Gemblades

It really is Ascension, which is a pretty good thing to be! As a solitaire style game it really works out well, great play pattern. It is a little awkward to just have a target score, and one could wish for modes with a little more life to them, but man! Solitaire Ascension which just works & provides a cool variety of cards to think about is a pretty elite product. If it's useful to anyone: Ascension is a deck building board game in which you start with a hand of generic cards which add 1 gold or 1 fight (or whatever it might be called.) There's a river of cards you can pick from which cost either gold, and join your deck and do stuff, or which cost fight and give you VP when defeated. That's how this works too. You have mulligans to turn the river over (since you're the only one picking from it) and your goal is to build a machine inside your deck which lets you churn a bunch of cards out of the river, generating VP along the way. I will note that it isn't super well optimized and despite being a little card shuffler runs my poor PC kind of hard which is unfortunate but still. 4/5 do recommend very highly. EDIT: Two notes which didn't appear on first run, neither are dealbreakers but both odd: 1. You can't turn off the tutorial! It just runs every time you play. This is not good, but it's also fine. 2. It's weirdly dark! Why is it dark? Even turning off film grain leaves the app strangely dark. Who knows.

An absolutely fantastic game with a dev that cares deeply about their community and feedback. The perfect pick up and play for any deckbuilder fan. A new player coming in should know though that the first 5 invasion levels are effectively a quite long tutorial. The design philosophy at this stage of the game revolves around competing in score attack on the leaderboards rather than being able to "lose" in the traditional sense. If you come in looking for a deck builder that itself will kill your run, you will likely find the game easy up until unlocking Gauntlet. But while the skill floor is incredibly low the skill ceiling is constantly being optimized and perfected. The music is also absolutely fire and the art is immaculate!

If you like boardgames like Ascension or Dominion, this is a must buy! Great game, nicely polished, with a very active developer. He is active on discord and quickly responds to bugs and suggestions.

An EXTREMELY smooth, solid take on Ascension/Dominion style deckbuilding. Rather than competing with other players directly, you instead have a certain number of turns to hit a "gem" (victory points) goal. As you draft cards from the center row using resources pulled from your deck, "boss" cards will show up that stay on the board even as other things are cycled out, and cause problems for as long as they're present. This creates genuine stakes even though the game is singleplayer. It's a genuinely elegant, intuitive bit of design that takes a format that can be really hard to play singleplayer and makes it work beautifully. It has quickly become my coffee-break game. EASY recommend.

Fun game but finished all 5 difficulties in less than an hour. Hopefully more gets added to up the difficulty as right now it seems almost impossible to lose.

With more content,some balance changes and reworks over time, this game has a huge potential to grow big

Quick fun Dominion style card drafting game with a very good core, catchy music, good art if you're good with anime, and definitely worth the value especially on sale, however I'm not sure about longevity. You draft allies/cards into your deck and fight enemies with those cards, the enemies earn rewards and don't actively hurt you, you only lose by not having killed boss enemies by the time limit. As it is now IMO its hard to lose in the game and the only thing to work towards is high score leaderboard. I never actively played a game for a leaderboard, but seeing other people's profile pictures made it cool to set a profile pic and get my dog's picture in the #1 slot if even for a bit haha The issue is I'm not sure where to go from here. I want to explore trying out some specific decks, but its almost all luck if you can get some of these fusion cards or the rat transformation etc. at all, let alone before a game ends. You can ban cards but it isn't enough to aim towards some of these merge/fusions etc. Would be cool to have mono-color modes too, wouldn't be balanced as is now, but if the mode was made to be harder to match then maybe? It seems this game is still actively being worked on/updated so thats great, I'm not sure what it's missing that sets it apart for replayability like Slay the Spire or Balatro, but its a very good game, definitely recommend if you like those two and/or Dominion.

the game is just a small gameplay loop there is nothing to really hook you the game doesnt offer enough even for the small price