I’ve recently been into this neat little Collectable card game (digital) that I play on my mobile, called Combat Cards. Looking at some of the history, I believe this was a physical card game that someone adapted to a mobile cards game. It’s a light enough strategy where the battle is wrapped up fairly quickly, but has some reasonable depth, which is probably why the game gets me back.
Lowdown
The game is deceptively simple. – You select one leader – called Warlords, and fill the rank with up to 8 body-guards. You and your opponent each take turns with the winner being the one who takes out the opponent’s warlord.
Simple, isn’t it?
Going deeper – the more serious game play
Beneath the surface is a lot of room to play with, so to speak, with decking strategies and little curve balls that the game throws at you to make it just that much more interesting.
Let’s start with the Warlords
Each Warlord has a leader skill. This leader skill is applied throughout the game and to all cards – Warlords and Bodyguards. As such, for the deck building stage, it becomes important to think and choose a good leader skill and Body guard combination, to take maximum advantage. – In future posts, I’m planning on my builds and discuss what other people may have thought in their way of building their deck.
Bodyguards
As mentioned earlier, you can select up to 8 bodyguards. You are limited by the total points cost. You can build a deck full of lower costing bodyguards or select a small hand-full of elite expensive budyguards to fill the rank.
Each Warlord and Bodyguard has the rarity from Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary. Each rarity of Common and Rare can have one skill, while Epic and Legendary can have up to two skills as the card levels up. The game somewhat gets balanced out by the more common cards being easier to get (therefore easier to level up) and the rarer cards being harder to get (and therefore harder to level up). – We will discuss these skills in a different post.
Combat
Combat process is fairly simple, with the final goal is to defeat (make the Wounds) of the Warlord of the opponent to zero. On the other hand, you lose if your Warlord is defeated. This is regardless of how many bodyguards are left on the stage.
- At the beginning of the game, the player with the deck with the highest initiative goes first.
- The player who goes first will place one bodyguard card on one of the three spaces on the field
- The second player will place one card on the playing field.
- This process is repeated until both players has three cards on the field
- The first player will attack, while the second player’s cards will counter-attack.
- If any cards were lost, it will be filled until 3 cards are on the field and the second player will attack.
- This process is repeated until one player loses a warlord.
Deep diving into combat.
For each attack round, the attacking player can choose one of the three attack types – Ranged, Psych and Melee. Each of the attackers will attack (if applicable) from left to right to the card directly opposite. If any cards of the opposing side survives, it will counter-attack with the same attack type that the attacker chose.
When re-filling the downed rank, you can move the surviving cards left or right, so long as there is space left. This can be used to move high damaging card to the appropriate position or to move a card you don’t want to die to another slot.
The cards you have may not have a value in the attack type you want. This is called “Prepare” and has one of two effects. If it is Green, it boosts the next attack of the given attack type (e.g., Green axe means it gives an attack boost to melee in the next melee attack) and if it is Red, it decreases the opponent’s next attack of that type.
Next : In our next post lets discuss skills