AGE OF RIVALS
I am a big fan of board and card games so when ever a digital representation of them comes out my interest is piqued. Picking up Age of Rivals last year seemed like a no brainer as it had all the hallmarks of what like in digital card games. Of course it sat for the better part of 6 months in my library untouched, till now.
Age of Rivals is card based civilization game. You are attempting to score the most points against a single rival with the cards you play over the course of a number of rounds. There is card drafting and some random selection, cumulative bonuses, resources and warfare. In short it's 7 Wonders. Okay that is being a bit cheap. Age of Rivals does a lot of things 7 Wonders doesn't but the inspiration is a little more than obvious.
Each game of Age of Rivals takes about 10-15 minutes and is broken down into a number of rounds. You start by buying a card from a random selection of 4 in your hand, with your opponent (this is a 2 player game only, vs AI or human) doing the same. Then you swap hands and buy 1 from the remaining. As the game goes on you do this a number of times till you have 8 cards. A round of conquering occurs where both sides have an opportunity to score points based off their respective warfare cards. Then actual war between the players happens with each side having to deal out damage to their cards depending on opponents warfare cards. A single destroyed card on each side is ruined for the remainder of the game (becomes a dud card). Then points from various other cards are added to your total points for the game and income for next round is earned.
It all flows quite smoothly. Making choices between war and income or points and resources. Dynamically altering the route your civilization of cards takes depending on what is available and what your opponent is doing. The back and forth of game state works well.
Age of Rivals does a good job of exploiting behind the scenes mechanics and keeping track of numbers in a way that a PC game can that would be hard or impossible in a physical game. I doesn't go overboard though which is also nice. After the well built tutorial and a game or two the mechanics are clear and confusion free.
There is an interesting progression system in the game that seems to be borrowed from the free-to-play world where achieving certain goals in games complete quests that earn you card packs. These open up new characters and civilizations to play and adds new card selections to those as well. This is all earned with in game currency, no real money trap here, just a simple quest system. This is nice and even though this is port of a mobile game it avoids any of the typical trappings. The only disappointment is that on PC its $10 vs $4 on mobile for the same game. This isn't the PC markets fault though, rather that of mobile game price expectations. And to be fair I did pick it up for 1/2 price on a sale.
As a quick card game that works as a time filler, Age of Rivals will fill in nicely when I am not up to playing Hearthstone (my card game drug of choice) but an still jonesing for some card play. I haven't yet played against human player, but the AI has a couple of difficulty settings and been a good competitor for my current level of skill at the game.
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