It got a little oversaturated for a while there. There are definitely some really good deckbuilding games but I'm a touch burnt out on them. I kinda feel like the co-op deckbuilding that Legendary does could be different enough to get me interested again.
Have you ever played Ascension? That's deckbuilding, but not the "buy more cards…okay, now buy even more cards…" kind of deckbuilding that you get with games like Magic. The entire game comes in one box. You start with a deck of ten cards, eight of which are resource cards and two of which are attacking cards. Cards are then dealt from the main deck onto the board (six of them, I think) and you can use your resource cards to "buy" new cards from there. You use your "attack" cards to defeat monster cards. The other player(s) do(es) the same, but you're not directly trying to defeat each other. Every time you defeat a monter card, you get some Honour points (the value depends on the monster you killed) in the form of small plastic token thingys - small clear ones are worth one point, large red ones worth five. When the combined total (between players) of these tokens adds up to a certain number (60 for two players, 75 for three, and I think 90 for 4), the game ends as soon as the last player has finished their turn. At this point everyone totals up their Honour - as well as the plastic tokens, all bought cards (not the ones you started with) have an Honour value. Whomever has the highest Honour score wins the game. The cool thing about this game is that it can turn out differently every time because you don't know which cards are going to come up. If the starting batch is all monster cards, do you work on buying attack cards in order to defeat them, or let someone else do that while you buy resource cards in order to buy the cool stuff once that comes out?
It was the game we played the most before I got my hand on Sentinels. Erm, we haven't played anything else since then ;).
Ascension is the one I still play. I have it for my iDevices and play online with people. I'm even getting a touch burnt out on it, though.
You can play Ascension online? How does that work? Is it like the online games of Sentinels people have been playing, where one person has the stuff laid out and tells everyone else what's going on?
It's an iOS app.
I refuse to play Ascension with more than 2 players anymore. With the newest expansions, there's just too much downtime for how random the game becomes with that many players. With 2 players it's still great though.
I'm also still playing Thunderstone (man, did that game get better with each expansion), plus Eminent Domain and Mage Knight if you count those. They're pretty different from the core Dominion model, though.
One deckbuilding game I bought for $15 at Gencon at a booth that had lots of older games was Heroes of Graxia. It's one where you can also attack the other players with your units you bring out. It's similar to Ascension as it only has a limited amount on the board at once, but a few from 4 decks instead of just 1.
Blehh, Heroes of Graxia is a terrible, terrible game. I really like liking things, so I very rarely come down on games this hard, but it just is not good. There are severe balance problems and the pacing is jittery. I appreciate what they were trying to do, but they just didn't have to chops to pull it off.
I didn't know Ascension had expansions - I've only ever played the plain normal game, Chronicle of the Godslayer.
When I'm playing Ascension with a large amount of people, I tend to ignore what's availbe until it's my turn, because, more than likely, anything out will be gone before my turn comes up. By ignoring it, I don't have to make out plans for what I'll do, only to have to change them 5 times over because someone took the card I was planning for.
I love the raven card though. It's surprising how often I manage to get it to work well for me.
Can't remember a raven card, but it's been months since I last played it. I like erm, whats-'er-face...Cephra or something, Keeper of Stars (or something like that)...she's a Lifebound hero who costs about seven runes to buy and her ability is to let you take any hero card for free. Defeating the Avatar dude is always good as well, since that lets you take or defeat any card on the board.
Also, if you can manage to get enough Mechana constructs out you're pretty well-buffed. Plus those cards are the ones with the highest Honour score of all - I think the Hedron Cannon is the one with the highest (though it costs about eight runes to buy).
The Raven allows you to name a card, then draw a card. If the card drawn is the same as what you named, then you obtain an honor. In the cases where I hadn't already known my top card, I'm well over 50% correctly guessing the top card.
Erm…that must be from an expansion then, 'cause I've never even heard of that. As mentioned, I have only the base game and didn't even know there were expansions till such a thing was mentioned in this thread.