TLDR: The game is good, worth your time and free. The mechanics are easy to learn, there is depth in deckbuilding and rewarding gameplay in ranking up and in mastering the draft mode. The business model is fair, giving you playable cards to begin with, but building high cost decks requires you to pay up or complete a lot of daily quests. The graphics and interfaces are not as polished as they need to be for release, but passable. For flavor, there are some legendary delightful Runescape locations, characters and humor.

Introduction

First up, if there was a mac version, I would not be writing this review but playing the game. This review is based on the few hours of gameplay I got in last weekend from my parent's basement. In this review I'll try to explain the game mechanics so a newcomer can understand what the game is about without needing to play first, talk a bit about the graphics and presentation and finish with a bit on card design, deck building and thoughts on game balance. The hope is to persuade you to try the game and to spark some discussion.

Mechanics

RSChronicle is an online collectable card game where two players play cards to build an adventure for their hero, spanning five chapters ending in a final showdown between the two heroes. There are two categories of cards, support and enemy cards. Enemy cards are encounters for your hero, giving your hero money, weapons or stat boosts when the monster depicted by the card is defeated. Support cards are paid for with gold, giving your hero weapons, health, armor or some other more special effect. The game's objective is to use your hero's life total and the cards in your hand as a resource to reduce your opponent's life total to zero.

Each of the five chapters requires you to make a choice on what cards your hero will encounter. You may play up to four cards, heroes take turns moving from encounter to encounter and you draw three cards at the beginning of the next chapter. At the end of the fifth chapter, heroes take turns swinging at each other, until only one remains.

There is no traditional mana system, but that doesn't mean all cards in your deck will be playable in all circumstances. You might not have enough gold for a support card, or your hero might be too weak to face against a powerful enemy encounter. Deciding how to order your cards to build up your hero in an optimal way is a challenge in itself, but then there are cards that directly interact with your opponent. You need to guess what your opponent might play to trash your plans, and play around accordingly, while deciding the perfect time to make a strike against your opponent yourself. RSChronicle is a game of hidden information, risk management and opportunity.

Graphics, Presentation and Interfaces

Each chapter takes place on a 3D presentation of a known Runescape location. The five available heroes move through as boardgame figurines, cards hover in the air until their effects are animated in their encounter. The cards are easily readable and the card art has a distinct style, but the card borders look simple. The hero stats are easy to read if a bit bland. Animations are plentiful but not distracting, but not very high quality. Texture and model quality are fine, except when the camera zooms in for the encounters.

The interfaces are often either too empty or too cluttered. The drag-and-drop manual labor required to play cards feels a bit clumsy, especially when you need to swap cards around. Voice acting and sound effects are fine, but can get repetitive. There is a lot of waiting for animations to play through if you are not paying attention to the cards your opponent is playing, and each time a chapter changes. The deck building interface needs work, as navigating your collection between support and enemy cards and neutral and hero specific cards is slow.

Card Design, Deckbuilding and Balance

Each of the five heroes have unique playstyles, strengths and weaknesses. Ariane cares about hand size, Raptor builds up armor, Ozan steals money, Linza uses high durability weapons and Vanescula gains an advantage by having low health. Hero specific cards are either marginally or strictly better than neutral cards. For example Ozan has Gnome Guard, a 3/2 that rewards 3 coins, while the neutral counterpart Black Arm Bandit is a 2/2 that rewards 2 coins. Neutral cards are still useful to add consistency to your deck, as you can only have two copies of a card in your 30 card deck.

Cards are divided into four rarity groups. The rarest cards, diamonds, have the weirdest text on them, are very situational, or clearly overpowered. As an example of an overpowered diamond card, I give Kayle, a neutral 2/2 that rewards a 4/2 weapon. An alternative to this would be a neutral support card called Gee'ka, that costs no gold and gives a 1/2 weapon. Heroes start with 2 attack, so both cards are playable on turn 1. Apparently you can only put one copy of each diamond card in your deck, which turns down the pay-to-win a bit.

To build an effective deck, you typically need a good balance of support and enemy cards, sources of gold, weapons, health and direct damage. Card draw is important to give you more options, but also to fight off hand disruption. There are multiple roads to victory, so you can't prepare for everything. There is enough card variety to make meaningful deckbuilding choices and for the game to develop a varied metagame.

As an example of options available, I present you your typical neutral options for gaining health:

(name, cost, effect)

• Cabbage, 0 gold, 4 health

• Adamant Armour, 1 gold, 5 armor

• Romily Weaklax, 2 gold, 7 health

• Full Tetsu, 5 gold, 7 armor 7 health

You need to consider how much money you can spend on healing, if you have synergy with armor, how much healing is needed and so on. And this is just the neutral support options, not counting hero specific cards, cards that have other effects besides healing or enemies that reward health. And sometimes offence is the best defence, right?

Enemy cards are another beast entirely. There are some enemies you can kill in one hit, taking no damage. Other enemies require you to think if you need a better weapon before facing them, or if the reward is worth it to play it early and take some extra damage. Sometimes you have a bunch of unplayable enemy cards in your hand, since the rewards aren't worth the trouble, and you lose valuable weapon durability each time you swing at a monster. The effect is equivalent to mana screw or mana flood in magic, but a deckbuilding challenge at the same time.

For example, I was confused by Undead Dragon, a 6/13 creature that rewards 2 gold and reads "Remove 10 health from rival". So if you manage to kill it in two hits, you take 6 damage, gain 2 gold and your opponent loses 10 health. In addition you may lose two weapon charges you have bought previously. I thought, is it worth it to go through all this trouble, just to net a 4 point health difference to my opponent? That four health is equivalent to a cabbage. And the answer lies in the fact that sometimes 10 damage is all you need to win, and building your deck to use this as a finisher is part of the puzzle.

At this point I realize I've probably written enough, and that I haven't played enough to give any meaningful analysis on game balance. I seemed to get wrecked by aggro Vanescula, so I put in a lot of healing in my deck to have a better chance. Then I faced someone who played a ton of weapon buffs and monkfish, and I had chip damage and healing, so I lost. I got about half way leveling my heroes to level 10, and ranked up to rank 30 or so, tested and improved my decks and had fun. So yeah, it's a fun game.