The basic game here (from Wise Wizard Games) out of the box is a 2 player deck builder. If you don’t know what that means, I’ll explain a bit (if you do, jump to the next paragraph now.) In a deck builder game, you and I start with the same 10 cards in our deck. In this case, 7 purchase and 3 combat. There is a row of revealed cards between us that all have prices on them. Say I go first and my hand is 4 purchase and 1 combat. I hit you for 1 point of damage and then can spend my money on the cards in the middle. I can buy multiple cards if I can afford them. Any cards bought go to my discard pile to be used later in the game after I shuffle. If I have unspent money, I don’t get to keep it. At the end of my turn, all cards played and any still in my hand are put in my discard with the ones I bought. I then draw a new hand of 5 cards and your turn starts. If at any time your deck doesn’t have enough cards for you to draw 5, you draw what you can and then (and only then) shuffle your discard pile into a new deck, then you finish drawing to 5. After a few turns your deck starts getting better and better, especially if you bought something to thin your deck down.

Great, you know the basics of deck building now. Which is good, as it is one of my favorite mechanics. In this game we are at war, trying to use our combat to knock the opponent down to zero life. There are four different factions of cards you can buy, and you want to try and focus on one or two as the cards give bonuses for playing more than one of them in a turn. The Blob faction is green and likes to do damage. Lots of damage. The Star Empire is yellow and likes deck manipulation (drawing cards and making opponent discard.) The Trade Federation is blue and likes to heal you. The Machine Cult is red and likes scrapping (either cards from your hand or discard or the ones in the buy area.)

This is a quick easy game, but a lot of fun. I will always default to wanting to play the paper version, but there is also an app that you can get for free. You need to pay for expansion content and that gets dumb with the app. All total it could be like $45 spent on it. But the free play is great to get a feel for the game. The paper version of it can be bought for between $10-15, and if you were so inclined you could buy two copies and play up to four players. I would say this rates 8 stars. Just in the realm of deck builders, there are some I would play before this, but the ease of this makes it easy to break out and play anytime.