Star Realms

Two decks of cards, a couple dozen scout and viper cards each side starts with, plus a shared trade row of ships and bases in the middle, and that’s the game. The box is barely bigger than the cards themselves, which mattered enough in my planning that it beat out a couple of chunkier deckbuilders I looked at before the season started. Everything’s fine cardstock, held up three summers now with just a rubber band and a gallon bag, no case needed.

It’s a two-player game at heart, twenty minutes a round once you know the cards, and I’ve gotten a fair number of rounds in against a smokejumper or a trail crew guy who happened up here on a supply run and had half an hour before heading back down. That’s the thing about it. It reads fast enough that someone who’s never touched a deckbuilder can be playing a real game inside five minutes of explanation, buying ships from the shared row to build a bigger hand while attacking the other player’s authority points down from fifty to zero. No board, no dice, just cards flipping and numbers dropping, and it moves quick enough that a loss doesn’t sting the way a long game’s loss does.

There’s a solo mode built into some printings and a few unofficial ones floating around online I can’t get to without signal, so I’ve mostly played it against a scripted “easy” hand of my own making, drafting for both sides and trying to play each side honestly. It’s not as sharp as the real thing. The game wants a second mind pushing back on your trade row choices, deciding which ships to snap up before you can, and an empty chair can’t do that half as well as even a mediocre real opponent.

The factions give it more shape than I expected going in. Four colors, each with its own personality, the red ships that hit you for damage as soon as they land, the green ones that stack up hand size and card draw, and mixing factions is usually worse than committing, which is a decision I didn’t see coming from a game this stripped down.

Rating it a notch below what it could be only because of how much it depends on that second player showing up, and up here that’s not something I can count on. When it happens, though, it’s the fastest good game I own.