I’ve been meaning to write about this awesome game for some time but kept putting it off, partly because I keep struggling for words to describe it adequately. It’s a sort of double-blind turn-based pokemon battle with collectible cards… well, at least I tried. It was designed by David Sirlin, and if that name sounds familiar it is because he is the author of some compulsory reading in Internet 101.

Basically you start with a ‘deck’ of 3 characters, each equipped with an item of your choice, against your opponents deck. One character is on the playing field at a time, and may use attacks consuming differing amounts of energy, which recharges every turn. Characters may switch in and out of battle to dodge attacks while bringing in reinforcements, and each move (and its never-certain outcome) can swing the battle either way. The character cards are nicely themed and flavorful, for what it’s worth, and the balance in the game makes it truly solid. Read the forum and you will find loads of people ranting against the RNG, which is kind of silly because I thought that was one of the neatest touches to the game, since everyone gets their share of really horrific bad beats, each one rantworthy in itself.

Where the game really shines is that basically as long as you can read your opponent’s mind and predict which button he is going to hit this turn, you can more or less dance around his attacks while routing him in humiliating fashion. I generally do quite well playing entirely inside my opponents heads, ignoring the logical part of my brain. When done right it’s exhilarating beyond belief. When it goes bad I check back and can’t believe I did that dumbass shit what the fuck was I thinking. As I’ve always said, it’s a game that either makes you feel really smart or really stupid.

The interface is simple and clean, and another thing I love about it is all the information you will need is displayed right there, so all you have to be worried about is making the correct decision.

All the info is in nice little tabs. Little icons along the side show relevant status effects, etc.

Unfortunately his dudes are all dead, but otherwise the cards are all flippable to show all relevant information you’ll need to make your choice.

The game has a sort of player rank matchmaking system. I rarely play a lot of ranked games, and at the lower levels it’s mostly trying to find out exactly how dumb your opponent is, like Poe’s schoolboy who won all the marbles in his school. The different choices beat each other in a rock-paper-scissors fashion a lot of the time, but there’s always more than enough time to slowly figure it out.

You earn cards by a low chance random drop while playing, or by achieving some level in the various flash games on site. You can also buy the cards outright, which is nice but not really necessary. Many collectible card games, online and otherwise, will swear that their stuff is perfectly balanced, and spending money only expands your options to better suit your playstyle and creativity. This is always pure bunkum. In this case however, it is almost perfectly true. I have yet to spend a cent, and have enjoyed every hour wasted on it. If you like mind-readan games, rate a zero on reflexes, or just want to feel superior to some 10-year-old kid on the internet, there’s no reason to not check this out.

Site is http://www.kongregate.com/games/kongregate/kongai (Main site registration required)

A useful wiki is http://kongregate.wikia.com/wiki/Kongai

I played Benjamin a couple of times last year and found out I am roughly 20 times better at this game than him. If you do play and are interested in a game or five let me know.

bad beats, each one rantworthy in itself.

Anyways, here’s a list of who played:

Team 1
11218 as HRE (Yellow)
eirei as Holy Eiropa (Purple)

Team 2
bps as Yugoslavia (Cyan)
umai as DPRK (Dark pink)

Team 3
Flonne as India (Pink)
COOLSAN as Smugcatia (Red)

(Oh yeah, apologies in advance for the language in this post.)

From the start 11218 and eirei usually make a beeline for all the religions, so having these two on a team resulted in some sort of wondrous “holy land”, founding 5 religions and building almost all wonders. With the Holy Roman and Eiropean people basking in culture and luxury, Team 1 managed to set up a lot of massive, powerful cities.

Their headquarters also turned out to be highly consolidated super cities: 11218′s headuarters Aachen with 10 world wonders and 2 founded religions, and eirei’s headquarters Eirome with 8 world wonders and 1 founded religion. Their combined economic and cultural output was a dominating force for most of the game.

Flonne and COOLSAN kept up the competition with rapid expansion. COOLSAN especially focused on building colonists, managing his dominion to send them out in rapid succession.

By the time we ended our game COOLSAN alone had 11 cities, stopping only because he wanted to leave some land left for Flonne. One might argue, though, that building more cities becomes less beneficial after a certain point. Or maybe the Russians just have a thing for cold water ports.

Flonne’s ability to expand quickly might have been hindered by starting on a branch away from the team’s mainland, resulting in very little land to colonize without becoming too distant from the headquarters.

Speaking of which, our team’s island was awful. It was all stretched thin, requiring cities to be great distances from the headquarters, and was positioned so that half of the land was covered in ice and tundra. I got the short end of the island, too, resulting in some cramped conditions once we started to expand.

My Yugoslav comrades kept us going strong, though. They harnessed a large inland sea to rapidly grow the population, and, combined with Tito’s oppressive regime of slavery, their production skyrocketed. They even managed to get a few wonders before 11218 and eirei snagged them. I then wound up buying a Great Merchant off my comrade since my bases were low on nutrients.

Eventually I discovered that 11218 and eirei’s shameless pursuit of “wonders and religions” had made them too bloated and it was high time someone decided to carve them up. So while they were off researching some advanced religious tech, I directed my research towards astronomy and sent a fleet of ships to put an end to their monopolistic grasping. I launched a surprise attack on an isolated city and managed to defeat it with my archers, but some formidable cavalry approached from the mainland and I razed the city to prevent them from getting it back. After being quickly defeated, I retreated to my island to build up another army and prepare to attack one of 11218′s main coastal cities.

And that’s roughly where we ended the game for the night; the final scene looked like this:

Funny thing is, only because of the internet can we couple expert-level analysis and theorycraft from progamers and various internet pundits with our own abysmal mechanical control and execution. The result is a horrific comedy of errors that frequently makes me want to tear my hair out. And eat it.

By the way, don’t you hate it when you want to make more units because you are at 3000 minerals and have 12 idle larva just chilling out, but the overmind is growling at you to spawn more overlords first, and you just can’t help but ragespawn 3 overlords at once?

And that’s why we’re all watching this kind-of-funny, sometimes-cheesy, heartwarming tale of a singer from a famous boyband wanting to play professional Starcraft. Because there’s a little bit of him in all of us, when you lose a game and feel like you’re a failure as a human being, when you get cheesed out and shit just got real, when you roll over your opponents and can hear the lamentations of their women. Even as a top-tier celebrity on a reality show, his charm is really disarming, and you can’t help but genuinely like him and want him to succeed.

Thanks to the subbing team at Teamliquid, now everyone can cheer HyungJun from SS501 on his wacky foray into the pro e-sports scene.

You can find further episodes on the above link, or on their youtube account.