Rules of Sacred Realm

Published by MagicIsland, Rules of Sacred Realm is a duelling card game for two, four or six players, with the four- and six-player games played in teams - so you're either playing with two players or two teams of two or three. The game is themed around a magical academy so players are duelling using competing spells, with players seeking to reduce their opponents' vitality to zero. Tho' there's no actual connection to J K Rowling, it's a theme that's bound to appeal to the legion of Harry Potter fans around the world.

In the basic game, player characters are broadly symmetrical; their core abilities are identical but they do have one asymmetric spell card (two in a two-player game). Once you've mastered the basic game, however, you can switch to playing with asymmetric characters.

The core deck of 150 cards comprises combat and spell cards. It's the combat cards that are used in duelling and these follow a rock/paper/scissors system; in this case, dark/principle/light. Combat cards also have a numerical value in the range 1-16. This is used to determine the winner when both the attacker and defender play a card of the same type (eg: both play 'light' cards). If the defender's card beats that of the attacker, the attacker can respond to the defender's card - again by playing a higher number in the same suit or by playing a card from the suit that beats that card in the rock/paper/scissors system.

One of the most interesting aspects of Rules of Sacred Realm is that the longer a duel goes on the more damage it does to the loser: the loser draws a card for every card played in the duel but they must discard cards where that takes them above their seven-card hand limit, taking a vitality point hit for every card discarded in this way. That means players are incentivised to make a judgement call on whether it may be best to concede a duel and just take maybe 1 or 2 points of damage rather than prolong the duel with the risk that you might end up suffering much greater damage. This introduces both a push-your-luck element as well as scope for bluffing and misdirection.

Each combat card also shows one of seven runes. These affect which special effect starting cards can be used with the combat cards. Spell cards are divided into instant, augmented and delayed effects. It's only instant effects that have a direct and immediate impact on duels; augments add to your own or a team ally's' character for their next turn and delays likewise handicap an opponent. At the end of a duel, a Shockwave spell card can be played to increase damage through 'Overstrike' and an Infusion spell card can be played to reduce damage. Every Overstrike does 2 damage so you're likely to find winning or losing in the Sacred Realm often comes down to how much Overstrike damage you can inflict on your opponent(s).

Hand management forms a crucial part of the game. Subject to the limitation of your maximum seven-card hand size, you can at any point in your turn take an action to discard up to four cards and draw up to four cards. You can play spell cards and you can of course duel other players.

We've enjoyed Rules of Sacred Realm both as a two-player head-to-head dueller and as a team game. For the latter, 'Astral' skills come to the fore: you gain an Astral token as a reward for winning a duel and these tokens can be spent in a team game to swap cards with an ally or to give an ally an extra action. We've particularly appreciated the scaleability of the game so that players can progress from the basic game before exploring the additional complexities introduced by the different asymmetric characters - and there are 20 of those to discover!

Rules of Sacred Realm is due to launch shortly on Gamefound. Click here for more details.

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