Colony Wars

Colony Wars
Star Realms is a lovely little two player card game. I’ve spoken a few time before about it. It’s a non collectable dueling game set in an epic conflict between four space faring factions. The bio hive Blobs, the robotic Machine Cult, Empirical Federation and Royalist Star Empire or green, red, blue and yellow for short. The electronic version of this game is magnificent. 

I’m not going to talk about the base game again. If you have a smart phone I recommend you just go and buy it. It’s a cracker no ifs buts or maybes. You will get so much bang for your buck. What I’m going to talk about is the latest expansion and the interface upgrade 

Colony Wars is the latest expansion to the game. It’s very much more of the same. There’s nothing new from a rules perspective just more and different cards. The cards however are all very sweet. Again nothing massively different, an evolution rather than that other thing. The Colony Wars moniker is a bit of a misnomer. The Colonies are just more space stations. As for bigger some of the ships and colonies are definitely the biggest we’ve seen to date. The Blobs get the aptly named Leviathan which deals 9 damage, destroys a target base and allows you draw a card. The Machine Cult gets the big old card chomping damage dealing wrecker. The Star Empire gets the massive Emperor’s Dreadnaught, the Fed get some big space bases and a few bigger fighting and trading ships. 43 new cards in total. 

All in all it’s like the game has been handed to a safe pair of hands that has just continued the unbroken let’s not change it too much tradition and it works. It injects a nice albeit short lived bit of life into the game. The designers are super careful with the cards they introduced. Nothing is overpowered and the chaining of cards seem to flow that bit more smoothly than before. It’s a subtle game in some ways and requires many many replays to learn how it flows. You find yourself wondering how the hell you lost when you played the same (pretty much) as your opponent. This is the street fighter of card games.  
The artwork is as ever gorgeous and I like touches like ships from previous sets featuring in the background going about their business (or being eaten or blown up)

The other new thing is changes to the app interface. It’s now even slicker (it was pretty slick to start with) with cards displayed at a jaunty angle and revealing more of themselves as a result. It’s quite a feat to get a card game like this displayed on a small screen and still make it playable without having to squint. The developers have done a sterling job. 
The thing about this expansion is people who love the game will race out and buy it and I can’t blame them. If you haven’t played it yet. Now is as good a time as any to start. There are now seven expansions in all but this doesn’t make the game in any way less accessible for new players. 
More of the same. Great game. Worth a look
Huzzah!
Vic