And for people like Anonymous, there’s not leader board, no bragging rights, and winning isn’t everything.

Almost all TCG/CCG rely heavily on luck. Both as to your draw, and the cards your opponent has/plays. I’ve played a small handful of card games and tend to stick with them. yu-gi-oh, FullMetal Alchemist, being the more recent. i played these for a couple of years before they began to die. and it’s all down to the luck of the draw.

The worst part about it is that you can’t be competitive at all without spending a lot of money on it. Glad I didn’t waste a penny on it.

As a game designer, I started to Warstorm because its luck-based mechanics sounded like a terrible idea to me. Having played Warstorm a lot by now, I must say that I was wrong about that. Luck, chance or alea (as Callois put it) can be a fun experience. Why else do people play dice games, right? Of course, different people prefer different games and some people want their games to be as skill-based as possible. Many CTG players probably fit this category so Challenge Games might be aiming at a different demographic than the hardcore, competitive player.

That said, only fool would say that Warstorm is only about luck. Building a better deck definitely leads to more wins. There’s a lot of strategy involved. In fact, the game allows you to create a deck by combining squads of 7 cards. What that means is that the game draws cards from a pile of seven until they’re all in play, and then it will move on to the next pile. A deck can consist out of six of such squads. You can’t control the order the cards in a squad will be played, but you can control the order in which quick units, ranged units, powerful spells, heavy hitters, and so on will appear. As a result, you lose a bit of control with regards to timing (as you can’t chose when a card enters play) and you gain a bit of control with regards to timing (because you can choose the order in which cards will be played to a certain extent).

For example, I’m playing a three squad deck. My first squad is a combo of small but very fast spamming creatures along with two barriers that will make those small creatures a lot tougher. Unfortunately, that’s pretty weak against a rush bigger creatures and specific counters against that type of creatures. Nevertheless it will take some health points away from my opponent. My next squad are big bad white dragons. They will kill almost anything that’s thrown against them except for archers. Unfortunately archers can be quite common, so much next squad is primed to destroy archers because it’s a full-scale rushed cavalry. I rush them so they can keep some additional dragons alive if possible.

Now, if you’ve read that then tell me that that doesn’t a skill-based game, right? I defintely agree that luck plays a part but it’s more about being a n00B than about having a game that’s similar to rolling a dice.

All in all I highly recommend Warstorm. It’s true that you need to invest about $40 in it for it to become fun, but it’s definitely an interesting game.