Duelyst
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Duelyst brings collectible card games back down to earth

J.K. Rowling was remarkably creative when coming up with Wizard’s Chess. A favorite pastime of Ron and Harry’s in the early Harry Potter books, wizarding chess is exactly like regular chess, except the pieces move by themselves and smash one another when taking opposing squares. “That’s totally barbaric,” opines Hermione in the first film. “That’s Wizard’s Chess,” responds Ron, as if pitching the game to a room full of Hasbro execs. As evidenced by Duelyst, though, the gimmick is surprisingly effective. The first thing anyone will notice about Counterplay Games’s tactical RPG, collectible card game (CCG) hybrid is its irresistible pixel…

Card Thief
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Card Thief brings medieval stealth to the card game format

Card Thief is an upcoming game from the Tinytouchtales studio headed by Arnold Rauers. Inspired by Thief (1998) and Sage Solitaire (2015), it will see players extinguishing torches and sneaking past salivating dogs to string long chains of cards together as the obstacles mount up. Tinytouchtales’s last effort, Card Crawl (2015), also used a more-or-less standard deck of cards to blend dungeon crawling and Solitaire. At some level, Solitaire isn’t a card game anymore. Or, it’s not a game you play with cards. Microsoft Solitaire (1989) was developed by Wes Cherry with art by Susan Kare in an effort to…

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All your real-life Gwent fantasies are coming true

Among the countless hours I spent playing CD Projekt RED’s sprawling open-world adventure The Witcher 3 (2015), too many of those were spent playing Gwent. Whether it was battling against random merchants or innkeepers, or challenging the best players of Novigrad in an effort to win a coveted card of my surrogate daughter, the seemingly simple card game of Gwent wasn’t just another side quest. Gwent transcended the tedious minigame trope and became something wholly enjoyable itself. I can see myself roaming the pubs of San Francisco to battle friends, as I once did in The Witcher 3’s Velen During Microsoft’s…

Photo by Scott Harrison/Getty Images
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Juggalos rejoice: Insane Clown Posse is getting its own card game

If your knowledge on the Insane Clown Posse (shortened to ICP) is minimal, chances are you’ll know the musical duo not for their songs, but for their take on clown couture and inspiring the niche fanbase who call themselves Juggalos. There’s even a yearly festival for fans of ICP called “Gathering of The Juggalos” which I can only speculate to be an interesting experience. However if you’re like me, you probably remember hearing about ICP through friends in middle school and all those recycled jokes about faygo and magnets. Maybe you went onto YouTube and searched one of their songs: who…