Chroma: Bloom And Blight

First of all, it's obviously incredibly nice to have a TCG come with all the cards "in-the-box". A cosmetics-based monetization is so much more user-friendly than the usual business model. Apart from that, man is the art and music in this game gorgeous. In the interests of transparency, it [i] is [/i] more graphically demanding than many similar games, but you get what you pay for (metaphorically, the game is free).

Releasing a free card game where all the cards are already unlocked is a noble idea. Unfortunately, the year is 2022, and games are competing for a player's attention. I assume that the developers of Chroma have now learned the fatal flaw of their card game: if players already have every card unlocked, the motivation to continue playing is purely the "fun factor". Unfortunately, that isn't enough to keep a player base addicted in the long-term. One queue times increase, a domino effect happens, and you're left with a multiplayer game that has no active players. Listen to my story, and heed it well: There's a Discord server I'm in that has an elemental spell collection bot. Ten spellbooks, maybe a dozen spells in each book, and varying rarities. You could trade with other players or build a deck with your spells and duel them in turn based combat. To build your collection, you collected one random spell per day. Over the course of maybe a year, I kept coming back until I'd collected every spell in the game. I dueled until I'd built a deck I was satisfied with, dueled some more, and then... And then I stopped playing and stopped returning to the server. The owners failed to provide any incentive to dueling, and my collection was complete. Eventually the dueling functionality broke. People weren't collecting spells anymore because their collections were also complete. The owner's brute force, inelegant solution: erase everyone's collection and make them restart from scratch. Let that be a lesson in game design to someone out there.

Commits to it's theme about the battle being a retelling of a story. There are no boring or useless cards or cards that are just worse then other cards. You start with every card in the game.

edit: development stopped. still a fun free game. + It's neat. + It's free! (like: all cards; just try it) (- it's a bit slow at times, mainly in the menu) Having a card game be free and not pay-to-win/pay-to-play is a huge upside: It tries to finance itself like Dota,... via cosmetics, which means it can actually be balanced after cards have been released since there is no money invested in any of the cards. Imagine that: a BALANCED virtual card game. Oh yeah, and it also has Hearthstone's Mana but with colours like Magic: the Gathering and you have to build your Mana alongside your Deck and there are Heroes with unique Abilities and Mana-Reservoirs and apparently the lore is a big thing, (I didn't read up a lot, though) and you can buy/earn cosmetics for cards you like and the next expansion is already planned and the devs are actually approachable on their discord. Oh yeah, there's also fixed cells for permanents as in Yu-Gi-Oh but it actually has some meaning, so placement is a HUGE deal and the unique "act-system" evolves the flow of each game (and prevents some stupid OTKs) and there is like 3 different permanent-types, a "defense" position for minions, an armour-system, Taunts like in Hearthstone, activatable Abilities on permanents, Battlecries, Triggered effects, ... You get it: there is a LOT of depth to be explored. Current resumée: (1) This game is way too deep already at launch to be called "unbalanced" only one month in. If anything emerges as unbalanced it will get nerfed. (2) By now I think it's actually closer to MtG than Hearthstone because of the activatable effects (and the difficulty), but in the end it's its own thing using some mechanics from other games. Just try it. Its free.

I love this game! It has complexity, and with the free cards I feel like it rewards good strategy, rather than grinding events for cards, or worse paying for it. The artwork is beautiful, the story seems interesting, and the gameplay is exciting. There is room for improvement, but I highly recommend it.

I dig it. I recommend this game. Is good. I'll hold it up against all the other card games I played. It will probably get better over time. It's got a fix to some of the big problems I had with Magic the Gathering: mana, expense, and hand traps. I'm a long time MTG fan, I've been playing since the OG Ravnica 15 years ago. I even played in the occasioinal tournament but I stopped because of frustrations with the mana system. Lands maybe made sense 30 years ago, but they grew too annoying to me. It was bad enough that if I played with 6 people around a kitchen table, someone would have mana problems every game and basically auto lose. This could be got around if you had a serious deck with investment in serious cards and dual lands, or by cheating and manaweaving the deck, but it's kinda just fixing an inbuilt flaw, you know? Chroma doesn't have that. You not only get a mana every turn, you even get to choose what rder in colour you get mana: which colour you get turn one, whether you want a different colour turn 2 or more of the same for a pricier creture, and so on. It tokk the biggest frustration I had with magic and turned it into a deckbuilding feature, a strategic decision I can make while deckbuilding. And of course, ALL the cards are FREE. I need not worry about my opponents bringing a $200 deck to a casual kitchen table game, nor do I get accused of paying to win when I beat someone with my own deck. It removes an element of awkwardness and imbalance, which I am very much for. Also, there's no 'blue' equivalent that means that only one person gets to play each turn with counterspells and such. There is the occasional 'trap' card, but no handtraps that you can't see coming. When a trap like 'awkward serendipity' is played, you see that it has been played, and while you don't know which space it is played on you do know it's coming and can try to play around it. There are no surprise 'nos' from the other guy. Other than bashing on magic, the hero system is cool. Some heroes I don't get, but some are pretty neat. It's kinda like Force of Will, another magic clone with a fixed mana system that let you have a hero leading your deck and giving your passive support effects. But unlike Force of Will, not pay to win or overly weeb. Only issues is that there are but 200ish cards, but I hear there are expansions already in the works so that shouldn't be an issue in the long run. Oh, and it had a rough launch, but it's looking much better a couple weeks after release. It's also slower than YGO, which is both a good and a bad thing. Anyway, I recommend this game. Is good. I'll hold it up against all the other card games I played. It will probably get better over time.

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I find it hard to shut down the negative comments, because the game is unpolished and lacks useful tooltips/toutorials. But the positives make up for that, the gameplay is highly enjoyable and the buisness model is leaps and bounds better than any other card game. -----------------------------Edit The above issues have been addressed mostly as of 2/4/21

Disclaimer: Played the tutorial and one bot game at the time i wrote this. Pros: -All cards/champions are free, can only buy cosmetics -There are tons of cards and champions (each has unique abilities), e.g. tons of free content, even lore Cons: -Clunky UI -Gameplay not very straightforward (each game has 3 acts, acts have impacts on abilities/cards) but the tutorial is very short (need to read a lot/play a lot to understand the basics) -Matchtime too long for me (bot game took 20 minutes, meaning BO3 would be maybe 1 hour long), -Bot was very dumb (i like PVE more than PVP generally though), so i hope that changes I think this could be a really nice game after some more polishing. Anyway "Yes" for the moment until i get some more playtime / understand more than 10% of whats going on... Check it out folks, its free!