By Jaime Skelton (MissyS), Senior Editor

If you’re a mobile gamer and haven’t heard about Cards and Castles yet, I’ll say it outright: you’re missing out. Those aren’t words coming from a long-time fan; no, I’m a recent convert of the Dark Lord Vontre – that is, the game’s developer at Bit Mass has managed to suck me in with a great game that has certainly earned its recent feature on Apple’s App Store. I spent some time at Bit Mass’ booth during PAX South to meet the team and learn more about Cards and Castles’ latest update and future plans.

Since Cards and Castles was new to me, the first thing I did was pick up the game and play through its two-battle tutorial. It’s pretty easy to see, from the start, how the game draws on its inspirations. In each battle, you take your deck of cards – drawn from two factions – onto a rectangular grid that’s five high and nine wide. On the left side of the field is your base, and mirrored on the right side is your enemy’s base. Bases are immobile but are the most important units on the field: they bring in your income each turn and also serve as your health for the match. If a base is defeated, that player loses.

Players can spend their gold income each turn to use cards in their hand. These cards, like in any card game, consist of a variety of units and spells, the later of which can be used to harm enemies or buff allies. At any time during their turn, players can use cards, move units on the battlefield, and attack. When a player is done, they can end their turn and wait on their enemy’s movements. The battle continues until one of the bases is taken out, and winning results in a few cards for your deck.

For beginners, Cards and Castles is a very friendly game. The card game elements are similar to Hearthstone: easy to read and understand cards, a simple resource system, and a central ‘hero’ to defend. The combat field, on the other hand, is similar to Tactics Ogre being very easy to pick up on for those less familiar with the style of battle. The end result? A quirky, fun game that’s easy to learn but quite rewarding for more hardcore players who want to dig deep into the strategy. And while the game offers solo campaigns, there is a real focus on multiplayer, which includes friendly and ranked matches either through live and asynchronous online play.

Recently, the team has launched a new update, “The Ancient Hero Returns.” The star of this update is Brynjolf, a legendary new hero that players can earn after completing a ten scenario solo campaign. Not to be overshadowed, though, is a major update to the game’s Draft mode. Similar to Hearthstone’s Arena mode, Draft mode places you in competitive multiplayer match with a random deck, letting you battle it out with only one walking away with epic prizes. A new option also allows you to see your stats in draft to get a feel for how well you’re doing.

If you’re stuck without a mobile device to game on – the game’s available on both Android and iOS – don’t panic. Bit Mass is also planning on releasing the game for PC and is already preparing its beta client – in fact has just started a new Steam Greenlight campaign. No matter how you play, though, Cards and Castles is definitely worth a try. With more interesting gameplay than Hearthstone (and less annoying audio), and a developer keenly interested in the game’s balance and community, Cards and Castles may be the next mobile titan of CCGs.

By Andy Skelton

With the global popularity of Pokémon, many companies have attempted to create creature battle games to compete.  Many of those games, however, have failed, either by straying too far, or staying too close to the source material.  Moonrise, in development by Undead Labs, is a new offering in the creature battle arena, and while it does stay fairly close to its roots, it has a few branches out there that definitely differentiate it from other similar games.  We had a chance to sit down and play the demo version at PAX South, and initial signs point to a very solid experience.

Character creation in Moonrise seems quite simple, but does offer a nice bit of customization as well.  We’ve also been informed that even more customization options unlock throughout the course of gameplay, which will add to the uniqueness of the character you create.  The game then throws you into a tutorial where you get to pick your first Solari between a fire, water, or nature creature.  Solari, as the game explains, are peaceful creatures that become corrupted by the Moonrise event occurring.  These Lunari then cause widespread havoc and destruction for a period of time until the Moonrise wanes.  This time, however, there is something wrong, and the Moonrise is not abating, so your character goes to become a Warden to fight against the growing chaos.

Honestly, a simple story is best for a game of this nature, and Moonrise delivers on that front.  Your Warden-in-Training then learns the basics of combat where we learned the first difference between other creature battlers:  your character can also attack.  Since such a simple addition can add such a layer of depth to a game, I was surprised no one (at least that I know of) had thought of it before.  In fact, battles can be ended by defeating trainers, instead of their creatures, which heaps on even more depth to the combat system.

Combat, too, is quite refreshing.  Rather than inputting commands and resolving them turn by turn, Moonrise offers real time battles.  This always gives you something to do, since you can have two Solari on the field at once, in addition to your own attack commands.  Creatures come in one of six different elements: fire, water, nature, stone, electric, and basic.  Basic creatures have no strengths against the other elements, but are also not weak against others either.

Catching new Solari is a bit of a grind, from what I gathered.  Each time you win a battle, you cleanse the Lunari into is peaceful self.  Should it want to travel with you (a somewhat rare occurrence, at least for me), you can use a key to take it with you.  More keys can be obtained through play, so you don’t need to worry about running out of them.

One amazing aspect I found about Moonrise was the skill system.  Each Solari can have up to three skills at a time.  However, say there’s a skill you want on one of your benched Solari.  Players can simply take a skill off a monster and offer it to another. Of course like TM limitations in Pokemon, some skills can never be learned by certain Solari, such as water skills being unavailable to fire creatures, but its a simple, delightful system to customization your team that is not often found, especially in mobile takes on the sub-genre.  Additionally, certain item drops found through quests and dungeons can be used to customize a creature’s stat distribution.  Want a powerful fighter?  Use a bunch of strength essence.  Need a tank?  Build up their defense!  There’s quite a range of customization there for you, so feel free to create whatever fantastic beast you’d like.

Being a mobile game, there’s always the elephant in the room when it comes to energy or other sorts of gating mechanics.  Since most of Moonrise focuses on battling, you’ll be happy to know you can do as much of that as you want — Player versus Player included.  Game modes that feature loot items, such as dungeons and PvP tournaments do require tickets to enter, so you’ll be limited on both of those options.  These tickets respawn over time like any other energy system though, so you never need to worry about buying more, unless you really have to do another dungeon right that instance.

If you’ve played anything similar to Neverwinter’s Sword Coast Adventures, dungeons in Moonrise will look familiar.  For me, this is a good thing.  The goal of each dungeon is to unlock the boss room by completing objectives found on the map.  Most of the time, these objectives are going to be combat based, but sometimes there will be merchants, or other unique events to view.  Each time you complete an event, you unlock additional rewards, but you can only get the rewards for defeating the boss of the dungeon.  While your creatures automatically heal after every encounter on the world map, you do not get this benefit in dungeons, so it becomes a race to try and complete as many objectives as you can while keeping your creatures healthy enough from the gauntlet of random encounters to stand a chance against the final boss. It sounds somewhat complex in written form, but it’s still fairly intuitive to follow once you’re experiencing the content.

There will be some micro-transactions available in the game, however, most of these are either cosmetic, ticket refills, or slot machine style awards, so there’s no pay-to-win scenario going on.  It’s always nice to know you’ll be able to experience the game without needing to hand over uncomfortable amounts of cash.

From the initial testing, Moonrise is definitely shaping up to be a very strong mobile game, providing a great deal of content absolutely free.  In fact, many people were coming back to the booth a second or third time, just to play through more to try and capture more creatures, or just to try and experience things they may not have on their first trip around.  Considering some of the lines people were experiencing at PAX South, and that they were willing to wait for this game alone, that definitely indicates a strong, strong future for Moonrise.