Quick Look: SolForge

Woo! Tried this and didn't much care for the mechanics, too simple maybe? Curious to see what Drew and the gang think!

Mr. Rorie?!

Hey guys, this is a great game for anyone into Magic The Gathering! Give it a try!

If anyone has any questions about this game feel free to ask me here! http://www.giantbomb.com/solforge/3030-42040/forums/ask-me-about-solforge-1448841/

EDIT: Being able to cancel Corpse Crawler's ability is a bug, lol. Made my eyes bug out for a second there. Also cards go into your discard pile the instant they are played, not when they die, and shuffle back in every 4 turns. Maximum playset size is 3.

MATTHEW!

Glad y'all did this QL, definitely going to check it out now. Nice appearance from Rorie, thanks!

tried this on steam the other day, seemed cool if a bit simplistic.

Metal Gear AC!D is amazing! I wish they would put it on VITA or something :/

Thanks for this interesting QL @drewbert and @rorie

I really wish they'd make a Lunch Money iPad game.

This seems like a pretty terrible card game. If there's no "mana" every single card has to be balanced perfectly with every other card.

I will echo the sentiment of this game seeming pretty simple. I know very little about card games, but I got a very Junior's First Card Game vibe. My opinion is born out of sheer ignorance though.

Side question, Is there any sweet "Rorie: Social Engineer" photoshops? I'm thinking Rorie leaning out of a Facebook/Twitter branded choo choo train with a dog face.

Made by Sonya Blade. Got it.

Doh, took a break from playing Hearthstone and this just made me want to go back and play...more Hearthstone

Just a quick few things - when you play a creature, it's as if you played a token making card. The token is on the field, but the card itself levels up. Every four turns is when you shuffle your discard pile back into your deck, so before you see any leveled cards, you've seen at least 20 of your 30 card deck.

Also, there is quite a lot of depth to the game. The mechanics are very simple to begin, but as you check out different cards you realize there is a cost - opportunity. Some cards are very weak early, and require you to level them before they will have an effect on the board, so they're not that great against aggressive decks, whereas other cards are great early, but don't do much in the late game.

While it may seem a little luck based, with some time you'll notice that there's actually quite a lot of skill involved, as the community has been running tournaments for quite a while and we have consistent top 4 finishers.

If anyone wants to check for news and strategy articles, you can find them at a fansite dedicated to helping others improve: www.forgewatch.com

@ares42: Except they really don't, because you're making a deck of 30 cards. If card X is really shitty against 99% of cards but extremely effective against one of the most dominant cards in the meta, it might be worth playing a 1of or 2of. My go-to deck is full of cards that are underpowered if you take the entire set and compare them on average, but they're worth playing because they synergize well as a whole.

@molenator85: @rhaknar: The basic rules are simple but top level play is very complex. Likewise, chess may be simple to learn, but I wouldn't call it Junior's First Strategy Game when compared to Warhammer.

SolForge looks really fun. Having played Uncharted Fight for Fortune on Vita I can see myself having fun with this game, too.

@starvinggamer: Fair enough, and after hearing the pedigree for this game I imagined that might be the case. Watching this quick look was more enjoyable than my brief time with the game. It's beta state may have given me a bad impression.

Ok, so I will appear like a preacher, but here we go anyway.

That was my initial reaction as well. It *seems* like every single card you play is free. But it isn't. The balancing factor are the way the cards level. Cards aren't strong at every level. Levels work *very* similarly to mana costs.

Example? A card like Deepbranch Prowler is a 7/7 with breakthrough (I assume you're familiar with magic, that's basically trample) at Lv1. That's is quite above average compared to most other creatures and is likely to require your opponent to use 2 cards to deal with it. However, it's Lv2 is an 8/8 w breakthrough (slightly below average, but still fine) and its Lv3 is a 9/9 with breakthrough (that's *really* weak). It doesn't level very well.
A card like Scrapforge Titan is only a 1/1 with 1 Armor at Lv1 (armor reduces damage dealt to the creature each turn) so it basically wastes one of your 2 actions per turn when you play it, a 5/5 with Armor 5 at Lv2 (fine, but below average) and a 20/20 with Armor 10 (!!) at Lv3. You should be able to see a very clear parallel between this sort of system and mana costs in a game like Magic. Deepbranch Prowler is sort of like a 1 mana aggressive 2/2 (Goblin Guide, Diregraf Ghoul etc.) while Scrapforge Titan is like a 5 or 6 mana bomb (Thragtusk, Titan Cycle, Wurmcoil Engine etc.)

Of course, most cards fall somewhere in between and aren't on this kind of extreme spectrum, but I think this example illustrates the mechanic of the game well. And sure, some cards are strictly weaker than their higher rarity counterpart, but this is identical to Magic.

No one will play a Grizzly Bear (2/2 for 2 mana) in constructed when you can play a 2/2 with an ability for 2 mana. Just because you *can* cast a 1 mana 1/1 with haste on Turn 1 doesn't mean it's "balanced" compared to a card like Thragtusk.

Just because you *can* play the "strongest" cards right now "without any cost" doesn't mean it won't impact your long term deck and how it levels up. The hidden "cost" is gauging how much impact the card you played will have on the game *right now* in comparison to the future.

Sorry for the wall of text, just wanted to clear the misunderstanding. The game is solid and fun and while it's not as deep as something like grand daddy of all the TCGs like Magic (tho Magic has the benefit of being around for 20 years), it's developed by people who played Magic competitively for many years (Brian Kibler, Patrick Sullivan etc.), so they definitely want to make the game good. Solforge is the definition of "easy to learn, difficult to master".

I'm not so sure about this game after this QL. From what I see it doesn't really look interesting at all, but maybe playing it will prove different than watching them play it.

@molenator85: I get that. The beta launch has been really rough and until you've built up a fairly significant collection, any deck you build is probably going to be of the "trade as well as you can and hope you draw the first bomb" variety.

MATT RORIE

This game is super fun. I bought it when the beta was a buy-in on Steam because a friend of a friend is on the dev team, but I'm glad I did! Probably the best digital ccg I've played, though I'm HYPE for Hearthstone.

Edit: I've had no connectivity problems on the PC. Also if you try to save a deck with more than 3 copies of one card (I think it's 3) it will tell you to take some out.

@starvinggamer: At one point I was looking at like 4 skeleton armies and a weak zombie dude, and the AI had almost the same thing. I zipped back to League of Legends after that. I guess all these faux "betas" have made me overly sensitive to actual betas.

Aha, the token analogy makes perfect sense from an MtG perspective. Sounds like an interesting system. I'm going to give this a shot. The pathetically intransparent conversion rate immediately angered me though. Small nitpick but it always comes across as a developer lacking any confidence in the game actually being worth the money you spend.

Fucking CCGs. The business model is just so damn shady. But fun, so very fun. Oh, how I love to tinker with deck builds. How I hate to find out that the one playset that'd do so well in my deck will set me back far too much cash. I'm not too sure I'll ever get that bug out of my system, oh well.

Very nice QL!

I tried this out last night, coincidentally. It's a pretty fun little game. Check it out!

@sphinx: The game gets surprisingly deep for how simplistic the mechanics are. You have interesting decisions early on because you need to balance playing cards that help you now vs cards that will level and help you later

@thecable: @starvinggamer: while it's hard to say, considering the game uses a very different mechanic than what's conventional, what I was trying to say (albeit probaby poorly) was that since there's only a single factor to determine the power of a card (the innate strength/ability of the card) it's gonna very quickly turn into a situation where if you're making a certain kinda deck it's very easy to know which cards you need. Without the depth of a second mechanic to determine a cards strength it's pretty much impossible to reach a point where some cards aren't straight up more powerful than others.

Think I'm gonna try this out. Thanks for the quick look!

Well, that's kind of the same with any card game though, right? As I mentioned, a 1 mana 1/1 with haste may not be *strictly* better than a 2 mana 2/2 with haste, but if you played the game enough you'd know that 1 mana 1/1s are usually far too low impact to ever see constructed play. So while the cards have a fundamental difference in a sense that one can never be cast on T1 under normal circumstances, the power level of one of them is still so much higher than the other one's.

In a game like Magic you measure the power level of a card by looking at other options at similar mana cost, right? Well, in Solforge you measure how good the level 1 of this particular card is in comparison to other cards and then have to gauge how well will it level up if the game goes longer. It looks simple, but it really isn't.

I mean, you *can* cast Scrapforge Titan anytime you want, sure, but its earlier levels don't do that much to fight your opponent on the board. So while in Magic you would have wait until you have enough mana to cast it (let's say 6 mana), in Solforge you play its earlier weaker version first, level it up and and play for the long time, until your reach player rank 3 and can draw Lv3 version.

The amount of time it takes a player to reach something like 6 mana in Magic is parallel to the time it takes a player to reach player rank 3 and draw their "bombs" in Solforge.

Hey! Rorie on a quicklook! Great!

But in a game like MtG how much time it takes to reach something like 6 mana will always be a core mechanic, and can be heavily manipulated.

Hearthstone looks better than this, sadly Blizzard is keeping that game locked up pretty tight. I wish I could get in on that beta...

Now it makes sense, looks like the AI didn't abuse this (it played / destroyed Corpse Crawler on its first turn, moved by quickly so the crew didn't see what happened).

Nice!

@video_game_king said:

There's another free to play card game out with some deeper mechanics called Might & Magic: Duel of Champions. Seems alright to me so far.

That's the thing though, there are plenty of secondary mechanics. Drew was playing with a majority of starter cards which are very vanilla, straight up Attack / Health bodies with very little else going on. A majority of the cards in the set have a wide variety of abilities that allow for numerous synergies and interactions.

Here's the set list if you want to see what I'm talking about: http://solforgewiki.forgewatch.com/wiki/2013_Core_Set

Not true, at all. First turn, forest + mana elf. Second turn, forest + 3-drop mana manipulation. 3rd turn 5-6 mana and possibly endgame in 2 turns. Obviously that's assuming nothing controlling happens, but to say mana is a static progression in MTG is real, real wrong. You can get a scoop in 3 turns with the right decks, 4-5 with most others.

Looks neat. Going to give it a shot on Steam.

I would love to see more board and card game coverage on this site. I think it is an industry that is slowly getting more relevant, and it would be awesome to see another video games website do some board game coverage, like Cardboard Children or Shut Up, Sit Down's pieces on Eurogamer. They have a couple RPGs sitting on their shelves. Just get them a copy of Dominion and set them to it in a quicklook.

I probably won't play it but I can certainly see the draw of this type of game.

That's definitely true, Mana is a lot more flexible and definitely a deeper mechanic overall, but the parallel is still there which is what I was pointing out. A lot of initial impression seem to be "Oh, there's no cost to playing anything, everyone just plays 2 cards per turn, it's far too simplistic and easy".

I mean, yeah, even with all that said Solforge is still extremely basic and "casual" compared to the other TCGs on the market, but it was designed that way. It is far simpler at the basic level and can be learnt in a couple minutes, yet still retains a high amount of strategy. It isn't very hard to add a bunch of unnecessary mechanics, it's a lot harder to follow "easy to learn difficult to master".

I guess I just hate when people dismiss it just based on complexity of the rules, I did that too initially, but I've been loving it so far.

thats 1 color that has mana generating 1-drops out of 5 colors. so yes, you can get around it if you are playing a specific strategy...but in general it doesnt work like as easy as you make it sound

Speaking of Star Wars card games, Fantasy Flight Games put out a Star Wars themed LCG (Star Wars LCG). For those who do not know, an LCG is essentially a collectible card game without the random booster packs. Essentially, they release a core pack and then rapidly release expansion packs of varying size. It's actually pretty fun and the card art would make any Star Wars fan vibrate in their seat.

NEEEERDS!

I honestly have no idea why you'd play any TCG that isn't Magic the Gathering.

I love this game, and I long for the release of it for Android. The freedom over the deck combining is just such a big relief unlike the MTG games.