For tackling a genre as complicated as the living card game, Battle for Sularia does a lot of things right. I was skeptical as to whether or not I’d enjoy it; there are fun aspects to competitive card games, but they can easily be over-complicated and annoyingly convoluted. There are several specific things that I really enjoyed about Sularia, and of course, some things that need improving. It’s my opinion that this game’s strengths overshadow its weaknesses. Let’s begin with those:

A sense of progression

Although this isn’t something that’s unique to Sularia, it’s something I always appreciate seeing in a game when it’s implemented well–I’m talking about the sense of progression that you feel as the game goes on. Simply put, you start off with nothing in Sularia, and end with a cadre of sites, combatants, and powers aggressively working for and against you. However, there’s never one moment where it feels like you jump from one end to the other; there’s a feeling of buildup that occurs as you play, and this makes Sularia an exciting experience. There’s never a question of whether or not you’ll become powerful, it’s simply a question of who will do it faster and better.

It definitely feels like you’re building something when you play Sularia, and I just love games where you feel like you became powerful by the end of it. I like it when things culminate into a decisive final battle, or when you’re tempted to take a risk that might yield strong payout or major losses. These are the feelings you get when you play Sularia, and on top of everything, it usually doesn’t feel clunky or clumsy. It’s hard to design a game that elegantly allows for major growth and progression without providing checks and balances that prevent it from feeling like an unbalanced mess. This usually either ends up IN an unbalanced mess, or a game that’s so tightly checked and balanced against itself that it leaves no room for anything interesting or unexpected.

Much like the RTS games (like Starcraft) that I compared Sularia to earlier, there’s a palpable sense of satisfaction to starting with nothing, and building a base/army out of gradual resource collection. If you like this kind of feeling in your games, Sularia will deliver.

Deep simplicity

It’s the elusive sweet-spot that every game covets–the “simple, yet complex” spot. Although there are hundreds of factors that go into judging the quality of a game, the “simple/complex” metric is one of the most important. Essentially, if a game can be relatively simple in its fundamentals, but profoundly deep underneath, it’s probably doing something right. For the most part, Sularia does a good job of being in that space.

Sularia, when it comes down to it, isn’t that complicated. The resource collection system is straightforward and easy to understand, and then most of the game pretty much just comes down to understanding how to attack and defend. Although there are technically nine phases of every turn, each turn really does just come down to “add +1 influence, play site card[s], play combatants, battle, rinse/repeat.” Sularia looked WAY more complicated than it actually ended up being once I learned it. When I finally got the rules down, my first thought was, “wait, that’s it?” and I mean that in a good way. I was surprised when I realized that you’re really just following the same few steps every turn, and that the cards would do the rest of the work for you. Sularia was a total pain to learn from the book (more on that later), but if you were to be taught in person how to play it, you’d have the general game down within ten minutes.

So, Sularia hits the right mark with simplicity, but what about complexity? Surely, if you’re used to playing competitive card games, then the prospect of a dumbed down game is no doubt unappealing. I’m happy to report, then, that Sularia really nails it in the “depth” department when it comes to more advanced gameplay. This game does it right–it makes the fundamental mechanics relatively simple, and adds complexity through the individual card effects.

Every type of card adds its own layer to the game. Sites can grant special actions that buff your abilities, or enhance individual units. Combatants have their own effects that can become larger than the sum of their parts when paired with complimentary cards, and then there are the tactic/condition cards that can allow you to blast your opponent with one-time actions, or give yourself passive boosts that will benefit you for the rest of the game. I’ll go more into this in the “strategy” section of this review, but it suffices to say that Sularia offers all the complexity you’d want from a good LCG, while keeping the fundamentals simple, approachable, and easy to teach.

Dual Resource System Makes Things Interesting

So, you’ve got two types of “resources” in Sularia: influence, and Sularium. Influence is not produced, per se, by any specific cards; every card that sits in the influence row counts as exactly one influence point (regardless of the contents of the card), and you can only place add one influence card per round. Sularium is the opposite; it’s generated by various cards and effect, and is used to purchase combatants.

I love the influence system because it sets the pacing for the game. Influence is used to pay for sites, which is what generates your Sularium, and Sularium is used to pay for combatants. As such, you don’t have access to the good sites until you’re farther into the game. You can’t just game the system to create a strategy that produces tons of influence, because there is simply no way to have a greater number of influence points than rounds played.

Because everybody progresses in their “power level” at the same rate, it ensures that tactics are always an important part of the game. In other words, I’m fairly confident that Sularia won’t turn into a game where building a good deck is 90-100% of the battle. Even if you have a great deck with great cards, you generally won’t be able to use your more powerful ones before your opponent, meaning that you’ll also have to focus on USING your cards well.

The dual resource system works because it introduces the fun aspect of resource management/generation, but also ensures that players progress at a relatively equal rate. I like this, because it ensures that every game of Battle for Sularia is indeed a battle. There will be no deck-cheesing here that allows for thirty second victories. To some, that might be a turnoff, but I like the assurance that it brings that there won’t be a completely one-sided victory.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

It can be one-sided

For the most part, Sularia does a good job at keeping things balanced, but there are situations where it’s easy for one player to kick the other while they’re down. The site cards generate solarium to deploy combatants, and if those sites are taken out, that leaves the player with no generation. It is, of course, the point to reduce your opponent down to nothing, but sometimes it feels like it happens way quicker than it should, and this mostly is due to the luck of the draw. Basically, it’s quite possible for a player to start off with a hand of relatively cheap cards, and for the other to start off with a more expensive hand with maybe only one or two cheap cards. If that’s the case, the former player’s cadre of weak combatants could wreak havoc against their opponent, leaving them with virtually no options until they have enough influence to play their better cards. It turns into a one-sided game when one player never quite gains the chance to produce resources. This is mostly a luck-based issue, but the mechanics of the game occasionally allow steamrolling to happen.

There’s a lot to keep track of, and nothing to do it with

Sularia needs tokens. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter game, and yes, I understand that it’s cheaper if the game can be packed into a small box, but there were some obvious repercussions to this decision. The first is the rulebook, which is too small and simple in its “basic” form to be of much real use, and the second is the lack of tokens/chits, something that I think would have really helped in moments where there’s a lot of things to keep track of.

First of all, the object of the game is to reduce your player to 0 health, down from the starting amount of 25. However, the game gives us nothing to keep track of that health, requesting instead that it be written down or tracked by dice. There are also cards that tell the player to put markers on cards to denote certain effects, but the game gives us no markers to do so.

Finally, there’s a lot going on in combat. It’s not that hard of a system to get used to, but there are a LOT of card abilities that buff the strength/defense on combatant cards, and battles are essentially a big mish-mashing of numbers. This can get needlessly complex when you have to play mental gymnastics comparing all the numbers, especially when there are various effects in play. It would’ve been nice if there was an implemented way to track all of this.

I realize that there are many CCGs that ask the player to bring their own components, but to be fair, Sularia seems to be following the LCG format, which usually tends to follow the board game release model where everything is included in the box.

Tactic Cards Can Feel Like Cheese

One thing I wasn’t a fan of in Sularia is that some tactic cards, or in other words, one-time play cards that deal a certain one-time action, can sometimes feel cheap (for lack of better phrasing). This isn’t a problem for the most part, and it IS a deliberate design decision to have cards that can be played at unexpected moments, AND there is the “command chain” which allows your opponent to react to these surprises (though not every tactic card in the game has a card that can counter it), but sometimes, just sometimes, it just feels kind of lame.

The biggest offenders here are “System Scramble” and “Sularium Tactical Assault Beam,” which can both deal direct, unblockable damage straight to the opponent, and both are tremendously cheap to play. It is hypothetically possible to have these stashed away in your influence row, and then to bust them all out and wipe out half (or more) of your opponent’s health. Site and combatant cards, the tactical essence of the whole game, are made pointless by cards such as these. I don’t like it when games encourage a certain style of play, and then pull out wildcards that invalidate your actions.

On the other hand, if both of these cards were exactly the same with the only difference being that the opponent can’t be directly targeted (sites and combatants only), these would be incredibly interesting cards that would absolutely enhance the experience.