Be a haunted house, play pinball billiards, and help a bird migrate with the power of spelling.
When I pitched PC Gamer a list of the top five deckbuilder demos of Steam Next Fest, I probably should have checked that there weren’t 4 billion of the bloody things. Still, it’s a fantastic problem to have. Developers keep finding clever twists on deckbuilding, so much so that my top two don’t even contain cards. Here’s five you shouldn’t miss—you can try all of them for free until March 3rd.
Aliosso
Both a dice and deckbuilder, Aliosso knows I’m a sucker for a big number. With the right multiplier-giving cards on your left and a lucky dice roll on your right, you can deal thousands of digits of damage, cackling away as you easily wipe out its monsters. Until you journey further into its nasty desert and meet something that smacks you with OTT numeracy right back. I also like its clever water-depleting idea, where you have to weigh up using a finite pool of H2O to make armor (what, do you freeze it into a shield or something?). Loads of great risk-reward ideas in this one and all with lovely pixel art too.
Castle V Castle
You play as a little knight, a witch, and a builder, all living in a mini castle. Awww! Just one problem – the witch, knight, and builder in the opposing castle all hate your guts. Whoever knocks their opponent’s castle down is the winner. The best attacks unfortunately cost a small fortune, so you have to decide whether to build up your resources, deplete your opponents’, defend yourself, or strike the other castle. Basically no matter what you do you’re always neglecting something important, keeping the tables constantly turning until the very second one castle finally collapses. A tutorial would have been nice but it’s great once you figure out how to actually play it.
Deck of Haunts
A deckbuilder where you play as a haunted house is such a brilliant idea that I can almost forgive its awful title. Foolish mortals wander into your cursed abode and you have to kill them or drive them insane. Then you slurp up their essence and use it to add extensions to your home, like a nice kitchen, or a phobia-inflicting sanity-destroying en suite. These sections play a bit like the original The Sims, except all pretense that you’re not meant to be torturing people has finally been done away with.
Ballardo
Playing billiards with careful aim and strategy is overrated. What we all really want to do is hit the cue ball as hard as we can and pinball everything everywhere. Ballardo encourages exactly that. You accumulate points from boring ol’ pocketing, sure, but also from the far more satisfying art of bouncing the balls into each other as much as possible. The deckbuilding comes in with stickers you can permanently add to balls to give them multiplier bonuses for things like being pocketed, or for even just moving along the table (hysterically, the game doesn’t tell you that the latter makes the ball into a giant boulder that can barely move at all). Every deckbuilder demo that didn’t make this list can blame the hours I lost to this one.
Birdigo
Help a bird migrate by playing scrabble in what’s already my new favorite word game. Your ‘deck’ is a collection of letter tiles that you have to form into words to create enough ‘flaps’ for your bird to make the long journey. Special feathers give you bonuses like adding a multiplier if you play an even word, or use two of the same letter in a row. It’s a great core for a word game and the adorable birdy presentation layered over the top is simply a delightful bonus. Word nerds might grumble at a game where a three letter play can score higher than a six letter one. But consider that revenge from the rest of us who’ve had to lose countless games of scrabble to assholes who apparently grew up reading the dictionary.
Honourable mentions
Kindfolx, with its sublime, charming animations, looks remarkable—and even more so when you discover it was made by a solo developer. Inkborn adds an interesting combo system to the Slay the Spire formula—definitely one worth keeping an eye on. And I found the food truck deckbuilder A la Card pretty baffling, but that pun gets it a recommendation anyway.
Some of these demos will be sticking around, but others will disappear when Steam Next Fest ends on Monday—so get on them quick!
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