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Damion beat me to posting about it… although people actually read his blog. But what’s special about this? I started writing this before Damion posted back in October, and I’m just now finishing. How’s that for productivity? Trying to ship an MMO tends to get in the way of everything else.

More seriously, I have a lot of thoughts on Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, but I need to remember them before I can start writing.

Update: More importantly, it’s getting a sci-fi follow-up called Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I don’t need to know anything else about the game - I’m already a guaranteed customer.

Counters are cool, but I’ve never been fond of trump cards that require no skill or strategy to use. It leads to the situation where I win automatically because I have X and my opponent has Y. There’s no satisfaction to gain from a predetermined victory in a competitive game. Trumps cards are my second greatest complaint about the typical card-based strategy games. Insane costs are the first (thanks, Magic).

.. Which brings me back to Culdcept Saga, which has the advantage of charging you a reasonable one-time fee instead of asking you to sell your kidneys to be competitive. I’m pretty much at the end of the game now, and I’m starting to see quite a few cards come up that directly determine the outcome of the match. For example, in one especially big match I destroyed all 15 of my opponent’s lands in two turns. He had 9,000 points with a map goal of 12,000, and those two spells dropped him below 1,000.

Fortunately, Culdcept lets you disallow rare cards. Unfortunately, I have lots of cool-rare-but-not-overpowered cards. It’s a shame to have to remove all of those cards from play just to prevent a handful of cards that sap the fun. Regardless, I’ve had a great time playing Culdcept single player, co-op (yay!) and competitively.