Monster Train

 8/10

 Good strategy card game. Similar to Slay The Spire but with elements of a simple tower defense. Each turn you can add creatures to the levels of your train (it has 3 levels and "the core") or play spell with various effects. Your creatures trade blows with the enemy and the remaining enemies go up to the next level of the train. If they get to the core they can fight it (if they win you lose the game). At the end of each stage, a boss shows up. When this happens creatures on the boss's floor trade blows until either the boss dies or all your creature are wiped.

Between encounters there is phase where you get to make various choices to edit your deck. There is also often an option to make the next encounter harder by giving a specific bonus to enemies in exchange for better rewards.

There is a few things I did not understand immediately while playing the game, like which creature gets to eat morsels (some kind of buff). Its the creature at the front.

Finishing one game takes about 1 hours. You can choose 2 of 5 factions and one of 25 difficulty levels when you start. Cards are progressively unlocked for future games and there is a lot of randomness so its expected that every game will be different.

I made it to the 17th difficulty level I was starting to find that the way the difficulty in increased isn't always very fun. One example is that the game adds dead weight cards to your deck, this feels very random. It feels like many strategy which were valid at the beginning of the game are not valid anymore, unles you get a specific item. The quality of items vary greatly and most of them don't enable a specific strategy. You get a bunch of random cards at the very beginning of the games and sometimes it feels like you are getting a very bad start.

Otherwise the game is very original and kept surprising me many hours in. I recommend it to fans of games like Slay The Spire. Its very similar and surprisingly different at the same time.

Slay The Spire (Early Access)

8/10

Slay The Spire is a turned based rogue like RPG where your characters actions are cards. After every encounter you may choose one of three random cards to add to your deck.

Every choice seems important, which card to add to your deck, which path of the randomly generated levels you take, which cards you play on each turn and in which order.

I found that the game is very accessible and enjoyable even if you start over when you die. It lets you make different choice and try different strategies which keeps the experience fresh.

Also when you die or complete your current run, the games give you a score which goes to unlocking more cards to pick from in the next run.

The music is similar to that of Heroes of Might And Magic. However there are few tracks and it can get repetitive.

In 20 hours I finished two runs with each character available in early access, the Ironclad and the Silent, (and died a few times also).

I will definitively come back to try the third character when the game is released.

Card City Night

7.5/10

What happens when you mix pokemon plot devices with collectible card games, and lots of other crazy ideas? The result is surprisingly good in Card City Night! This is a single player collectible card game (or CCG) with original mechanics. The game makes you collect cards and face many opponents in order to .... collect more cards and face stronger opponents.

The game was fun while it lasted, 10 to 20 hours I would say, depending on your desire to collect the cards and attempts to make original decks. 

I would say its easy to make good decks just by using offensive cards that go well together. There are many ways to win a game, and some of the opponents in the game have very interesting decks based on specific cards. However I think it would be very difficult for a player to make one of these very interesting decks because:

• Cards are given randomly to the player.
• Those special cards that allow interesting special strategy are rare or expansive.

I think the game would have been a lot more fun if the player could make interesting decks like the ones the AI opponents have. But it was was fun playing against these decks anyways.

An other thing that could be improved is the user interface used to create new decks. Its possible to sort the cards differently but there are no filtering options.

I can't recommend this game to everyone, but if you like puzzles or CCG and are looking something different, this game might be a great addition to your collection.

Magic the Gathering - Duels of the planeswalker (+ 2012 and 2013 editions)

7.5/10

If you did not know MTG is collectible card game where you play as a wizard who can summon creatures and cast spells. Your goal is to kill your opponent (also a wizard), usually by reducing his hit points to 0. Its a fun game with a lots of strategy and tactics, however its one hell of a pay to win game. For people who realized this, there are usually modes where players don't come with pre-made decks. But they still make  a lot of money by having players buy new random cards for each tournament.

It exists in physical form (go to the store, buy real card) and in digital form (Magic Online which is very old and looks like shit, where you pay the same price for virtual cards!).

Still its been the most played, most complex and interesting card game out there for a long time. So without any major competition, Wizzard, the company behind MTG, has been sitting on its ass for a long time and selling its physical and virtual cards at a ridiculously high prices. Which has always been a turn off form me.

But at some point they released Duels of the planeswalker on steam and Xbox live, where players only play with somewhat balanced pre-made decks (you can swap a few card in and out for each decks). So you don't pay for the card in those games,  you pay once for each of those games (and their expansions) and then you can play against other player with relatively balanced decks. And it can be a lot of fun.

At least the challenges and campaigns are fun. The multiplayer is a bit buggy sometimes, when there a bugged game at the top of the match making list and you always get match to a game where you can't connect. Also since you can only play with premade decks, players cannot do everything they want and play all the modes they play with physical cards (like drafting). But there are new competitors on the tablet and PC markets now and they announced much more features for the planeswalker version of 2014, that's why I'm reviewing these games now.

Also its more fun if you don't buy the card unlocks downloadable content and instead unlock the cards as you play the campaign, it makes the campaign more interesting. So buy the game and expansions but not the unlocks.

Buy Magic 2013 Gold Game Bundle

Buy Magic 2012 Gold Game Bundle

I can't find the original (pre 2012 edition) on steam, they probably removed it because there were too many bugs and they did not want to fix them).

2020 edit: Since then I've a played the other planeswalker games, Magic Duels and Magic arena. Magic Arena is probably better maintained (and they will maintain the game instead of releasing a different game each year). But its also different, gone are the pre-built decks and you can now buy cards and virtual currency to play the game. I'm sure that it is very popular and that they are making a lot more money that way ... but it could not retain my attention. I don't feel like spending so much money on virtual cards and games and grinding free to play is also unappealing for me. Things I hated: Losing (or winning) because of mana flood, mana screw, or better cards. The difference between common and rarer cards in magic is too great in my opinion. There are lots of digital card games these days, many of which don't have these problem. See my other CCG game reviews.