*Update* Theres a speed option now for the cards which is awesome! They added an “Exhaust Champions” button which helps not forget since they are tucked away. Itd still be nice to play with some of the people on the facebook pages I follow without sharing me email but thats minor now and something I can bet will be added in the future cause it seems these devs listen to their fan base. 🤙🏻🙌🏻Seems like a good quality game so far but I would love to see you add an option to speed up the play of the CPU. When you get later in the game watching each CPU card pull up, sit there for a second then get played gets really tiresome. Also I feel like the Champion cards could have a better spot, I find myself forgetting they are there and I dont use them. Also I wish there was a different method to adding friends besides entering their email, I dont know a tom of people that play this game so id like to play with anyone that does but I dont really want stangers having my email. Im a big fan of the physical game so I hope this one lives up and gets a good community of people playing!

Between Shards, Hearthstone, and Gwent, Shards is by far the better choice from the App Store. I own a physical copy of Shards and both expansions, and it’s a really solid card drafting/ deck builder. But it’s app version is also great, where some games can be held back in digital form. For instance, Hearthstone could be a fun quick little game seeing as the mechanics of the game itself are really simple. But the gameplay is held back by how over produced the app is. I can’t just jump in for a quick game, or easily build my deck without seeing a few load screens or swiping some pages. It’s just feels really slow for such a simple little game that I just want to jump into.Gwent has the same issues. It’s way over produced. And you have to sign your life away to jump into a game.Shards as an app is so simple. You can either play 3 different AI difficulties, join someone else’s game, start your own game, or add irl friends and play them. And the best part is you can do all of these options at the same time. I have 4-7 games going at any given time. You can leave the game, go about your life, and come back to take your turn. You never feel too locked in.It does seem a little abandoned though. The expansion don’t seem to be coming to digital any time soon if ever, and there are a few bugs that will probably never get fixed. If the AI has a big turn, it’ll grind the app to a halt and crash until you cancel that game. Instead the AI should pace itself and try not to do too much at once. And I have a game that was forfeited by an opponent and the prompt for that game won’t go away.

Update: New patch adds speed increase! It will exit you out of the game extremely quickly and repeatedly! Test your patches before you release them. Every time I start a game now, it plays maybe 1-2 turns, then crashes. Sad. But it looks like they fixed the big Zetta the Encryptor bug, so that’s huge. Keeping at 4 stars until they fix the crashes for playing with medium opponents, but like the game very much.Game is great and plays very cleanly like Ascension, but with a different theme and a couple different mechanics. Much more player against player than Ascension. There seems to be a rather small set of cards as well, but hopefully that will be addressed with DLC.

Fantastic AI (Keldon’s from Race For The Galaxy - which is the best modern board game AI I’ve ever seen). I’m a noob though and the cards go by too fast to get a sense of the ai is doing. Seems really silly they would do a speed update and not add a slow speed because I’ve seen many other people complain in various forums about this and it’s not like it’s hard to do. It would also be nice if we could add an option to view the other players deck (at least a learning mode against the ai). Otherwise it’s too hard to see what the ai is doing and learn how to appropriately adjust strategy in response. The game is great for experts but unfriendly to noobs. Also game has frozen 3 times now during ai turn. It’s always during the best games too.