Developer Abrakam Entertainment's digital CCG Faeria is an engaging take on the genre that prioritizes strategically planning every move made, and at times plays more similarly to chess than it does Hearthstone. In Faeria players will not only collect and play powerful cards, but will also be responsible for creating the board itself.
The basics of Faeria will be familiar to anyone who has played a CCG game before. The player and their opponent face each other down on either side of a hexagonal grid and draw cards every round. These cards have a damage and health stat on them that determines how many hits they can take and how much damage they can deal against other cards. On top of this there is also a resource called faeria that regenerates every round that is used to summon these cards, and each card will cost a specific amount of faeria. The main object of Faeria is to reach the other side of the grid in order to attack the opponent and deplete their health bar.
Faeria does alter the CCG formula by the fact that the grid is entirely made of water when the match begins. In order to move cards around the map, every round players must place down different pieces of land tiles. Many of these cards can only be placed on a specific type of land and there must be a certain amount of that type of land on the map before these cards can be placed. Green cards can only be placed on forest tiles, red cards on mountain tiles, blue cards on lake tiles, and yellow cards on desert tiles. Players are only able to place one of each of these tiles per round, with the exception of neutral tiles, of which two can be placed per round.
This makes for an interesting strategy game where it is not only important to plan which monsters and spells to use against the opponent, but also how to lay out the board to attack the enemy directly. There are many different strategies that players can employ in Faeria: some may decide that building a bridge directly to their opponent will help them end the fight more quickly, while others may want to begin building up their land tiles to begin summoning stronger monsters to decimate their opponent's defenses.
Playing against early AI opponents is a surprising strength of Faeria. Its a lot of fun to test strategies out as these opponents pull out different kinds of decks and cards. The more difficult AI and human opponents can be annoying to play against at times, however. Faeria matches can go on for quite some time compared to other CCG games, and one mistake can spell a player's doom. Played the wrong card or put down the incorrect type of land at the wrong moment? That will likely be the thing that makes the player lose, but it typically won't happen immediately. Instead, players will lose slowly for 10 rounds with no hope of bringing themselves back from the edge. When competent Faeria players face off against each other there is practically no hope of it being a close game after a mistake is made, which detracts from the experience somewhat. The game sorely needs some kind of comeback mechanic so that it isn't so dramatically punishing to make one mistake.
The largest issue with Faeria is that it is an always-online game even if players are going up against the AI. This is frustrating since the servers aren't very consistent and if they are offline it is impossible to play the game at all. While it is nice to play against people on any platform around the world, it would be nice to just relax and not worry about being connected to the internet all the time when a player just wants to test a strategy against the computer.
Faeria has its issues with internet connectivity and its slow, difficult matches, but it is also a clever game. In order to win matches the player has to multitask and really understand the game's deep mechanics. This makes for a satisfying CCG game that does quite a bit to separate itself from the pack - but still, many players may find themselves frustrated by Faeria's few prevalent issues, which really do go a long way in souring the experience over time.
Faeria can be played on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
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