Star Realms 1.15

Space, the final frontier. Well I frankly think that mind or soul might be further along the discovery track. But returning to our subject, here we have a neat card game that has caught the world by storm. My world at least. What do you think about building a space empire, establishing trading routes, developing an economy, exploring space, building stations and outposts and finally blowing your enemies out of the ether? You're thinking that it might be complicated? Not at all! The answer is elegance. In Star Realms empires are built and destroyed in a matter of minutes, and all to satisfy your imperialistic tendencies while commuting or waiting at the doctor's office.

Your Space Dominion

Star Realms is a deck building game. In a deck building game, each player starts with a card deck that contains some basic units, actions, money or other specific card types. During a game turn they will draw a hand of cards, play cards from that hand and then discard & draw back up. When the deck is depleted, the discard pile is reshuffled and so on, until someone wins the game. Turing your turn you are able to purchase more powerful cards and add them to your deck. This is called deck building.

In Star Realms, you will try to acquire stations and ships in order to:

• increase your economy (so you can purchase stronger cards)
• increase your authority (read "life points")
• reduce your opponent's authority to 0 (win the game)

During the game you will play cards from your hand to add to your money and combat pools. Unless spent, these pools revert to zero. There's no problem in that, since most of the time you will always have something to spend them on. Combat points are spent in order to destroy enemy bases and reduce the enemy's authority. Money is spent to acquire new cards.

There are only two types of cards, ships and stations. They both have similar effects, the difference being in that stations remain in play until destroyed or voluntarily scuttled, while ships are discarded at the end of your turn. You may chose to destroy an opponent's space station if you spend combat points equal to its defense value. You can otherwise ignore stations and go directly for authority. Some stations are outposts though. These cannot be ignored and must be destroyed first, before reducing authority. This essentially acts as a shield against an opponent who is becoming too dangerous.

Besides that, every card has two abilities. The primary ability is activated whenever the card is played. The second one however is only activated if the player plays at least one other card of the same faction. Each ship and station is part of one of the four factions:

The Trade Federation - Its units specialize in increasing authority and money pool
The Blobs - They specialize in dealing damage and removing purchase opportunities for opponents
The Star Empire - They help you draw more cards and forces opponents to discard
The Machine Cult - They let you remove weaker cards from your deck in order to streamline it and also have many bases.

Purchasing more cards out of one faction increases the chances of activating secondary abilities, which give you necessary boosts to help you get the upper hand against your opponent. This is key to victory. Getting cards in one or two factions is great, but you can also go wild with all four if you feel like it.

Conclusion

Star Realms is ultimately made for the player with time constraints. A game lasts about ten to fifteen minutes and is truly captivating. It is free, but you can pay to unlock multiplayer modes, stronger AI and campaign play.

PS: Star Realms is also available for iOS, iMac, Windows and also as a physical card game.