I’ve tried a bunch of deck-building card games but Ancient Enemy feels fresh and new. It’s another game where you have one life to see how far you can get, and where you battle with cards and gain new cards as you go. But at the same time, Ancient Enemy is fundamentally different.
In Ancient Enemy, the majority of the cards being played aren’t yours. It’s not my hand against your hand. Instead, Ancient Enemy is a game built around Solitaire – TriPeaks Solitaire. You clear a board of scattered cards by selecting those of either the same number, or one higher or lower, than the card by the draw pile below.
Ancient Enemy impressionsDeveloper: Grey Alien GamesPublisher: Grey Alien GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on Steam for £12.40, and apparently coming to Mac too
As you do this, your abilities power up, and you build combo multipliers to magnify their strength the longer your run goes on. Your turn ends when you use one of those abilities on your opponent, or when you decide to refresh the board or End Turn because you can’t go.
Attacks depend on the cards you’ve equipped. You have a melee slot, magic slot and a defense slot, and three gear slots. Magic can be all kinds of things, from fire attacks to ice attacks and earthquakes, and gear can be potions and bombs and even toxic mushrooms.
You also have active and passive ability slots to fill. Active abilities are things you use in battle, like a runestone which changes a card’s number to one you can use, or a hammer which clears a card from the board as well as those next to it. Passive abilities, meanwhile, hum away in the background, doing things like helping you build combos quicker.
There’s also a skill tree to progress along as you level up.
There’s plenty of scope for customisation, then, and you’ll soon encounter enemies with resistances you’ll need to tailor your loadouts for. No point using fire if the enemy is resistant to it; no point defending against physical attacks when your enemy uses only magic.