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Board game review & gameplay of: Star Realms

Game design: Robert Dougherty, Darwin Kastle

Illustrations: Vito Gesualdi

  • 9/10
  • 12+
  • 2 players
  • 20 minutes

Gameplay

Star Realms is a 2 player deckbuilding card game, which also has a very nice solo and 4 player variants.

The goal of the game is to beat your opponents authority to zero. Youeach start with a deck containing only combat or trade. Combat attacks the other players authority and trade lets you buy new cards from the pool, making your deck better towards the end of the game.

New cards will be added to your discard pile, when your deck runs out, you shuffle your discard pile into a new deck.

There are four different factions:

The Trade Federation, regaining you authority and providing trade, 

The Blobs, for massive amounts of combat, 

The Star Empire, for combat and card drawing or 

The Machine Cult, letting your remove undesirable cards from your deck

Thoughts

Star realms is my favourite two player game. It is small, easy to learn and I love the deckbuilding mechanism. 

There is a big deck of cards, so you don't get to see each card every game. This makes every game unique and ensures a lot of replayability.

Because of the different factions you can try a lot of different strategies, although I must say I tend to really like scrapping cards early in the game..

There is also an app available, which has tournaments each week. I enter almost every week to play my games! 

If you like two player games that have a lovely build up, and you like the space theme (a bit), you should really try this game!!


9/10

Also check my let's talk about story series about Star Realms in my story highlights on IG!

Boardgamegeek BGG

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