What to Play: Star Realms

by the Opaque Senator, GGR Gaming Contributor

I have a pretty long history with video games. I have played all types of games and go all the way back to the Intellevision in my gaming history. With 2021 marking so many franchises having milestone anniversaries, I will certainly be doing a bit of a retrospective of impactful games some time soon. But something else I've also enjoyed playing have been card games. I really enjoy traditional games like blackjack, Texas Hold'em, and Gin among countless others. I also enjoy trading card games as well. Like many in my generation I started by collecting and trading Pokemon cards. Not long after, many of my high school friends, especially in the high school band, were playing Magic the Gathering on breaks and study halls. That was my card game of choice until college, when I had a new group of friends who were into YuGiOh. This took me on a ride I never expected. Through college I collected and played. My friends and I would attend local tournaments, and even attended regional tournaments and played competitively. After college I stopped playing just due to not having a place to play until about 4 years ago, when I found a few local card shops that reignited my passion. I have played somewhat competitively since then...until the pandemic hit. Almost a year ago to the day, I was set to attend a regional tournament mere minutes from my apartment that was canceled due to COVID. Boooooooo (but I get it).

“it’s fine…I’ll just play in my house, by myself…with a mask on…forever.”

This left a bit of a hole. New cards and sets kept coming out, but I no longer felt comfortable going to a card shop even once they reopened. I also haven't gotten real into the online simulators, though there are some perfectly fine ones out there for YuGiOh like Dueling Book. At some point I will do a bit more of a deep dive into the game, but that's a longer article for the post-COVID times. This lack of a card game really weighed on, until recently when a friend (one of the same ones who turned me on to YuGiOh) had started playing a game called Star Realms.

Star Realms is a deck-building card game. Like most of these games, there is a story line behind it, which can be found detailed here for anyone interested. The cliff-notes version is that there are 4 rival factions, 3 human, and 1 alien vying for power in a sort of space race. These factions are represented by the 4 colored cards; red for the Machine Cult, Yellow for the Star Empire, Blue for the Trade Federation (I hear the shivers of the Star Wars crowd reading those words from here), and Green for the alien Blob race. Each faction has its strengths and play style, though your decks can and will consist of multiple colored cards as you progress through a game. The Machine Cult faction specializes in “scrapping” cards from the deck; meaning removing cards in your deck from the game, thereby cycling quicker to your better cards. The Trade Federation is the only faction that allows you to gain authority (ie this game's version of “life points”). The Star Empire is probably the best faction for drawing through your deck quicker, and the Blob's are probably the biggest damage dealers. Now, all the factions have damage, money gaining, and drawing abilities, but these are just what the colored factions are best known for.

The object of the game is to take an opponents authority down to 0. Each player starts at 50 authority. Both players also begin the game with identical 10 card decks, complete with 8 Scout cards and 2 Viper cards. In addition to authority, “Combat” icons are how damage to authority is done, and “Trade” is this game's version of mana or energy. Scout cards are worth 1 Trade, Viper's are worth 1 point of Combat. Both players “buy” cards to upgrade their deck using trade from their decks, to buy from the general Trade Deck. The top 5 cards of the Trade Deck are laid out, and those are the communal cards both players can trade for. When you trade for a card, it is added to your discard pile. As you use your cards in your deck, they also go to your discard pile. Once your deck is used up, you shuffle the discard pile together and this is your new deck.

This game is actually pretty simple after you play a round. It is also not a long game, the longest is typically no more than 15 minutes. There are also a number of expansion sets for the game, editing and changing the game and the strategies you might pursue. It's also a game available on the client Steam, base game for $5. This is actually a decent way to play the game, though there's not a huge community on there. The AI players though give it a good go for a game, and the challenge missions in the story mode are also very challenging.

For a crowd-funded card game, this was done pretty well. You could do far worse for $5 online or $15 for the full main deck if you buy the physical cards. There's good strategy, of course some luck involved as all card games have, and helps beginners have a shot when they start off too. Highly recommend for a small time sink at a low cost!

In this truly opaque world, I hope that makes things a bit more clear…