With the country entirely declared a "red zone", gathering bans due to the corona virus, friends in quarantine and voluntary isolations, we have decided to retrieve some titles from the library to open this section dedicated to playable solitaire games with a not excessive cost: Maiden's Quest e Dark Souls: the Card game they were our first choice.
We look forward to doing more episodes in the coming weeks, assuming someone survived to read them.
Maiden's Quest
The first title we rediscovered is Maiden's Quest di Kenneth C. Shannon III, published in 2018 by WizKids.
A girl kidnapped and trapped in a tower, tired of waiting for a hero to recover her, decides to free herself by facing various enemies and dangers.
We will go to choose the protagonist of the adventure, the dress she wears and the Villain who kidnapped her. The selected Maiden and Villain cards will show us how to compose our deck by listing which and how many cards to insert from the Item, Health, Obstacle, Savior and Treasure decks.
The peculiarity of the title consists in the possibility of being played without a table: once the game deck has been prepared we will not need surfaces on which to place the cards but only both hands free (one to hold the deck and open a "fan" of five cards, the other to move and rotate them as explained by the rules).
Despite the setting of 10 and praise and the excellent idea of the game to be played "without a table", the mechanics of Maiden's Quest Unfortunately, they leave something to be desired: the games are almost totally at the mercy of chance, the clashes are in fact determined by the symbols on the five cards at the top of the deck without the possibility of the player's intervention. Only with upgrades and downgrades (obtainable by winning or losing the clashes) will we have a choice on the cards to rotate based on the symbols shown, trying to positively influence the subsequent clashes.
Also worth mentioning is the bad rules of the game, one of the worst we've ever come across.
Rating: 5 / 10
Dark Souls: the card game
After the disappointment of the boardgame of the same name (which we have reviewed on this page) and certain of the fact that the IP of Dark Souls deserves something better, we wanted to give this a chance card game 1 to 4 players of David Carl and produced by Steamforged Games.
Just like in the video game, we will play as a fantasy hero (a choice between knight, sorcerer, assassin and herald) each player will face monsters of various levels, improving their characteristics and equipment from time to time in order to confront each other. with two of the four bosses available.
The starting deck is made up of 28 cards ("equipment" and "stamina") which also constitute the player's life points (and will increase during the game). The "stamina" cards represent one of four different characteristics (strength, dexterity, intelligence, faith) and can be used to activate weapons and defenses by carrying out attacks, parries and dodges.
Fortunately, this title of David Carl it has very little in common with the board game: we are faced with a fast card-game with a good tactical level, perfectly usable even alone. The farming of monsters was the aspect that disturbed us most in the board game, in this card game it has not been eliminated (probably not to deviate too much from the video game) but the brevity and variety of the encounters manages to keep the interest of the players high .
The element we liked the most is the deck-building phase, full of interesting choices on how to set up our deck to face the following battles. Depending on the equipment recovered, we can decide to push more on some of the four stats (by purchasing enhanced stamina cards) or even abandon some features to focus on the others and optimize the frequency of useful combinations.
Compared to the cooperative mode, in single player the tactical aspect of the clashes is slightly sacrificed but the amount of choices available in the deck-building phase is expanded, keeping the level of challenge and fun high.
Rating: 7/10
We conclude this column for today, giving you an appointment next week for two more solo mini-reviews.
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