Review anarchistica 3/5 · Jun 27, 2018
Too random
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 …
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.