Star Realms (2014)

Star Realms is a board game similar to games like Ascension and Legendary Encounters. Both players start with an identical deck consisting of resource cards and damage cards. Resource cards are used to buy new, better cards, chosen from 6 cards in the middle of the board - five random, one type always available. You play your cards until your deck runs out, then you shuffle your cards and add the cards you bought - so it's not a deck-building game in the traditional sense.

The problem with Star Realms is that it's very random. You have very little control over the outcome of the game, it's pretty much up to luck. On top of that there's no Easy difficulty, so you end up losing to the Normal AI randomly. I started playing Magic in 1996 (when Kastle still played) and i've played dozens of deck-building games. During my last drafts in Eternal and Elder Scrolls Legends i got the maximum amount of wins (7 and 9). I have some notion of what i'm doing, and it's barely relevant.

Aside from the excessive "Ameritrashness" of the game, the technical side is lacking. The game lags on my system (Ryzen 1600, 16GB ram), settings can only be adjusted in the main menu and the wording in the menus is vague ("leave"?).

I had quite a bit of fun exploring the different factions and such, but ultimately losing to random luck just gets too frustrating after a while.

Decided to buy the full version and an expansion. So far just playing against the computer and I noticed a few things. The luck factor is super high. It comes down to what's in the trade row often. Sometimes there are just bases or really expensive things, which makes it tough. In that case I buy explorers and hope for something coming in when the computer takes a card.

An ideal start for me would be some scrapping ships, buy a few explorers, load up on blobs then hope to draw many cards per turn.