Wyldernook

Wyldernook is a free-to-play digital collectible card game developed and published by Studio Kejami that blends tactical card battles with a whimsical fantasy setting inspired by folklore and fairy tales. Instead of relying solely on familiar mechanics found in many online card games, it introduces several unique systems that place greater emphasis on planning, prediction, and creative deck construction. The game also benefits from the experience of Ian Underwood, the original designer of Infinity Wars: Animated Trading Card Game, whose influence can be seen in the title's strategic focus and willingness to experiment with genre conventions. Combined with its illustrated storybook presentation and colorful cast of magical creatures, Wyldernook offers an inviting world that feels both charming and distinctive. The setting is one of the game's greatest strengths. Players are transported to a mystical land populated by witches, enchanted forests, mischievous faeries, living mushrooms, animal clans, and ancient treefolk, all woven together through a narrative presented as a beautifully illustrated storybook. Rather than existing as simple background decoration, the lore gives each faction and champion a stronger sense of identity, making battles feel like meaningful conflicts within an evolving fantasy world. The handcrafted art style reinforces this atmosphere, creating an experience that is approachable while still offering enough personality to stand apart from many darker or more traditional fantasy card games. Combat introduces mechanics designed to reward foresight instead of reaction. Every deck is built around a champion that always starts in the player's hand, allowing strategies to revolve around a dependable centerpiece rather than hoping to draw a key card at the right moment. Matches also feature simultaneous turns, meaning both players secretly plan their actions before everything resolves at once. This system creates constant mind games where anticipating an opponent's intentions becomes just as important as executing your own strategy. It removes long waiting periods between turns and keeps multiplayer battles moving at a brisk pace, even when multiple participants are involved. Wyldernook also offers a roguelike single-player campaign that expands the experience beyond competitive play. Players pursue the mysterious arch-witch Serincenthe while strengthening their deck with new cards, relics, and upgrades earned throughout each adventure. Along the journey, role-playing decisions allow players to shape their path by choosing between noble and selfish actions, adding replay value to every run. Randomized encounters and evolving deck-building opportunities ensure that each campaign feels different, making the solo mode more than just a tutorial for multiplayer and instead a rewarding experience in its own right. The progression system is refreshingly consumer-friendly for a free-to-play card game. Every card can be crafted directly through the collection interface using earned or premium currency, allowing players to target specific cards instead of relying entirely on random booster packs. This significantly reduces frustration and gives players greater control over building competitive decks. An additional highlight is the ability to trade cards with other players, making collecting feel more interactive. Individual cards even develop their own history by tracking statistics such as victories, defeats, and usage, while collectible stickers provide cosmetic customization that adds personality to each player's collection. Perhaps the most ambitious feature is the built-in card editor. Players are given tools to create entirely new cards using the game's mechanics and share them with friends for custom matches. This opens the door to community-created formats, experimental mechanics, and endless opportunities for creativity beyond the official content. If supported consistently throughout development, this editor could become one of Wyldernook's defining features and help build a dedicated player community that continually produces fresh content. As an Early Access title, the game remains a work in progress. Studio Kejami has been transparent about its plans to replace temporary sketch artwork with fully finished illustrations while continuing to expand the campaign, increase the card pool, and improve the creation tools. Importantly, player collections are expected to remain intact throughout development, allowing early adopters to invest their time without worrying about future progress resets. The developers also encourage community feedback, suggesting a collaborative approach to refining balance and introducing new features. Another appealing aspect is the studio's commitment to handcrafted content. The developers openly state that the artwork and music are created by human artists and that the project avoids AI-generated art and blockchain or NFT integrations. This philosophy complements the game's handcrafted aesthetic and demonstrates a clear artistic vision that values creativity over trend-driven technology. Wyldernook successfully combines strategic gameplay, imaginative world-building, and player-friendly progression into an experience that feels fresh within the digital card game genre. Its simultaneous-turn combat encourages thoughtful decision-making, the roguelike campaign provides satisfying solo content, and the generous crafting and trading systems make collecting far less restrictive than in many competing titles. While its Early Access status means additional content and visual polish are still on the way, the current foundation is already ambitious and engaging. With continued development and active community support, Wyldernook has the potential to establish itself as one of the more innovative digital trading card games available on Steam. Rating: 7/10

Wyldernook is a new CCG with a very solid foundation and great potential, that does have a little roughness around the edges. I would recommend checking it out. This review is rather lengthy, so I'd like to mention up front that I have multiple thousands of hours playing CCGs both digitally and online, from household names like Magic the Gathering to titles much nicher (and rougher) than Wyldernook. I'm not an expert per-se, but definitely have a good feeling for what I enjoy and don't enjoy about a card game. --- Positives --- Simultaneous turns have some great advantages and cool play patterns. It can cut down on "wait time" when you sit while the opponent acts. It can create cool mind games where you try to anticipate where your opponent will move their game pieces, and try to move yours around the dodge location-dependent effects or line up good trades in combat. This detail really sets Wyldernook apart in the genre, since almost every other CCG uses a back-and-forth system. The faction purity system allows for deckbuilding flexibility while maintaining coherent archetypes and faction identity. Your deck can have up to 3 pips spread between factions, and certain cards require a minimum of 1-2-3 pips in their faction to include in your deck. Those 3 pip cards can create an incentive for a single faction deck, or you can dip into up to 3 factions for maximum versatility if all you need/want are those "splashable" cards from each faction. There's no automatic card draw per turn. Instead, you spend mana to draw cards, which each draw on the same turn costing more mana than the last. I love this system because of its flexibility. Early game you can sacrifice hand size to dump your starting hand out faster, and late game you can draw multiple cards while still playing out cheaper effects. The variability in card draw adds a nice counterweight to automatic mana growth, since some decks will still decline to "curve out", instead funneling the mana growth into draw power. Each deck can have 1 legendary creature card that is available to play from the start of the game, separate from your hand or shuffled deck. I like the consistency this "champion" card adds, and the different ways decks can use that guaranteed card. Do you put an aggressive, turn 1 play, or a late game finisher? Value engine? What about a pocket counter to your deck's weakest matchup? Lots of options. Aesthetically, the game looks very nice. It has a Feywild, Fairytail, Storybook theme to it, with knights and faeries and little vegetable goblins. The menus for matchmaking, collection, profile, etc. look like the pages of an old book. Some card effects come with nifty animations. --- Negatives --- There's definitely some issues I have with Wylerdnook, despite its many great aspects. The deckbuilding and card crafting UIs are...bad. Two examples. 1) When sorting piles of cards during deck creation, there's no way to move a card up or down in a stack. You can only remove it from the stack and then add it back to the bottom. So if I want a card to be at the top of a large stack, I have to completely empty that stack one card at a time and rebuild it. I also can't move entire stacks around left to right either. 2) when viewing the collection screen with both collected and non-collected cards, the game will display cards twice if I own 1 copy and could craft a 2nd copy. Animation speed and action lockout is also an issue for me. Where I mentioned in the "simultaneous turns" aspect that it cuts down on wait times, these two aspects add a bunch more back in. I don't mind animations, especially since Wyldernook's are generally good. But they're a bit long with the delays between them. More frustratingly, the game prevents you from pulling up any kind of sub-menu or additional information when the turns are resolving. I can't view my graveyard, or highlight a card, or even hit the settings cog to concede mid resolution. So during a lengthy or complicated turn, I can't pull any card up to read its text and understand what's actually happening on the board until *after* everything has resolved and the next turn has already begun. ---- TL;DR In conclusion, I like Wyldernook quite a lot. It's definitely the CCG I'm having the most fun with right now, even with its flaws. Notably, so much of what I love has to do with actual gameplay mechanics (mana, champions, factions), while much of my hangups are on the execution of actions (UI and animation). So the game is great, just a little annoying to interface with. I hope many more people try it out. Edit: a correction regarding the UI portion of the review.

This is actually a very refreshing game in the TCG genre. It's simple and after beating all of the decks as CPU you unlock a roguelike mode that lets you build your own deck to take into and modify as the run goes on, all for free, and the free to play pve roguelike mode gives you rewards depending how well you do. It plays kind of similar to Runeterra from Riot Games but is vastly different in deck creation as far as I'm aware of might have changed things since I've played Runeterra years ago. Yes like most TCG's you can say it's pay to win because you can buy card packs with real money. The game is free chill. There is 1 free currency in the game that I have seen so far and you can either buy packs, forge cards directly, or buy cosmetics with it. I personally would like the free currency rate per game go up but I play aggro so my opinion might be skewed. Try it out, you'll be surprised.

Great game so far! Cute, whimsical artwork and I love the storytelling behind it. I like playing Magic the Gathering in person, haven't played any online TCGs, but I can see myself playing this.

really enjoying the gameplay, love the way the UI looks. Devs did a great job, looking forward to more future updates as well.

Very solid start to a TCG. There are no other digital TCGs that I have played that have such a fantastic monetization (hope I am helping Kejami!) strategy where one can relatively easily play F2P, but if you wanna bling a deck out a bit, or rush some cards, you absolutely can, but every single card can be obtained within a reasonable amount of time as F22P. I am seriously hoping the time to complete sets remains about the same, so those who play very often or those who spend a little bit per expansion can obtain a playset/dust for what they want. The community is already incredible with many aiming to help guide the rest towards the meta, though it is still entirely the wild west, and with the restrictions (good thing) to deck building, there should be a ton of diversity regardless of meta, incredibly hyped to see this games future! 100% recommend joining the Discord!

Great community, love to play this after a hard day of work to wind down. Just so satisfying!

Suffers from the usual CCG curse, just worse, since there arent ranks: As a new player, you will face players with perfectly refined decks full of epics and legendaries. Its as boring, as it is frustrating.