The Starspeaker from 2024’s 9-Card contest is about finding a new home in the far flung future after the eleventh earth is dying. The cards are decorated with mystic symbols and aspirational quotes.
And the game play consists of sorting the cards lol
Honestly, I got over the disconnect of theme and mechanics when I first played Lost Cities. ‘Wait, that’s what I’m doing with all this cool imagery? Sorting cards like Klondike? Oh, wait, this is really good’ But the world building in The Starspeaker compared to the mechanics has a striking disconnect for me. Ultimately in a good way, since I was happy about how accessible the game is.
The Starspeaker is an In-Hand solitaire game, a niche I love. Each card has a different goal. Pick one out for your game and go for it. The core mechanic is that you fan the first three cards in the deck, pick one to flip backwards into the back of the deck, and then rotate the other two cards like they are airplane propellers, changing their values. The game ends when all the cards have been flipped and the you see if you’ve achieved goals like all positive cards or no ones.
I’m not actually sure if I’ve seen this done before. Sure, Palm Island does all kind of interesting things rotating and flipping cards but Starspeaker’s card sorting is its own kind of thing.
Most of the cards also have a special power, either rotating the card or exchanging it for a card further back. Simple stuff but we are talking about just nine cards. And it adds some real agency to the game.
The cards are really solidly designed because everything you actually need to look at to play the game are on the corner so you can see it when you fan the cards. And it might seem weird to praise a design element that has been around for generations but sadly that is not the case.
So the game has cards that are both visually neat and very functional. The mechanics are easy to understand but offer choices and there are special powers to mitigate bad shuffles. But is it challenging or engaging?
Well, no and yes.
The goals do range in difficulty. The easiest one is to get a +/- 6 in a suite. The most difficult is to have each suite have the exact same ranks. The easiest goals are painfully easy even as tutorials while the tough goals actually take some concentration but are very doable.
I can see someone being done after playing each goal once or twice. But as an In Hand game, Starspeaker is also a puzzle you can noodle around with anywhere. And being able to scale the difficulty adds some nice flexibility.
I normally think that asking how challenging a game is isn’t a bad yard stick to measure it by, particularly for a solitaire game. After all, in a solitaire game, you are playing against the game itself and too easy shouldn’t be interesting, right?
However, I still enjoy the process of playing some games that aren’t that challenging. Starspeaker is one of those games. It is very portable and playing through a few rounds is relaxing. The challenge isn’t high but the engagement is solid enough that I’ve added it to my travel kit.
The Starspeaker is a visual treat that doesn’t offer a tough challenge but it is decompressing. I do wonder how the design elements could be taken further.
No comments:
Post a Comment