Quoting Ian:
For several months my partner has been doing art, design and other work for a combination real time strategy/collectible card game called Spirit Siege. It’s Kickstarting right now until September 26, and I’d like to see it succeed not just because of my personal interest in my partner’s success but also because I think it’s a really clever and worthy game.
To that end, I’m devising 25 reasons you should support Spirit Siege, and I’ll be posting one per day on this blog from now until the day before the Kickstarter finishes. After that, I’ll go back to my regular bimonthly posting schedule.
First, the game in a nutshell: Spirit Siege will have you build a deck of cards representing combat units and use them to place those units on a battlefield like the one on the right in order to defend your crystals and destroy your opponent’s. You have a single resource (provisionally called “mana” like in Magic: The Gathering) and a hand of up to 5 cards with different abilities and mana costs, and your mana and the cards in your hand both replenish at a constant rate. That’s all there is to the basic rules, but the units have many different abilities when you drop them on the field. There’s a demo video here which shows a full game being played and demonstrates some of those abilities.
With that in hand, the first of my 25 reasons that you should support Spirit Siege is:
1. There’s no other game quite like it.
There are lots of real time strategy games (like StarCraft and Age of Empires) and plenty of collectible card games (e.g. Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon) but if there are any games that combine the two in the way Spirit Siege does, I’m not aware of them. Most collectible card games are turn-based rather than real-time; few if any RTSes have the kind of deck-building metagame that Spirit Siege does. So I’m excited about Spirit Siege because it combines some familiar game mechanics to make a brisk, exciting game that doesn’t feel exactly like anything that’s come before it.
Here’s the link to Spirit Siege’s Kickstarter page.