When it comes to duelling card games, we’re spoiled for choice. From the 27,000+ card behemoth of Magic: The Gathering to small, all-in-one games like Mindbug. There are a ton of different ways to fight the person opposite you, and it’s not going away anytime soon, as the Disney Lorcana juggernaut proves. Chroma Arcana joins the throng, aiming to separate you from the cash in your wallet. If you’re a designer bringing a new duelling card game to the market, there’s a very important question that I, as Joe Public, have for you.

“Why should I choose your game?”

To answer that question you need to give me some clear, concise reasons that make your game stand out from the crowd. So, why should I buy Chroma Arcana?

Why not both?

The biggest difference between the TCGs (Trading Card Games) like Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh and the all-in-ones like Mindbug is the variety of types, styles, or schools involved. Mindbug lets you slap cards pretty much straight into the battle, while those like Pokemon TCG see you adding cards to a staging area, trying to charge cards up, and balancing the cards in your deck which can fight for you against those that help charge their abilities.

Chroma Arcana brings that same feel of having different schools of magic, or Pokemon types. Each card belongs to a different colour deck. They might not be named as such, but the same feel persists. It might be the ‘red’ deck instead of ‘fire’, but it’s the same idea. Firey things live in the red deck, lifegiving stuff is in the green deck – you get the idea. The concept is great because it lets you build your own custom decks to fight with, but with each of you building from the same decks. There’s no advantage to be gained by buying a ton of booster packs and getting cards that the other person might not have.

At the same time, with the way the different colours’ abilities mesh, it feels like you’ve got an almost open-ended pallette of paints to mix to come up with something special. While I’m on the paint metaphor, and thinking about a mixture of colours, it’s worth noting that approximately 30% of the characters in the game are non-white, and the same proportion are LGBT+. Kudos for being aware enough to even think about doing this, let alone weaving it into the game. Representation matters.

It’s a bit like giving a kid a colouring book but just a few basic coloured pencils to work with. Just because you have some limitations imposed on you doesn’t mean you can’t still create something beautiful, and something more interesting than just having a single grey pencil. That’s the feeling I get from Chroma Arcana.

The small print

Chroma Arcana falls foul of my biggest pet peeve in any of these card duelling games, and that’s the printing on the cards. I’m not a moron, I get it. If you want to put words on cards, but leave room for important symbols and some very pretty artwork (the art in this game is gorgeous), the text has to be small. I just find it frustrating when I can’t read or discern everything I need to know about a card when it’s on the table. My eyesight’s pretty good, but I still have to pick them up to read it.

Those of you familiar with card games are probably rolling your eyes at this point, and I can understand that. It’s not like it’s as small as Pokemon TCG text! Once you’re past those first few learning games, the text becomes mostly irrelevant. As long as you can see the cost to activate something and the icons that tell you whether it’s a ward, a minion, etc., then you’ve got all the information you need. Those learning games are crucial though, as that’s the only time you’ve got to grab someone by the dopamine receptors and go “Look at the thing I made. Play it. It’s fun!”.

The iconography throughout is great, and I like the way the keywords for a card are in a black boxout in the middle of it. It does a great job of drawing your eyes where they need to be. Once you’ve played a few times, you’ll be able to rattle through your games with relative ease, and they move fast, except for when your opponent has a potion card to interrupt your turn. Grrr! Annoying, but a cool feature in these games. Nothing better than pushing a stick into the wheels of your rival’s bike and watching his plans flip over the handlebar.

Final thoughts

I was a little wary of Chroma Arcana before it arrived. I’ve played so many duelling card games now, that I already know what to expect for at least part of how the game will play out. Using colours for the decks is cool, if not unique. Achroma (review here) does something similar. Fun fact: when I was approached to cover this game, I thought it was Achroma at first. Don’t make the same mistake. They’re very different games, and I prefer Chroma Arcana.

Every game I’ve played of Chroma Arcana has felt tight and competitive. Even when I’ve had a go at constructing my own deck – something I’m terrible at – I found that I was able to make something that worked together without too much trouble, which I really appreciated.

The promo copy I was sent was restricted to a smaller number of colours and characters (Egos, in the game’s parlance) than you’ll get in the finished product, and there were a few rough edges that I’m sure will be planed smooth by the time it ends up in your sweaty little mitts. Some of the cards had different names from what was listed in the rulebook, which made deck construction tricky, and the instructions for building your decks for the first game don’t tell you how many cards you should end up with. You’re told to add cards to the deck, but not how many of each. The only reference to how many cards go in a deck (it’s 26, if you’re wondering) is in a boxout on page 15, five pages after it tells you what cards to use. Like I say though, bear in mind this is still a preview of a prototype, and these are the kinds of things that are subject to change.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you my favourite thing about the game! Every time you shuffle your discard pile to recycle it into your draw pile, you lose 1 HP. Sounds small, but I love it. It keeps the pace up, and it means discarding a handful of cards to charge spells comes at a long-term cost. The snappy pace, the beautiful cards, and the (apparent) balance in the cards meant that I really enjoyed my time with Chroma Arcana. It’s clearly a labour of love for the designer, Mo, and it really shows. If duelling card games are your bag, keep your eyes on the Kickstarter project page for when this launches on 27th February 2024.

Preview copy kindly provided by Roc Nest Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Chroma Arcana (2024)

Design: Mo Shawwa
Publisher Roc Nest Games
Art: Ver Fadul, Nadine Jakubowski, Sandra Singh
Players: 2 (1-6 with expansion)
Playing time: 20-60 mins

The post Chroma Arcana Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

No, that sentence wasn’t the result of a fever dream or ChatGPT going off the rails. The main mechanism in Micro Bots will feel right at home to players of Gloomhaven.

Tinning your iron

A pun for the solderers there. The first thing that might surprise you in a game with such ambition is that it comes in a mint tin. I mean, it shouldn’t surprise you, it is called Micro Bots after all. But even so, it’s a tiny package. The game is made up of cards which represent the various weapons and upgrades available, the life and energy tracks, and the bots themselves.

Gameplay comprises each player playing a card from their hand face-down. The cards are revealed and played in order of initiative, which is a value printed on each card. There’s a clever mechanism here where each card is either a Weapon or Support type, and gets added to a row on either side of your bot’s card. Some of the actions’ values depend on how many cards are in each row, so there’s a nice tactical nuance in deciding what to play, and when. Support tokens bolster attack and defence values, and are played in secret.

If the Gloomhaven link wasn’t already strong enough, there’s the decision you have to make of when to play your recharge card. When you recharge you can retrieve all of your played power tokens and cards, which is great because you have them to use again, but suffers from the yin-yang balance of having weaker actions again. It’s a clever system which is more like a homage to the all-powerful dungeon-crawler, rather than a blatant rip-off.

Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Roboto

It’s true that a lot of tabletop games require a good imagination to really immerse yourself in what’s happening in front of you. Micro Bots: Duel really stretches this idea to its maximum. The cool thing about robots battling is watching metallic creations using all manner of weapons to send sparks flying, circuitry and shrapnel raining down like confetti at a robot wedding. Stationary cards and a few small cubes tracking values doesn’t quite convey the same thing, so a lot of what’s happening has to happen in your mind.

The same is true of the range track. It’s a great idea. You can push and pull the cube up and down the track to represent the distance between the robots, which in turn changes the defence value. If the bots are far apart, the defender starts with three defence points, whereas two bots close enough to kiss leave you with a single point. That distance isn’t represented anywhere other than the cube on the card, which doesn’t help break that disconnect between what’s happening on the table and what’s happening in your imagination.

This is the inherent problem (if that’s what you want to call it) with mint tin games. The more you condense what your game is, the more sacrifices you have to make with your design choices. As you read those previous paragraphs, you might be feeling slightly deflated about the game, which is why I want to temper the negative with the positive. Yes, there’s a lot of imagination required, but at the same time, we’re talking about a complete, expandable game which you can fit into pretty much any pocket in existence.

Final thoughts

I’ve had a bit of a grumble about the thematic restrictions because for some people it could be a deal-breaker. It’s really important to set expectations in a game of this type. You might not have cool robot minis or a wartorn landscape to battle on, but look at what you do have. The small footprint of the game means you can play it anywhere. It’s the perfect game to play on a train or plane journey, for example. While cost doesn’t usually factor into my review work here, I think it’s justifiable in the case of Micro Bots, because we’re talking about a game that costs £10! Ten Pounds… I’ve been to bars where that would barely buy a pint, it’s crazy cheap.

The presentation and iconography put games with much bigger budgets to shame, and there’s a very short learning period needed. You could play a few rounds, reset, and know that both players know enough about the game to compete on a near-even playing field. That’s a rare feat. I might not have played hundreds of battles, but I’ve played with every combination of the four included bots, and the balance is great. The Power Up expansion adds some nice tweaks to the ruleset by adding power-up cubes to the range track which you can use to power your bot up further, and clever Wildfire cards. If you’re comfortable with the base game, I’d suggest adding in Power Up as soon as possible, I really like the additions.

Micro Bots: Duel is an outrageously cute package. I’ve played other mint tin games, and few of them manage to pack as my punch as this game. The cardplay is sophisticated and could be lifted straight out of the game and dropped into a mini-heavy skirmish game costing £100+ with no changes. It’s a really impressive piece of game design. If you don’t mind playing the battles out in your head, for the sake of £10 I think Micro Bots is a great choice. Definitely grab the Power Up expansion at the same time, which will set you back a further £8. The two new bots on their own keep things fresh, but the added mechanisms feel like the way the game is meant to be played.

The Kickstarter campaign launches on 1st February 2023 – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/prometheus-gamelabs/micro-bots-duel-and-power-up

Preview copy kindly provided by Prometheus Game Labs. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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Micro Bots: Duel (2023)

Designer: Simon Beal
Publisher: Prometheus Game Labs
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 2
Playing time: 30 mins

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