horizon in this case a greek monster you are incentived to commit to a fight. As your heroes are very vulnerable and when they die their hard-earned VP die with them. Just like a road or a farm. Where the game adds a twist is the faction element similar to DI. Each game there are 4 gods you need to court to gain a random blessing/curse at specific rounds, which can be devastating. This is by far the most "feel-bad" part of the game and can cause a lot of salt to any new player. EDIT: The dev reached out and taught me once enough VP are scored, player can win the game at any time where usually a resign buttons is at. This helps a lot actually.

we need chinese please!

TL;DR: This really is a labor of love that combines 4x w/ ccg, so if you like both of those genres, you should check it out by downloading the demo. If you played Duelyst or similar games to that, you should also check this out. Note that it is a one-dev project, so expect it to be a bit rough. The characters / decks are genuinely unique and they interact w/ different components of the game, which I think makes them pretty interesting. --- Short summary of the game: This is a game made of 15-minute fights where you try to accumulate victory points. The way do so is with your deck, which are composed of buildings, units, and spells (Invocations), which you can play onto a grid (the grid makes is meaningfully different than many other CCGs). Your deck belongs to one-or-two gods and each god houses a couple archetypes, so building a deck within a God is pretty easy. (E.g. Ares is all about summoning a bunch of warriors, so you just summon a bunch of warriors and go kill things to get points.) There are three modes: Solo, Versus and Heroes Journey. Solo is what I described above where your opponents are just barbarians (think of playing a game of Civ against barbarians), Versus is the same thing as above except against one other Civ, and Heroes Journey amalgamates both into a roguelike: one 7-fight run where you get to add-delete cards to your initially drafted deck. Similar games I can think of are: Duelyst (I think this most similar) - Oaken - Rogue Hex (Rogue Hex games take much much longer) - other tactical RPG games where you meaningfully interact w/ the grid. (You can add every famous ccg/roguelike as like second order names to compare mechanics to, like Heroes Journey draft is like Arena from Hearthstone, and there is mulliganing like Magic) --- The good: - The variety of the gods; there is just so many archetypes, and they are fairly interesting. Just the initial 4 gods have some variety in terms of their main archetype: Ares summons Warriors, Athena focuses on Heroes, Demeter summons Farmland (buildings that generate mana depending on some units next to them and can sink that mana for other useful stuff), Hermes summons Herms (structures where if you play exactly 2 structures of the same type next to them, they gain victory points each round) (Being able to mix-and match 2 gods makes the deckbuilding a fun challenge; for instance, among these two, Ares and Athena go reasonably well together since a bunch of the Heroes are also Warriors.) (I cannot emphasize this first bullet point enough; this is the main reason why I kept playing: because a) I wanted to see what the new mechanics would be and b) how compatible the gods would be with each other) - Similar to the above: the variety of mechanics is a huge plus: you can hunt barbarians, kill wildlife and do encounters (or not, up to you). - The artwork, while AI, is really pretty. It truly makes it a joy to look at and listen to. - You can tell it is a labor of love; there is random quizzes on Greek mythology while you are doing a roguelike mode which is a choice... But yeah you can tell that each god and archetype was thought about and they really tried to combine the gods flavor with the powers flavors. - The dev seems responsive so far. (There was a game-breaking bug around release for macs, and he fixed it promptly) - The technical depth you can think of is interesting; since you cannot move your buildings, building placement is a markedly stressful task (in a good way!). (This applies to only the relevant gods; e.g. Ares cares less, though still some because of Sparring Grounds). I think you should view this as very similar to Duelyst, which I think has had a good amount of following around the sophistication that comes from gridding things. The mid - bad: - For solo mode, there is that much replayability. It kind of depends of how much you are willing to try to optimize your decks. (The roguelike mode was presumably designed to combat this) - Standard ccg complaint: There is probably a bit too much randomness. The god favor system is interesting, but the gods can mess you over really badly, and even if your favor w/ them is maxed out, they can still dish out annoying levels of damage (and how you curry favor with them is dependent on the luck of the draw) There is a preview that definitely helps a lot ("if there is a 50% chance all my units will damage their surroundings next turn, let me separate them out as much as I can" is cool to plan around; "hit a random unit for 7" is harder to plan around.) Also the powers are not even in terms of their impact at all and the opponent does not necessarily suffer the same ones you do. (I lose all my buildings to an earthquake; they get a dumb unit that blocks them for a few turns) Even initial building placement I get to to is kind of random, and I am hoping to not hit a bunch of water. - The roguelike mode is rough; more so on the Odyssey mode (which is described as the hardest, where the main hardness stems from "am I going to get something that will mesh well with other things I have chosen" and the answer is probably "no" with so many gods :D. It is like you are playing Monster Train and the game offers you cards from ALL archetypes not just yours). I did not do the base one as it sounded a bit boring (that is likely much less random, but then I would just rather make my own deck, as the roguelike experience is then just "here is a worse version of the deck you can have, have fun") I think adding some events / some fun variety would be nice, though I think a bunch of the fun of roguelikes (StS, Monster Train) come from the enemy variety and how you have to adapt your deck to them, which is kind of hard to do here (as each archetype kind of has a specific plan). - The power levels of different gods are not well calibrated and a god that is good at fighting is not necessarily good at base building (This somewhat naturally comes w/ the variety) and their victory point acquisition can be markedly different (you can check the leaderboards to see the overall variety). ---------- Disclaimers: - I only played the Solo and the Heroes Journey (roguelike) modes; did not play the Versus mode separately (albeit I assume it is similar to the versus fights in the Heroes Journey; I was too interested in building my own stuff in the Solo mode). - I am writing this review around like 3 days after the game is out, and I dont necessarily expect to update this review. - I very rarely write reviews

If you love greek myth and card games this is the perfect fit hard but not impossible. The depth of the game is that its not just about combat though combat is still the main feature devolpment is vital to winning.

It's good! Learning wish there was a tutorial but will still play and get it. I enjoy ir.

Good game with a good variety of decks and deck building with very different playstyles. Plays like a 4x, RTS, or Strategy game with the cards taking on the structures, units, and heroes.

I played some good games and I globally like that title. Good ideas, good music and cards are really beautiful. But it finishes to be so frustrating to feel powerless against all the things the game sends you (infinite enemies, too strong gods curses, elite monsters you just can't defeat with Heroes of your deck). A poor start can also ruins everything. Apart from that there is a lot of abilities that does not trigger correctly. The developer answers quickly and do his best for sure. For now, the game just needs some polishing and balancing. I will return to it after some time to see how it evolves.

I found Areteion almost by chance of destiny, just saw it and said "why not? it look like my kind of game". Oh man this game is a little gem, At first glance the AI art was like a red flag but after knowing this is a one person passion project I totally understand and I must admit there is art in the game that look totally awesome. Gameplay wise this game is fresh, fun and addictive, the board make each game different I have been playin solo and enjoying every moment of it, each god has one or two personal mechanics you can build around they all feel so true to their identity in mythology and that's a place where the love of the creator of the game shine above all Greek Mythology at its finest. The progression is perfect for me the idea of not getting all the cards at once makes you want to keep playing too get more and make more decks, perfect in my opinion since I have been only playing singleplayer. Buy this: If you like card games with a lot of options if you are into greek mythology if you want to support a single person love project

OK, wow. This has the makings of a great game, HOWEVER, it's like if slay the spire released but had terrible quality of life. The game is dynamic, the field of battle can change drastically from turn to turn, (you have 12), so every turn the Gods could potentially punish you, forcing you to alter your strategy, or granting you a boon highlighting an alternate strategy. The Gods are fickle, as they say, and they change from round to round. Let's address the AI. It has it, I don't mind it. That said, I do find the voice information distracting and unnecessary. Again, this has the makings of a great game, however, basic information is missing from the UI. Characters have dynamic health. Or maybe they don't? I honestly don't know. There are cards that change and/or are dependent on the type of terrain that a card is on, but there is no way to know what it is. There are many rule clarifications that need to be addressed in game. But I digress. From what I understand, it's one dev. What's here at this price is amazing. They just need to let us know what the hell is going on in game so that we can make better decisions.