But if you’re attacking a Champion, you’re not attacking your opponent. They all have their own health values and can only be wiped from the table when attacked directly. Champions are essentially units that you play to the table which remain there after the rest of your cards go to the discard pile.
Hero realms board game series#
The other nifty trick the series pulls off is what’s known in Star Realms as Base cards, but has been re-purposed in Hero Realms as the Champions concept.
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The red Necros faction tends toward nastiness and heavy attack damage, for example. These factions are also indicative of the style of card, very much akin to MtG’s colour system. So for Hero Realms, you may have a card that deals 3 points of damage to your opponent that belongs to the yellow Imperial faction, but if you happen to play another Imperial card at the same time, you will do an additional 2 points of damage. Where the Realms series gets interesting is in its adoption of a faction system, essentially the idea that cards belong to a faction of a certain colour, and that being able to play multiple cards of a certain colour will unlock additional abilities. Reduce your opponent’s health to zero, and it’s game over. It’s pretty standard stuff for a deckbuilder, the idea being that you optimise your deck to produce the best possible hand each turn. Certain cards give you money which you can use to purchase new cards from the Market (which go directly to your discard pile), others are direct attacks against a player and other still buff and debuff, such as giving health or forcing your opponent to discard. On your turn, you play as many of those 5 cards to the table as you want and utilise their effects to perform various actions. Players begin with the same deck of 10 cards, drawing 5 of them to form a starting hand (first player only draws three on the first turn). But a quick overview nevertheless, for those who might value one. If you’ve played a game of Star Realms, you could probably play Hero Realms without even consulting the rulebook. Throw in a deceptively simple rule-set, a quick play time, a very wallet-friendly pricepoint and voilà, you have yourself a massively popular deckbuilder. As veterans of Magic: The Gathering, Dougherty and Kastle must have realised that the key lay in translating the combatative nature of MtG, that feeling of whittling down your enemy’s health until he takes his last metaphorical breath. Even Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, which also happens to be partly a Dougherty design and perhaps most resembles an early iteration of Star Realms, was chiefly concerned with earning Honor Points.
Most of the early popular deckbuilders such as Dominion and Thunderstone may have been competitive, but it was a race to victory points that determined the winner. What made Star Realms such a success? Timing certainly, smart design for sure, but mainly it was just a perfect distillation of the appeal of deck-builders. Although both Dougherty and Kastle have published designs behind their names, White Wizard Games was a new studio, not nearly long-lived enough to have cultivated an expectancy for success like an FFG, so when Star Realms rocketed to success I assume partying was done like it was 2199. When Robert Dougherty and Darwin Kastle began to collaborate on Star Realms it’s not hard to visualise the enthusiasm blossoming in those early prototyping sessions, both discussing the what ifs of future triumph. Paradoxically, those same designers I’d imagine are just as often crippled by self-doubt. Every designer believes in the potential of success for their idea, why wouldn’t they? It’s both a prerequisite for being able to see an idea reach fruition, and simply an integral part of their DNA.
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