Card City Nights is a video game. You, the player, play as someone who lives in a town (graphically depicted as an island-town) populated by cartoony people along with various supernatural cartoony creatures (the meta-text says that these are all characters from “the Ludosity Universe”, though I cannot speak to this because I have not played any of Ludosity’s other games (oh, I guess that marks a third first)). You can name your character whatever you like and pick their appearance from several options. Anyway, you find out that your town has all gone completely mad…for a card game! I can’t remember if the card game has a name, in the game, or if it’s just referred to as “the card game”. Someone shows you how to play it, and then you find out that if you collect eight unique “legendary” cards, which have been obtained by various people around the town, you can win a million (dollars? credits? coins?) maybe.

How do you obtain the legendary cards from the people who have possession of them? By beating them at the card game, of course! But you’ve got to find the right people, and often you’ve got to beat other people at the card game first in order to get to the legendary card owners, and sometimes there are other people who you can fight for booster packs of cards, as well as money (to buy more cards), but they aren’t strictly compulsory to your progression. Anyway, the point is that Card City Nights is a video game where you role-play as someone who plays a card game in a town full of people who want to play the same card game.

The card game itself is (unusually, I suppose) about placement. Players take turn placing cards onto their own 3x3 grid from a five-card hand. Most cards have one or more arrows pointing along eight directions. You build combos by having the arrows flow into one another, so for instance placing a card with a direct-left arrow to the right of a card with a direct-right arrow allows those two cards to combo. Combos usually require a minimum of three connecting cards, though some cards allow combos of two. As soon as a combo is made, an action is resulted and the cards disappear — you can’t choose to keep trying to add more cards to the combo. Actions depend on the type of cards within the combo. Cards can be either Attack, Defence, Revive or Neutral. Attack combos either reduce the opposing player’s health, or can disable a target card on the opposing player’s board. Defence combos add health to the casting player. Revive combos revive a previously disabled card. Neutral cards can be used to build any of the above combos.

You win if you can get your opponents health down to zero, or if they fill their grid and can’t place any more cards. Each deck has a minimum of twenty-five cards and a maximum of forty. If one player runs out of cards from their deck, they can’t pick up any more and they’ll lose health each turn. Because running out of cards is BAD but your deck has specific quality thresholds, you’re therefore going to be choosing between endurance and stacking, along with if you’re gonna hedge bets with your strategies, or have a deck more focused on attack or defence. Some cards also have special abilities to do with, say, disabling or flipping your opponents cards, or discarding from their deck.

The connective mechanic of the game is fun, and after several hours with the game I start seeing the green lights of a combo pathway in my minds eye as I’m going to sleep. It’s a mechanic that I can see working particularly well for a DCCG rather than a CCG, owing to the aforementioned green-light (I’m not what this game’s physical analogues are, or if such a game could work as well if the players were monitoring their own combos). I got less enjoyment from the process of trying to balance my decks with arrows that match up. It felt like the kind of thing I could fidget with endlessly, but in a “trying to remember a sliver of information that I’m sure I know” way rather than a “doing this is an inherently interesting experience” way.

I did enjoy the setting, for the most part. It leans into cartoon ridiculousness, but there’s something kind of wholesome and homely about the idea of this town, alive at night, everyone playing the same game. The narrative is pretty superfluous, but the writing is light, reasonably self-aware and funny and some of the characters are worth having the extra chat with. It could have used a little more in the music department, just IMO — the loop that plays during card battles repeats a short riff to the point that I couldn’t go more than a few minutes without muting it. But that’s also okay, because it’s the kind of game that pairs alright with other things going on in the background.

I think I’m about halfway through, four legendary cards collected, twenty-four wins and four losses notched. I’m a little sad to be leaving it here unfinished. Perhaps I’ll continue with it, for once. In my own private, unblogged time. Perhaps.

Where/When/Why/Who: Card City Nights came in the Humble Card Game Bundle of January 2015. I bought mainly with the intention of playing Dominion online, a thing I have not subsequently ever done. It was made by Ludosity [website], who are from Sweden (I think?) and also made, uh, Ittle Dew, and most recently uhm, Slap City. Card City Nights launched in 2014, and its sequel came out in 2017.