Draconian CCG

[PhoneLobster]

OK, so Draconian wars, its a $3 "CCG" computer game on Desura, reasonable production values.

It is... EVERYTHING wrong with CCGs.

I can barely even begin... I mean... the rules are just ridiculously arcane. I can't entirely figure out how the fuck combat is even supposed to work.

No really. The combat system has three phases, fine, sometimes they don't all go off. The numbers on the cards aren't labelled but I figured out which is which, I've figured out the first phase... but then you have your force comparison and your damage from that... and it makes no fucking sense.

At ONE point I had it figured when I determined that units damaged in earlier phases still counter to force AND then the damage from that still was mitigated by already damaged units. Maybe. Sort of. Only that didn't seem to be right either... AAAAH. I'd go and try and read the rules document again, but playing the game and running through the combat tutorial (more than twice) apparently isn't enough.

The rest of the game is pretty arcane to. The resourcing mechanic is... boy, ridiculously complex. You have a draw of X cards each turn, but it goes face down as resources. Those are spent to buy cards from your visible hand. BUT then you can discard one card from your hand to increase your future draw rate. BUT then you can only draw into your hand from the pool of resources NOT spent on playing stuff. BUT then if anything stays in your resource pool it holds over as resources until next turn...

I mean the resource mechanic might almost be pretty cool, if anything else was cool but it's just more crappy icing on a crappy cake as it is.

Movement and occupying "areas" in the sky and on the ground is costly, like really costly, like seriously punishes you for trying to move around and be dynamic or aggressive in any way other than a deployment rush.

Game play for victory is INCREDIBLY tedious thanks to the incomprehensible combat, the high costs of aggressive or dynamic moves, and the whole "extract" whittling away mechanic being... so whittly.

The special abilities on the cards are VERY commonly VERY crappy. A LOT of minor manipulation of the resource mechanics, "move 1 card from hand to top of deck" "Move 1 card from hand to expended" "move 1 card from discarded to expended" "move one card from play to expended" ... I mean clearly the intent is some sort of elaborate combo deck but fuck it's tedious and piecemeal crap, and on top of that you have to, slowly, collect the cards at random in tedious matches against AI's that use the same 2 decks and same first move/first draw EVERY game.

Anyway. As far as I'm concerned for $3 it's an excellent example of almost every damn thing you shouldn't do with a CCG.