alexxkay | Loot and Legends

I have spent a nontrivial amount of time over the last 24 hours playing the new iPad game Loot and Legends. I say “new”; actually, it’s a new slightly-simplified port of a PC game called Card Hunter, made by some ex-colleagues of mine a few years ago.

The gameplay is a unique combination of tactical wargame and collectible card game. You control a team of three figures, each of them can be equipped with many different types of gear. Whereas, in most games, deer would add directly to your stats, in these games gear adds cards to your deck. Each round of combat, you draw three cards (per character) that you can use over the course of the round. But you can’t just build an arbitrary deck, since each piece of gear comes with a specific set of cards. Once you’re out of the early game, you often find gear that has some great cards really want, paired with less impressive (or even outright negative!) cards that you have to put up with in your deck if you want the good ones.

The game’s aesthetic is one of old-school tabletop D&D. The miniatures are represented as little cardboard cutouts, there is a pimply DM who will taunt you, and each “adventure” starts by displaying a “cover” whose layout and typeface will be very familiar to most of my friends list.

While it is a free-to-play game, there actually seems to be no need to give them money if you don’t want to. On my antique iPad 2, I have found it to be quite crashy, but, thankfully, the programmers seem to have set it up to aggressively save state, so that despite these crashes I have never actually lost any gameplay progress. Moreover, after a crash, the game reloads quite quickly. It does require a near-constant Internet connection but is pretty good about reconnecting smoothly after your connection drops.

Highly recommended, especially for Rickthefightguy.