Aces & Adventures (2023)

• Playtime: 32 hours

• Played: 2025

• Expectation: None. In my experience, these games vary wildly in quality.

The Good

• The five classes play very differently.
• Each class has roughly three different builds.
• Three different game modes with four difficulty levels each.
• Very easy to get in to if you know poker hands.
• Core gameplay is fun.

The Bad

• Very GPU-intensive despite being a simple looking card game.
• Deck names are tiny on deck selection screen.
• Atrocious deckbuilder. Literally the worst one i've seen in 30+ such games.
• You can only build an ability deck and a 30-card minimum leaves little room for experimentation.
• Not being able to pick suits makes it a bit too luck-dependent.
• Each character has 30 levels for unlocks, and then you need another 30 to unlock free skill choice.
• Giving people the choice between healing or a level up is intrinsically bad design. Like kicking people when they're down.
• Putting the story images and text on a tiny card makes no sense.
• The level selection screen only shows the name, no other info.

The Ugly

• Some of the worst writing i've ever seen. Painfully pretentious poetry and atrociously abundant alliterations.
• The game is designed to have you replay missions but the story cards show every time. Having to click through as many as twelve (!!) cards with accompanying narration to get to the next event is obnoxious.
• Cards affecting certain suits don't use the suit icon but the English name instead. 'Hearts' are obvious. 'Diamonds' and 'spades' take me a second or two. But 'clubs'? The symbol is a clover. We call it a clover. It is incredibly unintuitive that Anglo's still use the term from Spanish suits. I have lost battles because of this. It would have taken zero effort to get this right.

Conclusion

Despite the seemingly endless bad design choices, A&A is still a solid deckbuilding game that you can just pick up and play, while also having some depth.

7/10