There are a handful of console games I really loved. But the majority of the games I played were always on the PC, and thus I was always annoyed by the ongoing "PC gaming is dying" discussion and the idea that at some point in time all gaming would happen on consoles. Well, it turned out differently. These days we have more game platforms than ever, there is some quite good gaming to be had on tablets and smart phones of different operating systems. And the new generation of consoles is looking as sickly as never before.

First through the gate of the eighth generation of consoles was the Wii U, and by all accounts it is not a success. It is selling significantly less well than the previous Wii, and in some markets the old Wii still outsold its successor Wii U *today*. EA came out saying the Wii U was "crap", said they wouldn't make Wii U games, then paddles back and said they'd make a few. So overall reception was mixed at best.

Then came the announcement of the PS4, which failed to convince people that this would be a must-buy. And now we got the announcement of the XBox One, which pretty much evokes the same echo. So up to now the next generation of consoles doesn't look very promising. This might very well turn out to be the least successful "generation" of consoles since a long time.

I believe that there are many reasons for that. One is that consoles have lost an advantage they had on price. It used to be that a PC that cost as much as a console was pretty much useless for gaming. But in the last years system requirements have gone up slower than system performance of the average PC, and today most games run perfectly well on a cheap PC. Another reason is that both PCs and mobile platforms have better multi-purpose controls. If I can, I browse the internet on my PC. If that isn't available, I'd choose my iPad. My PS3, although it comes with an internet browser, would clearly be my last choice for that activity. If due to limited funds you could only have one internet-connected device in your home, would you want that device to be a console?

And even if you would, why would you want a next generation console instead of one of the current generation? If you use your console to watch Netflix movies or DVDs, or surf the internet, you don't gain much from an upgrade. Only if you mainly want to play the latest games is a next generation console the way to go. And that is an expensive proposition. Between Steam sales on the PC and $0.99 games on tablets, the $60+ games on consoles look pricey today in comparison. You can nearly get a mini-console like the Ouya for that money.

I'm not saying that console gaming is dying. But I would say that it is further away from domination of the game market than ever. The future will be a lot more diverse, and the time Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft had as top dogs is over.

There has been some heated discussion on win conditions and Pay2Win business models here and elsewhere. The core issue is that if you play a game competitively and believe yourself to be winning over somebody else, you don't want that person to be able to pull out his wallet and pay for an advantage over you that makes the richer person the winner. So far, so good. But very few games sell outright wins. Even the famous "gold ammo" in World of Tanks, which gave a small but measurable advantage to those who use it, has now been changed to be available for in-game currency instead of only for real money. Most games operate on similar principles, making sure that the same equipment is available either by grinding or by paying, so that arguably paying only saves you some grind and never gives you an advantage that somebody who doesn't pay can never have.

But multiplayer online shooters or MOBA games are relatively simple in that one game only lasts minutes, and the winner and loser are very clearly determined at the end. The matter gets a lot more complicated in a MMORPG, where outside certain forms of PVP battlegrounds there is never a screen that tells you that you won. Instead of that there is a multitude of personal win conditions, very often existing only in a nebulous form in the player's head. You feel good if you overcame some challenge, whether that was beating some raid boss or collecting 100 pets. You feel as if you "won".

The tricky thing in that is that in spite of your feeling that you won, this nearly never causes somebody else to feel as if he lost. And that is important when discussing whether a game is Pay2Win, because paying to win is not really a problem; paying to make somebody else lose is. If I could buy an unbeatable tank in World of Tanks for $1,000 and win every match with it, the problem would be all the players who lost to my tank, who now feel that the game isn't worth playing any more unless they'd be willing to put up an equal amount of money.

And that is how we should judge things that are being sold in a real money shop for a Free2Play game: Can you buy something which makes somebody else lose? Because otherwise, if everything can be a win condition, then everything can be Pay2Win. You might consider selling hats in an item shop to be perfectly acceptable, because hats do not figure in your personal win condition. But what about the player who collects hats competitively? Wouldn't he be complaining that selling hats makes the game Pay2Win? There are certainly people in World of Warcraft who collect pets and mounts competitively, and Blizzard does sell pets and mounts for real money, but does that make World of Warcraft a Pay2Win game?

Ultimately it comes down to a simple squabbling about "my win condition is superior to your win condition", where some people claim that whatever win condition they set for themselves is more important than the win condition some other player chose for himself. Thus Blizzard selling items that affect raids would cause more of an outcry than them selling pets, but only because there are more people whose personal win condition relates to raids in some way. But personally anything a game company sells that doesn't make somebody else lose the game is all right in my book. If a game isn't Pay2Lose, it's okay.

Our heroes had ended the previous session by killing the vampires in the dining hall of Castle Ravenloft. As they had used up a lot of resources like healing surges and daily powers in the last two fights, this session started with them looking for a place to take an extended rest. They wisely decided to take that in the chapel, and nothing happened during that rest. Refreshed they entered the dining hall again, where Count Strahd von Zarovich was still playing the organ. The players half guessed that this must be an illusion, him not having reacted to the combat and still playing hours later, but didn't go and try to disturb him. Instead they took the stairs down to the kitchen.

Downstairs Igor with his big spoon was stirring his "ghoulash" in a big cauldron, with arms and legs sticking out of it. Igor clearly wanted them out of his kitchen, but was still friendly enough to talk with the adventurers. They asked him what was in his "ghoulash", and got the reply: "Ghouls, of course!". Behind Igor was a double door, and when asked he told them that this was his fridge, and they should stay away from it. Not heeding that, and not making an effort to negotiate passage, the players tried the door, causing Igor to become angry and to attack by spilling his cauldron into the area where 3 of them stood. That not only scalded the characters standing there, it also spilled the 4 ghouls from the pot. Two of the players standing in the ghoulash spill, and taking ongoing damage from it, had high initiative and scrambled away. The third, the cleric, unfortunately had a low initiative and took the brunt of the first ghoul attack, ending up dying on the floor before he could do anything, and failing his first death save.

Fortunately for the players it isn't all that easy to kill a character in 4th edition, especially not in a group with two healers. One healing spell from the warlord later, the cleric was back up on his feet, and blasting the ghouls with turn undead. The group concentrated on the ghouls, and took them down in a few rounds. Igor wasn't much of a fighter, but his cauldron was filling up again, and he got off a second soup spill, this time without ghouls in it. So the players tried to get him away from the cauldron, and managed to push him into a corner and kill him. Searching the room they found only a ring of keys, and no treasure. After a short rest they were ready to look what was in the fridge.

The fridge turned out to be a 30' x 30' room with a magical cold effect. The floor was iced over, and 6 corpses hang from butcher's hook, clinging against each other from the draft when the door was opened. Iron bars with a locked door cut the room in two halves. The rogue approached that door, with two other players in the room, and the remaining 3 still in the kitchen, when the other door at the opposite side of the room opened and 6 vampire guards armed with crossbows rushed in.

Now the idea for the fight was that the players would try to open the iron bar door to reach the vampires, as not everybody in the group was good in ranged combat. But as a DM one has to get used to the fact that things not always work as intended. Instead of rushing forward, the players fled the room, back to the kitchen. They expected the vampires to follow, but the guards didn't have the keys. So when opening the fridge door again, the players were greeted by a hail of crossbow bolts. Expecting that they had constructed a barricade from kitchen tables giving them partial cover. And so they exchanged spells, arrows, and sling stones with the vampires. That wasn't terribly efficient, because only the ranger and mage were really good at that sort of combat. But having run out of the room the players didn't want to press forward again, wanting to deny the vampires the chance to regenerate by biting them. They ended up having to move into and out of the line of fire, retreating and healing the wounded when necessary. But they kept up the attacks on the vampires, concentrating their fire so that they fell one by one. After a long combat, the players ultimately succeeded in killing all vampire guards, and that is where we ended the session.

Dàchéng believes I don't know the difference between toys and games. But not only am I very well aware of that difference, I also believe that he didn't consider the possibility of somebody playing with a toy and only imagining playing a game. Imagine the following situation: You are on your way from home to work, when a car of a colleague rushes past you at high speed. Once arrived at work your colleague laughs at you and brags on how he beat you in your race. But you weren't even aware that there was a race on. Who of the two has misunderstood the situation?

MMORPGs very much work like that. Many of the people bragging how great they are at this "game" only managed to beat those who didn't even know there was a competition. And even different groups that all consider the game competitive all play under different rule sets: One guild claims to be the best because they had the server first kill of some raid boss. The next guild also claims to be the best, because they did it without practicing in the beta. The third guild claims to be the best because while their kill was later, it was done in less attempts. Gevlon claims to be the best because his guild did it in blue gear. And so on.

The difference between a toy and a game is that a game has rules that are universally understood and agreed upon. Playing with a toy in a competitive mind-set doesn't turn that toy into a game. When I said that World of Warcraft has no win condition, that was not a theoretical statement; it is a statement based on eight years of history: Nobody was ever declared the winner of World of Warcraft except by himself. World's most famous WoW player is more likely to be Leroy Jenkins, famous for his incompetence, than some player playing WoW exceptionally well. At best some guilds achieve passing fame, but they never really "win" the game.

That is not to say that it isn't perfectly all right to find a group of like-minded people and invent your own victory condition and strive to achieve it. Just like you can build a really impressive Hogwarts from Lego, and be proud of your achievement; but can you then say that you won Lego? I don't think so. You only competed against yourself, by rules of your own design. Winning World of Warcraft in your own mind doesn't make that win universally accepted.

As Azuriel always disagrees with me in the comment section of my blog :) , it is worth mentioning that I fully agree with his post on Instant Gratification vs Fun Investment. So much that I'd even use the same examples, deckbuilding in Magic the Gathering and campaign preparation for Dungeons & Dragons: For time investment for a future return of fun to be worth while, the activity into which you invest that time has to be fun by itself.

Of course in the context of MMORPGs it has to be remarked that at least for me leveling up a character has been fun for many years. I did not just do it as a time investment for some sort of "fun later" in the endgame. At some point in time I had 5 max level characters, with only one of them participating in any multiplayer endgame activity. And I always suspected that I wasn't the only one who found leveling fun, because if leveling was a boring obstacle to everybody, somebody would have developed a game where you would raid from the start, or introduced an "instant max level" option in the cash shop.

Furthermore, after having tried both serious raiding during vanilla WoW and more casual raiding later, I found that in fact those activities were not any more fun to me than non-endgame activities. At times serious raiding felt more like a job, due to a strict schedule and participation requirement. That was the guild that kicked me for the crime of going on holiday for 3 weeks in the summer. Also in various phases of raiding I must say I didn't have a whole lot of fun when we had to tackle the same content over and over and over again. Other endgame activities were even worse: I found "keep warfare" PvP in games like WAR or GW2 ridiculous zerg fests, and consider that whoever invented daily quests should be shot.

So the whole concept of investing time for fun later seemed always a bit shaky to me. And when after years of MMORPGs the leveling part became boring out of sheer repetitiveness, with every new game working the same, I stopped having "fun now", and didn't believe in "fun later". There is only so long and so often that you can stand a quest to kill 10 monsters, even if in the new game that quest has voice-over or you get the quest when entering the area with the 10 monsters instead of at a quest hub. And sorry, the writing even in triple-A MMORPGs isn't exactly J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin (probably because the writers of quests didn't have "R.R." in their initials). Most often it isn't even up to Robert E. Howard pulp fiction writing standards. All this is fun for some time, but that fun breaks down after a decade of little change.

Today I want to start a game and have fun right away. And if I still don't have fun after a few hours, I ditch the game and start the next one. There are too many games to waste time on those who aren't fun.

There has been some renewed discussions on the "evils of Free2Play" following the news that Rift is changing its business model and like so many others will abandon subscriptions. In the context of people recently pointing fingers at World of Warcraft for being down to 8 million subscribers it is worth remarking that WoW is one of the few games that actually still *has* subscribers. There is a wide range of different other models now, so that even games that on paper still have "subscriptions" now often can be "paid" in in-game currency. Are you a "subscriber" of a game if you don't actually pay the game company any money?

And if subscription numbers can be weird, Free2Play games can be a hundred times weirder. Some people have very incoherent attitudes towards the various business model, especially what to consider "Pay2Win". Can you Pay2Win in a PvE game that has no win condition? Is buying something you could also get from grinding Pay2Win? Some people even claim that whether buying an advantage for real currency in a game is Pay2Win depends on whether you buy that advantage from the game company or from another player, which seems not very logical to me.

What is behind all this can be easily explained by behavioral economics. Fact is that no system is 100% perfect and fair, there are always winners and losers. And people will always end up arguing for the system in which their preferred play-style is the one that is favored by the business model. Take for example two people, one playing only 1 hour per month, the other playing 100 hours per month. In a subscription model the guy playing 100 hours pays a hundred times less per hour played than the one playing only 1 hour. In a Free2Play model the guy playing only 1 hour could easily find himself in the situation of not having to pay anything, because the content available for free is sufficient for him, while the guy playing 100 hours is quickly hitting some paywall. It is obvious that these two people will have very different appreciations of the relative merits of subscription models vs. Free2Play models.

Fact is that Trion changes Rift to a Free2Play model because they hope to make more money that way. And they aren't making more money because of the people who will now be able to play the game for free. They will make more money on the one side from people who previously didn't play, and now pay at least a little for various items from the shop. And more importantly they will make more money from people who will now spend much more than the monthly subscription rate on Rift. A Free2Play model is profitable because it removes the cap on how much a player can spend on a game each month.

And let's be very clear about that: People don't spend that sort of money just on hats. Stuff that sells really well is always of *some* use to the player, even if it is something that can also be acquired by time spent in the game. Calling that Pay2Win is a misconception based on the very wrong idea that everybody plays games to win. You would have thought that after over eight years of World of Warcraft people would have noticed that nobody has won yet. And never will.

Again the rants against "Pay2Win" can be explained by behavioral economics. MMORPGs have been rather good at creating the illusion in some people that they had achieved a lot, because progress is more based on time spent than on skill acquired. So unlike skill-based games, where progress naturally slows down due to diminishing returns of learning the game, MMORPGs have been able to offer almost permanent progress and great ePeen to people who played a lot. If the person playing the most suddenly isn't top dog any more, because somebody next to him is wearing the same epic armor won in a locked chest lottery, that illusion of superiority shatters. And as much as I hate the locked chest lotteries that pop up in more and more games, I must say that people paying money for epics are not the problem; people believing that epics have meaning are.

The reason why I welcome Free2Play games is that I don't play to win. I play for fun, for the experience of playing, of learning the game, and succeeding challenges by skill. A challenge that consists of hundreds of hours of grind seems as stupid to me as a challenge you can succeed by paying hundreds of dollars. Because neither spending time nor spending money is ultimately an achievement at all. It is the money spent to access content and the time spent to learn the game that gives a meaningful "return on investment" in the form of fun and entertainment. It is incomprehensible to me how some people strive to turn games into work. I already have a job, and it pays well enough for me to be able to afford convenience items from Free2Play shops. Pay2Win is if you pay money with the intent of winning the game. These games get a lot cheaper once you realize that winning isn't actually possible at all.

Over the years I have repeatedly on this blog proposed the idea of having a game that mixes MMORPG and Trading Card Game elements together. So when Cryptozoic did a Kickstarter for a MMO Trading Card Game called Hex, I got several mails and comments of the "have you seen this?" type from readers. Yes, I've seen it. But no, I don't believe in it. As much as I did like the "we'd do anything for funding" video, I couldn't help but notice that all what they have right now, both in terms of experience and in terms of presented gameplay, is the TCG part. There is next to zero information about the MMO part. And I don't believe you can create the MMO part for half a million dollars.

Basically my impression of Hex is that it is a Trading Card Game *only*, or at least first and foremost. In many aspects it looks like a clone of Magic the Gathering Online. Whatever else they might add to the game, it will never resemble anything you and me would call an MMO. I mean, how would a classic MMO gameplay even be remotely possible when the combat is turn-based and on a separate screen? My Shandalar idea is for a game that is a MMO, and plays like an MMO, with combat taking place in real time in the 3D virtual world, only with cards replacing the current static abilities on the hotkeys. Cardhunter, turn-based as it is, is still a lot closer to my idea than Hex will ever be.

Ultimately Hex is a competitor of Magic the Gathering Online or Hearthstone, not World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2. And as Azuriel already remarked, you can't call it a Free2Play game if the only way to earn cards is to buy them. To me Hex is just a case of deceptive marketing. I haven't seen anything in the material that was shown which would suggest an innovative merge of TCG and MMO gameplay.

When you read a review of a video game, almost always there are comments about the graphics: How do the characters look, how are they animated, how do their surroundings look, and how do things like spell effects look. There are both artistic considerations to that, as well as technical ones, like how blurry a texture looks when viewed from close. In a pen & paper game like Dungeons & Dragons you would think there are no graphics. And in fact there are a lot of people talking about the "theater of the mind" in which their role-playing sessions take place. That is all fine and dandy if the scene is about roleplaying a negotiation with a tavern-keeper or merchant. But once you get into combat, the theater of the mind quickly breaks down, with every player and the DM each ending up with a different picture of the combat situation in his head, usually leading to heated arguments.

So many people use some sort of aid for depicting battles in a pen & paper game, for example figurines on a battle map. And suddenly you have graphics in your game. Of course that works perfectly well with minimal graphics, badly hand-drawn with a dry erase marker on a blank map with 1" squares. But just like graphics in a video game are nice to have, having better graphics in a pen & paper game can also help immersion.

I was thinking about that because I am preparing Madness at Gardmore Abbey, a huge adventure with 30+ encounters, but only 2 poster maps. The books propose using the official tiles to create the rooms for the other encounters. But I find the tiles both ugly and not very practical: You need to lug around a huge box of them to have all tiles for the various rooms, then you need to find the right ones and assemble them on the table, and as they aren't fixed in any way they can easily be accidentally moved when a player wants to move his figurine, throwing everything over. So I was happy when I found a set of encounter maps at the Cartographers Guild. They are a *lot* prettier than tiles. The grid isn't always visible enough for my tastes, but I'm not going to recreate those maps myself in Campaign Cartographer just to change such a minor issue.

So now I'm spending a lot of time printing those maps out to scale on a color laser printer and taping the pages together to form a battle map. That works reasonably well for up to 2x2 pages, which is 16 x 22 squares. I have been experimenting in the past with having maps printed on poster, but that is only a minor improvement and a lot more expensive. Besides maps, I also try to make other handouts in my game graphically appealing. For example in my current adventure the players found "The Book of Strahd", and I printed the two pages of text in a handwriting font on a parchment-like background. I got real Tarot cards for the fortune teller in that adventure too.

You might say that graphics aren't essential to pen & paper games, but I do think that they improve the final result. And as I can only play a session every two weeks, I have the time to do some preparation.

There are certain games which would be impossible to play without randomness, for example Poker. And personally I like some degree of randomness in tactical games, because it adds to replayability if for some reason you want or need to do the same combat again or a similar one. Thus I am quite happy with the random card drawing mechanic in Cardhunter. Having said that, randomness is not something binary which you either have or have not. There are varying degrees of randomness, from the minimal variations of the damage your fireball does in World of Warcraft, to games where a random event has a stronger influence on the final win or lose result than any strategy or tactic.

Now Cardhunter in this respect is somewhat weird, because how random the game is depends on your level. As I described earlier, with levels you get new gear slots, and each gear slot comes with a fixed number of cards, even if you don't put anything in. Thus your "deck" gets thicker with level. And that is something that every Magic the Gathering deckbuilder is painfully aware of: The thicker your deck is, the more random it gets.

Imagine a simple deck of 10 cards, 5 red and 5 black. Your chance to draw a red card is 50%. Double the deck to 20 cards, 10 red and 10 black, and obviously your chance to draw a red card is still 50%. But how about the chance that if you draw two cards, you draw exactly one red and one black? Or the chance to draw 3 red cards in a row? I won't do the math here, but it is easy to show that the probabilities for multiple cards depend on the number of cards in the deck. The 10-card deck has a lower chance to draw 3 red cards in a row, because the percentage of black cards remaining in the deck goes up by more after each red card drawn than in a 20-card deck.

Thus at level 10 in Cardhunter I find myself more often with "extreme" results like drawing only movement cards than I did in the first few levels where my deck was much thinner. The other effect is that if you have one specific card in your deck which you would like to draw, the higher you are in level in Cardhunter and thus the thicker your deck is, the lower is your chance to draw that card. To some extent I can counter this increased randomness by adapting my tactics, for example spending a turn running away from the monsters if I drew lots of movement cards but no attacks. But it does happen that I lose a fight and then win it on the next try with the same basic tactics, just because of a better luck of the draw. Well, I guess that is the price you have to pay to get a bit of random variety into your game.

I'm planning on running a huge "sandbox" adventure for my D&D campaign, using Wizard of the Coast's boxed set Madness at Gardmore Abbey. Basically that is a huge abbey complex on a hill with lots of encounter locations, and the players are sent there on different quests and have many different possibilities on how to approach and play through the place. For me it appears obvious that at some point in that adventure the players will need a handout of a player map of Gardmore Abbey. But the adventure only provides a DM map, with big encounter numbers written on it. The one dialog you don't want to hear in that adventure is "Where do you go next?" - "We go to the place marked "3" on the map!".

Now I did find a nice photoshopped front view of Gardmore Abbey, which will be perfect for the first session. But at some point I will need a map with the encounter numbers removed. And to my surprise I couldn't even find one with Google. So I had to make one myself. I am not the world's biggest expert on Photoshop, as evidenced by the fact that I don't even have Photoshop but use MS Paint instead. But I was able to scan the DM map and remove the encounter numbers good enough for my purposes. So as a public service I decided to put my Gardmore Abbey player handout map on my blog, for future DM's to find. It ain't perfect, but better than nothing.
 

As I mentioned yesterday, Cardhunter is a game about a group of people playing Dungeons & Dragons. At one point their usual DM Gary is replaced by his elder brother Melvin, who makes the players play through an adventure designed to kill them, and is a rather mean DM. He reminded me of actual DMs I played with many years ago, for whom the job was some kind of a power trip. Anyway in Cardhunter your whole party is fit again as long as just one of them survives, and if you wipe you just have to replay the same adventure again. In Dungeons & Dragons death is a lot more severe.

I didn't have a player death in my campaign yet, although there were some tight spots. So some commenters believe I deliberately don't kill my players. That isn't true. But I don't design adventures to be lethal on purpose. I design them to be challenging, and then death can be a consequence of either stupidity or really bad luck. For example in my last D&D session there was the possibility of the players getting all killed: They had found out how to weaken him by scattering the earth from his grave in the dungeon; but if they had skipped the dungeon, they could have gone directly to the end fight, and faced an un-weakened and therefore presumably deadly vampire lord.

The fight they actually did was also not an easy one, as they were outnumbered by the 9 castle vampires. But they played that combat very well, using great tactics to avoid getting surrounded early, and some good combos between the powers of the different players. In my opinion, if the players play well, victory should be the normal result. You can always have the dice rolling some extreme results, but it would require a lot of bad luck for a player to actually die if the groups' tactics were sound to start with.

What I am trying to avoid is the kind of game played in this Mines of Madness podcast, where repeatedly and early in the adventure players die for no good reason, and are repeatedly replaced by a constant stream of "member of your party that came to the mines later", played by whoever just lost his character. If your character is disposable like a Kleenex, you never develop any character story. So while I would agree on a player rolling a new character of the same level to replace a dead one, I wouldn't want that to happen too frequently.

After having made sure that there is no NDA (the beta forum is even public) I want to tell you some more about Cardhunter. You could say that it is a game about a game, you are playing a group of kids playing old-school D&D in the basement. There is soda and junk food on the table, and the artwork of the modules is spot on 80's D&D. Only of course you can't play a real pen & paper game on a computer, so the gameplay has been replaced by one of the best turn-based, card-based tactical games I have ever played.

Your party consists of a classic trio of a warrior, a priest, and a wizard, with your choice of race as dwarf, human, or elf. What your characters can do, whether it is moving, attacking, or mitigating damage, totally depends on the "cards" in that characters "deck". So there are cards like Walk that let you move 2 spaces, or Bash which lets you deal 4 damage to an enemy next to you. But unlike other games, e.g. Magic the Gathering, you can't choose what is in your deck freely. Instead cards are contained in gear, for example you could wear Plain Old Boots that contain 3 Walk cards.

Characters start out with very few gear slots, with no gear in them, but an empty gear slot counts as a very basic item and thus already has some basic cards in it. Every time you finish a fight you get a treasure chest full of items, which you can then equip. Or sell and buy other gear with the gold. At the end of an adventure consisting of several fights on different maps you also receive xp, which make your characters gain levels. With higher levels you get more slots for gear, and you can equip higher level items. Later you also get "talents", shown as little dots, and some gear comes with a requirement of a number of those dots, limiting how many items with talent requirements you can equip. Gear comes in all levels, and in different rarities (common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary).

The link of cards to gear has important consequences. In other trading card games you often wanted to have lots of rare, more powerful cards. In Cardhunter, while of course you'd prefer rare or epic gear over normal gear of the same level, you have the same effect as in a MMORPG: Yesterday's epic will be outdated by tomorrow's uncommon of a higher level. High-level gear doesn't help you if you character doesn't fulfil the level requirement, or doesn't have the talent points. So while there are various ways in the Free2Play model to get more gear with real money, like a premium account that gets you one extra item in every treasure chest, you can't simply buy your way to victory.

Instead you will have to play to win. And Cardhunter is not an easy game. And if I use words like challenging or difficult here, please understand that this is not about reflexes or being able to memorize sequences of button presses. In Cardhunter you will need to think. You and Gary the DM, the computer-controlled opponent playing all the monsters, play cards in turn. You start out with something like 4 cards per character, randomly drawn from the deck of that character, based on the gear he is equipped with. So already in the first turn you need to make decisions on which card from which character to play, while the other two characters won't do anything that turn. You can also pass, which is what at some point you will need to do when you have run out of useful cards to play. When both you and your opponent pass, new cards are drawn. So on the one hand you will need to deal with your draws being random, as well as some dice rolls affecting actions. But on the other hand the sequence in which you do things is extremely important. If you play all your move cards early, the enemy might be able to move away from you afterwards and play ranged attacks on you without you being able to retaliate. Your Righteous Frenzy, which lasts only until new cards are drawn, won't be any good if played after you exhausted your attack cards already. And so on.

There is a huge number of different adventures and game maps already in the beta. And the randomness of the draw makes the same map play out differently even if you play it twice with the same characters and the same gear. You can't just memorize the best moves, you will have to make the best out of the cards you have been dealt each and every turn. And then of course you'll think you need better cards, which means you need better gear, which is a huge motivation to play and advance your characters. And unlike other games you can't simply grind easy encounters endlessly. Each adventure can be played only once per day, and if you play adventures more than 2 levels below your characters' level, their level will be reduced temporarily and they won't earn any xp. As you can recruit more than the three characters that fit into one party, I'm currently planning on opening a second party to play through the lower level adventures that aren't of much use to my more advanced main party any more. This is a game I play because I have fun playing it every single turn, and not just because I need some reward for some hypothetical fun promised for some future date. Fun, fun, fun!

I would like to make one final remark on the quality of execution of the game: It is outstanding, far more than you would expect from a Free2Play browser game. The artwork representing cardboard figurines on a battle map is extremely well done, and everything looks just like it should on a game table. There is a lot of content for a beta game, and balance is generally excellent. I can see myself spending many fun hours with this game. If you like tactical turn-based games, I can only highly recommend signing up for the Cardhunter beta.