Card City Nights

I like card games. I’m just not sure this is it. Card City Nights is a card-laying game where you strategically place cards on a board to form combos. Each card has a set of arrows, and if two cards have arrows pointing at each other, they’re part of the same combo. Match three cards*, and you get an effect. These effects range from damaging your enemy, disabling one of their cards, healing one of your disabled cards, or giving you extra health. The game is quite simple and easy to understand, but there’s enough depth to have different deck playstyles. The loop is simple: you battle for packs, buy non-rare cards at the shop, and build your deck, all while progressing through the story. The characters and cards are all (?), as we’ve come to expect, from the Ludosity roster. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/241320/Ittle_Dew/]Ittle Dew[/url], [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/407900/Princess_Remedy_in_a_World_of_Hurt/]Princess Remedy[/url], and a few familiar faces from [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/725480/Slap_City/]Slap City[/url]—I admit I’m not super familiar with their other stuff—are all here. Everything is written in this quirky style that I didn’t care for, though it might appeal to hardcore Ludosity fans. Single-player TCGs need to avoid the obvious pitfalls to be fresh and fun the whole way through: have balanced cards, make many viable deck archetypes, and throw some twists into the mix. Otherwise, you make a deck 2 hours in and stop interacting with the deck building aspect. If your deck is strong enough, you even stop thinking about the card game itself. And then all you have left is going from map to map and accepting the story battles. Card City Nights has some cool cards with nice effects. Rotating, disabling, and removing your opponent’s cards, effectively messing up their arrow configurations, is very satisfying. Cards being balanced around having more arrows (and thus being easier to combo) versus stronger effects is quite interesting… and aggro strategies are so incredibly dominant, nothing else matters. As soon as you realize you only need to stack attack symbols, and SOMETIMES place a healing card, to win everything, the game becomes trivial**. And so the game falls apart a few hours in, and then it’s over. I understand one of the updates added more disruption-type cards to counter this very strategy—showing that the devs understand this is a problem—but the game itself doesn’t put them to good enough use. No rock-paper-scissors here—only rock. * Actually, match three symbols, but it doesn’t really matter. ** with one exception: one of the final encounters plays an incredible anti-aggro deck with a few very annoying cards that I would have loved to see a lot more of.

I was hoping that this game would scratch that single player TCG itch, but unfortunately it doesn't. There are 4 types of cards attack, def, neutral, and heal. Each card has little arrows which have to connect to other arrows so that they connect in a row of 3 or more, heal cards can do 2 or more, which wouldn't be so bad if the slog to get cards wasn't so annoying. The usual way to farm for packs is to beat opponents for packs but this is both annoying and boring. As at least for me in the start there are not enough cards to ensure a quick knock out. Many of the opponents decks have too much defense which forces you to either disable their field or to deck them out. Neither of which are fun, since the game plays so slowly. The initial cards are also boring most don't have any effect at all, which makes them deadweight until you get some on placement cards. Overall it feels more like a board game like catan rather than a TCG. I think that is my main gripe, their "breaking away from the fantasy TCG mold" only landed them into the wrong genre.

Bought it for 44 rubles in Feb 2014. Took me 11 years 6 months 2 weeks 4 days 23 hours 56 minutes to make myself beat it, as TCG is not really my genre, but this game is pretty nice

[h2]While the art style was strange to me, the gameplay was oddly familiar[/h2] These days I tend to avoid card battlers. Most of them feel bland or introduce some bizarre mechanic that turns the game into more of a chore than something fun to play. Card City Nights surprised me. The developer clearly has experience with trading card games because the gameplay feels surprisingly similar to Magic: The Gathering. It has enough strategy to keep things interesting without overcomplicating everything. I wasn't a fan of the art style at first. In fact, it almost put me off playing altogether. Thankfully, the gameplay won me over, and the fact that I was hopelessly addicted to 100%-ing games back then probably helped too. All in all, it's a solid little indie and one that I think is better than the majority of card battlers coming out today. [h2]7/10[/h2] [h3][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45905648-Gork%2527s-Game-Grind/]Check out my curated list of games[/url][/h3]

Easy to learn fun little game.

8/10

No pressure. Take your time, wander the city building up decks by defeating opponents for booster packs. You can play in a window if you want to multitask. With the right deck build and a little luck you'll own the city.

A short but very charming card game. My first venture into the Ludosity universe, so I didn't recognize any of the characters and stuff, but quickly got pulled in. The story provides a miniature tcg experience in buying packs, expanding your collection, aquiring rare cards and building a deck. Nice music as well. I played this game years ago through GOG and once again on steam. It's just that cute.

Hell yeah

Competent single player card game where you grow your collection over the course of the game. The game itself manages not to wear itself out over its playtime.