![]() Oh dear, I’m back with the pool analogies. Instead, it stands astride both, with a foot in each pond. It strikes me that Achroma could easily have been a digital-only game, like Hearthstone, or an analogue-only one. There’s a slider which tracks your Chroma vs Achrom wins, which is a really nice touch. See how gorgeous the cards are!Īs I alluded to above, the app also tracks how you win your games. It has a shard counter which is linked with your opponent’s, so if I steal one of your shards, your total automatically decreases while mine increases. You can even place your phone, running the app, in your play area. If you play against another registered player, the apps are essentially synced, so the game knows who is playing against who, and it’ll update its database accordingly with the winner and loser. When you first fire the app up, it’ll ask you to create an account, and show you where your friend code lives. It’s an app which does a few things, but the most important for Achroma as a product, is the player profiles. No-one remembers how you won, just the fact that you did, right?Īchroma has obviously been built from the ground up with an accompanying app in mind. Being able to win with either Chroma or Achrom is akin to a ‘good or bad’ win, yet it doesn’t feel bad. It’s a really neat thing to weave this into the way the game is won or lost. Chroma is the magical (colourful) life force, which is fighting against Achrom (or, a lack of colour), a savage dark energy. This concept of colour is everywhere in the game and plays an integral part in the setting and theme. Collecting 30 shards is called a Chroma win, while reducing your opponents to zero shards – therefore knocking them out of the game – is called an Achrom win. ![]() ![]() Actually, it turns out that isn’t the only way to win. Shards are the currency du jour, and in an interesting twist to some games, they’re both what you spend to play cards, and what you need to collect to win. Everything that even someone as inexperienced as me would expect to be in the game is there, albeit with different names. I’m not the most experienced in this field of tabletop games, but I’ve played a bit of Netrunner, I’ve played the Pokémon TCG with my son, and I’ve watched plenty of Magic: The Gathering. I’ve not seen another card game with the same style of illustration that Achroma employs, and I like it all the more for that fact. When you’re not playing, you can tinker with your various decks’ compositions, and in the case of Achroma, just enjoy the beautiful artwork. Your deck becomes this crafted, personal thing, which you pit against someone else’s crafted, personal thing, to see which comes out on top. It’s a tried and tested concept, and new games keep getting made in this style because it works. Assemble a deck of cards that complement one another, and take turns playing cards in your play area which beat the cards in your opponent’s play area. Crimson redĬard games in this style aren’t something new. I have no idea where the pool analogy came from, or why I took it so far. For the most part, it manages it, but the lifeguard’s got a few questions that need answering when it comes up for air. Along comes Achroma, sprinting to the edge of the pool where it takes off, shouting “Cannonball!” ready to make a splash of its own. Someone has pulled Netrunner‘s trunks off and it’s spent the last ten minutes underwater looking for them. Keyforge is busy trying to dunk Magic: The Gathering‘s head under, while the Pokémon TCG is quietly having a wee in the corner, hoping nobody notices. The Collectible Card Game style pool already has plenty of swimmers in it.
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