Designers: Robert Dougherty, Darwin Kastle
Build a fleet, and take it to war. Star Realms is a tight, well-balanced and interesting deckbuilder designed for two players.
Each player starts his turn with five cards. These cards have effects when played, such as giving them money to buy more cards, deal damage to their opponents or their starbases, draw more cards, make their opponents discard cards, and other effects.
At the end of the turn, the cards they played and acquired go into their discard, and they draw five new cards. If they do not have enough cards to do so, they shuffle their discard to form a new deck, and draw from the top. This is a deckbuilder similar to Dominion, where players effectively are building an engine on the fly.
Interesting Mechanic: Starbases. Unlike other cards you play on your turn, Starbases are not discarded. They stay on your tableau once played, until your opponent deals enough damage to force you to discard them. Starbases tend to have persistent effects, and enable color-matching synergy combos, which are at the heart of deckbuilding in Star Realms.
Bonus Mechanic: Trashing. Many deckbuilders have the concept of ‘trash a card’ – which is to remove a card from your hand or discard pile from the game, but Star Realms pushes it front and center, making it the central mechanic of one of the four factions. Trashing cards is underappreciated by most new gamers, but is crucial towards weeding out the crappy cards in your starter deck so you can more reliably draw your power cards. Trashing cards makes crazy looping combos fire much more reliably, and makes the genre in general much more fun.
Star Realms is a small, cheap deckbuilder that is great for two players, and has recieved a wealth of post-launch expansion support.
(Photo Credit: Monopolis Wonder)
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