Siege Storm

The Game

Siege Storm is a 2-player head-to-head battle card game with a fantasy setting. You each have your own deck of 34 cards. Every card is a fighter. Cards are also your basic currency - gems, which you need to spend to play cards. Your deck is your life points. Your goal is to make your opponent exhaust their deck before you do yours. It's a fight to the death. 

The game box has two compartments for the two decks that come with the game - a good guy deck and a bad guy deck. Seraphia and Styxia. The game has expansion decks so you can play with other factions. 

The factions have different card backs. 

There is only one card type in the game. They are all fighters. The number at the top left corner is the cost to play a card. You pay in gems. Your cards are gems. That means to play a card, you will have to discard other cards from your hand. The number at the bottom left is the attack strength, and at the bottom right corner the defense strength. There are two powers in the centre. The action is what you can perform immediately by playing the card as an action. If you play the card as a fighter, the action can also be triggered after three rounds. The passive ability takes effect as long as the card is in play and face-up. 

This game lets you to do deck-building. A playable deck requires 34 cards. You get more than that number of cards for both the factions. Some cards are marked and they are the recommended deck for beginners. Once you get familiar with the game you can customise your deck. Duplicate cards are allowed. 

A game is set up like this. The three cards at the centre represent the front line. You can send fighters here to hold ground. The purpose of holding ground is simply to allow a fighter's passive ability to remain in effect. The three stacks on the right are your draw deck, just that it is split into three. This is for the sake of providing a visual cue for how many life points you still have. You always draw cards from the top deck. When one deck runs out, you move on to the next one. 

The space between the front line column and your health bar column is the marching column. This is where you deploy fighters and where they advance. You always deploy a fighter at the bottom position. Every turn, your fighters move forward one position. When they advance from the top position, you must decide what to ask them to do. You have three options. You can get your fighter to storm the opponent. The action of the card is triggered. Your fighter also attacks your opponent or one of their fighters. Or you can position your fighter to hold ground, i.e. to camp at a front line position. Or you can convert your fighter to play a support role. From that point onwards, it gives you a discount when you play cards. 

These are the core mechanisms of the game. Not very complicated. The cards have various abilities, and that's where things get more interesting. The various card abilities define the characteristics of the factions. 

The Play

When playing a game of this nature, I can't avoid comparing it against Magic: The Gathering. I'm a newbie in Magic. I have only tried it a few times. Siege Storm has a different core system, but I consider it a similar kind of game. Every turn you will draw cards and thus deplete your life points. You can look at this as a benchmark. You need to play your cards well to deplete your opponent's life points efficiently. Much more efficiently than 2 cards per turn. 

One difficult decision you have to make in the game is which cards to play and which cards to sacrifice as payment for the card you play. This is similar to Race for the Galaxy. This is sometimes quite painful. Another decision which can sometimes be tricky is whether to play a card as a fighter or as an action. The action would be immediate and impactful, but if you play the card as a fighter and wait three turns, you will have more options. You can storm, i.e. launch an attack. You can have the fighter hold ground, i.e. extend its passive power. You can create a supporter, i.e. long term discount. If you play a fighter, your card is exposed and you are giving your opponent time to prepare to respond. If you see a powerful attack coming, you probably want to deploy a high defense fighter as a shield. 

You won't be able to play all cards. Some will be spent as payment. 

Now my opponent has two fighters on his marching path and one of them is about to strike. I only have one fighter on my marching path, newly deployed. This is in preparation for the impending attack. 

The face-down card at the bottom left is a support minion. This was a fighter which had completed its march and I had chosen to turn it into support. Horizontal placement means I have used its discount power this turn. I will reset it to vertical orientation at the start of my next turn. 

To play well you need to be familiar with your deck, and your opponent's as well. It will help you plan and strategise. The luck of the draw will affect how you play. You need to be flexible. You do know what cards you have in your deck, so you can anticipate what will eventually come. It seems to me in the early game you should send fighters to hold ground (so that you enjoy the long term passive abilities) and also to play support (so that you get discounts for the rest of the game). These seem to be simply sound preparation and build up. There are some cards which let you launch early and effective attacks, which is contrary to this general strategy. Probably there will be more different tactics with other decks. I am only scratching the surface now. 

The Thoughts

If one-on-one battle card games is your thing, Siege Storm is worth checking out. It's short and sweet. It's pretty. I'm not really into this genre, so at the moment I have only taken a quick taste. There is certainly more of it I have not seen or appreciated. I think you'll need many more plays and also you need to fiddle with the deck-building aspect to fully enjoy the game. The two factions in this base game are quite different and have their unique styles of play. The good guys can heal themselves by moving cards from the discard pile back to the draw deck. They also have some expensive but powerful angels. If you get rich enough, deploying an angel can deal a killer blow to your opponent. The bad guys have some disposable but quick and strong units which can be sent on early suicide missions, messing with the opponent's tempo. I checked BGG and there are four other faction decks which have been released.