Shuffling through the sprawl.
This is cyberpunk right here.
The analogue future of analogue yesterday, but with a bit of grit in it.
A handicam with a busted viewing screen.
A space-taxi dropping off stale pizza.
City Wars: Tokyo Reign
City Wars: Tokyo Reigngets cyberpunk.
Gets it right in its chunky, villainous, brutal heart.
This is a collectible card game and a roguelike, but deep down, in its heart?
It’s cyberpunk - eternal night, eternal scrabbling to get by.
Never enough to go around.
Never enough to get a real break.
Opening presents, hopefully.
But more often facing a dilemma.
And much more often getting into a battle.
There are so many moving parts to City Wars I’m just going to focus on the battling today.
Battling in City Wars involves cards, but it also involves space.
You play each battle facing an opponent with a battle track in between you.
Most simply stated, you place cards on the battle track to damage your enemy.
But nothing here is that simple.
Cards have a damage number - the higher the better - in blue.
So let’s pretend.
I place a card: fifteen damage and twenty accuracy.
But you place a card opposite with fourteen damage and twenty-one accuracy.
So my card is shattered and its damage is forgotten.
Now when the card-placing phase is done, I will take fourteen points of damage from your card.
Back and forth we lay our cards from a small hand.
And then the combat phase kicks off.
It can change everything.
But gosh, there is so much more to it.
And the so-much-more is where the real beauty lies.
And it is beautiful I think.
The cards are beautiful.
City Wars cards come in a handful of different types.
They might let you steal a card from an enemy deck or shuffle new cards into their hand.
Gold cards have powerful effects and pink support cards offer shields and health.
And I’ll be honest here.
And the chunky cyberpunk stuff helps, of course.
City Wars is lookingbrilliant.
