I am going to give you the good the bad and the ugly of this game and let you make up your own minds about whether you are going to enjoy Poxnora or not. To sum up this game quickly, I would say it's a cross between a collectable trading card game like MtG, a tabletop minatures game like Warhammer Fantasy and turn based tactics games like FF Tactics and Advance Wars.

Where to start?
One thing I am going to stress to anyone considering this game is that at it's heart this is NOT a casual game. Veteran players have learned an encylopedia of knowledge about this game. Cards are divided into 4 types, Champions, Spells, Relics and Equipment. There are hundreds of abilities and conditions that can used in this game, from the basics like block, dodge and stealth to the obscure like planarbound and encouraged. What does this mean? As a new player you are going to be confused while you slowly learn what all the hundreds of different cards do and how they interact. What this also means however is that if you enjoy deep strategy there is simply nothing else like Poxnora. Once you learn the game the sky is the limit as far as how many strategies you can employ.

Is this Pay to Win?
The short answer is yes, but not in an evil gimmicky cash grab way. Like I said above this game is very much like MtG or Warhammer. It is a hobby and a collection you build over time. Almost everything is available to purchase with in game currency but there is a HUGE library of cards to be had. This isn't going to appeal to everybody, but the people who it does appeal to will enjoy this game immensely because it is such a deep tactical game. This is a skill game and a well made deck of low value cards can easily outplay a poorly made mash up of expensive power cards. So it is certainly possible to find success relatively quickly without dropping any money on this game at all. You build your collection over time with free cards you earn from playing and then you can bolster your collection by buying cards with real money as you see fit.

How do I enjoy this game without spending a lot or any money?
I recommend all new players go through the tutorials and the new player guides that were recently added. These will reward you with free training decks and in game currency that you can use to start building your collection. You can use in game currency to purchase packs and boxes or individual cards, so you can get the best cards for free. There is also a PVP format that restricts to pre-made training decks so that you aren't facing opponents with lots of strong rare cards right away. There is trading in this game so anything you earn with in game currency can be traded away to other players for something different you may want.

My final advice would be to get to know the game and seek out help from the community whenever possible. People will be more than willing to help point new players in the right direction if they ask. There are community run pools of extra cards to help new players get started and a lot of resources on the forums and fansites to help you learn the game.

I highly recommend this game for it's deep gameplay and rich tactics.

Fantastic game. A new company, Desert Owl Games, have really reinvented the game, in a brilliant way. Its has a very similar "free to play" feel akin to Hearthstone imo with its daily income of ingame gold, but without the current "Arena" draft system. Drafting wil hopefully be reimplemented in the near future. The game has great depth and variety with thousands of runes to choose from when building your decks or just your collection. The artowrk is excellent and the lore is detailed and tells a very interesting story. 8 factions to choose from all with hundreds and hundreds of runes unique to that faction. Almost all content is able to be purchased in the marketplace with in game gold aswell as real money. A loyal and still active community is nice to see. The game caters for both PvE and PvP players. A really good game that combines elements of TCGs, CCGs, RPGs, F2P games, and turn based strategy games to create an excellent and very addictive experience. Highly recommended. Give it a try and have fun battling the denizens of Poxanthu.

Ever since Desert Owl took over this game and annouced that they were going to launch this on Steam, I have been awaiting for them to annouce the date. They announced yesterday that today was the day. Now I can look foward to playing on steam again (yes this used to be on Steam about a year ago, but under Sony). I have been playing since 2007 and have seen this game change vastly since that time, lets see where Desert Owl will take this game.

Been playing this game since 2007. There's really nothing else like it available. The learning curve is pretty high but if you give it a shot and enjoy being able to completely design and build your own strategies through decks and playstyle I think you'll enjoy this one.

I remember when this game first came out. Back in the days when you had to launch it from your browser. It has evolved quite a bit in its accessibility [for the better, of course!].
As many reviewers have already said, this game is easy to learn, hard to master. It is turn-based strategy meets collectible card game, and it is done in a masterful way.
If you like turn-based strategy and/or cc games, give it a try. It is a quick download, and it will run on a toaster, so you have nothing to lose.
I am so happy to see this game back on Steam.

Good to see PoxNora back on Steam, download it and get started. My best advice for beginners is not to look at rarity as terms of power, a combination of commons and uncommons can take down a poor group of exos and legs.

Poxbase.com is a 3rd party deck building site so you can theorycraft a bg while looking for games (DOGz needs to get a web developer and make a similar module WITHIN their website or buy out poxbase, but for now the system works)

Poxbox.net is also a 3rd party trading system, it shouldn't be taken for gospel, but is the best place for pricing and acquiring new runes.

Another good suggestion is goin on the forums and reading the combo threads within each faction, you will see a majority of battlegroups focused around these type of gimics so don't cheat yourself by not reading them. This is not a game of who has the more expensive runes (DOGz is making a good effort to make them all obtainable) rather a game of skill (through knowledge/experience) and whoever better knows their own battlegroup.

Pox Nora struggled through a long and arduous phase of being owned and subsequently undervalued by Sony Online Entertainment. A menagerie of bugs and balancing changes would go unresolved for months, it was extremely difficult to break into the game as a new player, and the the game had a distinct pay-to-win model unless a player was savvy enough to take advantage of third party resources like PoxBox and the like.

And then it all changed.

No, the fire nation didn't attack, Desert Owl Games came to be, and took over PoxNora for the better (far, far better). With the advent of DOG's game revamp, the entire collection of more than 1,300 cards were redesigned and retuned, the maps were uppdated, mechanics and the engine were retuned, the player rewards system was completely reinvented, and the free-to-play model was resdesigned to eliminate the necessity to spend money.

Now, it is extremely easy for new accounts to break into the game, receiving dramatically more gold per day from new challenges in addition to the daily skirmish, a new, highly expanded and more rewarding tutorial system has been implemented, a new skirmish mode has been implemented that dishes out free runes, and now all runes are available for purchase with gold rather than cash with the exception of the most recently released expansion pack.

The revamp is still in swing and changes still need to be made, but Desert Owl Games are really putting effort into making PoxNora a good game again, and are very public and open with the changes they make. They have implemented a new player council to aid them in development and provide an officiated voice for the players, and are just generally cool dudes.

Whether you're brand new or you long abandoned the game, this shiny new construction is definitely worth giving Pox a chance.

Very fun game! Many people will try and say that it is pay to win and when Sony owned it, it pretty much was. Desert Owl games has added many ways to earn gold very easily and has made it easier than ever to play this game for free and be extremely effective. Like any trading card game there are Rarer cards that are hard to get and can be sold by 3rd party people who collect these cards but you can win games easily without any rare cards at all.

Extremely fun strategy game. I've never been into card games but have so much fun collecting and planning decks in PoxNora. Getting to play your runes in the game environment is just a whole other level of fun :) Desert Owl games has made it easier than ever to be a new player in this game, and have implemented several ways of getting the runes you want, making it easier than ever to build the army of your dreams!

This game is unique. 8 factions, hundreds of cards, tons of possibilities and most important a lot of fun.
If you like strategy and cards, this game is for you.

Although it has one foot in the free to play and the other in the pay to win, it is fair to say that you have enough control on your type of games that you are going to be able to compete and have fun without feeling forced to empty your pockets.

The game itself is really one of my favorite turn base strategy board game, where both positioning and deck construction matters. I don't mind the outdated graphics myself, but don't expect much in that area.

Overall, I give it a 7 out of 10. The game balance still has too much cheese in it to be a game I would consider playing at a competitive level on a regular basis. But it's definitely worth the time if you are into occasional skirmish.

I was so excited when I saw that Pox Nora had switched to a new owner! And then I found out that it was available on Steam! (I don't know if this is a new thing, or if PN has been on here a long time, but for me it was new.) I decided to give it a try, despite bad experiences previously, and I was overjoyed to see that the client had gotten major updates; it looks fantastic and is very easy to navigate. and Desert Owl includes various daily challenges to help people new to the game to catch up. There is also a set of activities that all new players must travel before they can jump into an actual multiplayer competition, each of which also adds to the player's bank and allows them to score new "runes" (cards.) There is a microtransaction mechanic in which a player can buy rune packs (thus the bank of game coins that I mentioned,) but players can also join a "training" match, in which players have balanced starter decks and only player skill counts.

The gameplay was just as fun as I remembered, too. Essentially, each player generates "nora" (mana) automatically each turn, and they can then play runes from their hand onto the board. Some runes are characters, others are equipment that is played directly onto said characters, and some are spells that have instant effects on the boardstate. The board also has nodes, locations that can be captured by characters that move into their sphere of influence. Nodes give extra nora each turn and act as secondary (or sometimes primary) summoning locations for the characters. Ultimately, each player is trying to destroy their opponent's primary summoning point, a shrine, and receive a revamped animation as the building is destroyed by magical explosions or stone spires that stab upward through the ground, or...

But.

As the Curators' recommendation explains, this game "took a trip down the p2w slope under SOE." I was there, and I saw this happen. I played, and I payed. I have a collection of runes from that time, but when I began playing, I quickly found that, 1.) nobody plays the skill-only training matches, and 2.) everybody's decks are still broken at the bottom of the p2w slope. I thought I might just have been a poor strategist until I hung out in the chat forum and read people's posts; nope, I still believe that I am a poor strategist, but this does not account for the entirety of the current metagame. Pox Nora involves runes of various rarities, from common to rare. Wait, no, then there is Exotic. Oh, also legendary. You get the idea. Further, according to the players talking in the forum, two of whom were in the top 5 players in the current iteration of the game, a player must have no fewer than 5 exotics to be competitive.

The curators claim that the game was "reclaimed by the old devs and revamped." I believe this is true, but the p2w slope is slippery, and the game has not recovered. It is still crouched at the bottom of the p2w slope, and if you want to be competitive, you will have to descend to its level to do so.

Great mix of tradional trading card games and strategy gameplay! Recommend for all who likes turn based strategy games and don't like the luck factor to have significant impact on the results. I liked the idea of the game, having a choice between single player campaigns and PVP battles! Hope the project will be constantly progressing and we could get a new content!

ive been playing since before it was a steam release, it was pretty unbalanced but actually has gotten better. It takes some time to figure out a decent strategy for some people but once you find a style for you its a really good game. Think hearthstone combined with chess? something like that. I'd say give it a try if you want something more complex than hearthstone it's free give it a shot if you don't like it then you've lost nothing right?

Excellent game once you learn and figure things out. The best TCG out there, tons of awesome artwork and different options to build your deck, plus the satisfaction of seeing your runes (cards) in action on the battlefield. Nothing else like it that I've found. The negative reviews I have seen are just people that haven't tried the game for long enough to give it a real chance, or people that simply don't like the genre. Even those, if given time, would realize how exceptional this game is. Improvements have been made recently and will continue to be made in the future.

PoxNora is one this game where you do a turn while having five moves made forward in your mind. You have to be smart, game gives you ability to use extra spells beside simple melee hits, plus a rune system which you will have to master to be able to use. The artwork and overall graphic of table game gives you a satisfaction in Fullscreen mode. It does get better with time you play it.

Awesome strategy game with much depth, a nice f2p model and 1000´s of cards (runes). The Game may seem "hard" at the beginning but once you learned the basics its very funny! Try it, its free! =D
In my Opinion the best strategy game ever. ( i usually dont like turn based games that much )
10/10

I've been playing Poxnora on and off since 2008/09. You can immagine - that's a long time. And I saw it's good and bad sides. There are a lot of good sides in this game and only a few ( now ) of downsides. Back in 08/09 this game was full "pay to win" type of a game. You could only get basic, pathetic, starter decks, that couldn't level up at all and you couldn't buy any packs with virtual money ( gold ) that you get from playing. Basically, gold was non-existent back then.

Then SOE ( Sony Online ) took over. They made it "free to play" finaly with implementing gold which you could spend on buying individual high value runes. Then, you could trade those high value runes for a bunch of smaller value ones that you need for your decks. And the more you played the game, the more you got "rich" and could build a better, more competitive deck.

Then DOG ( Desert Owl ) took back the game again. They nerfed 95 % of the runes ( by the way completely destroying all of my high value runes by doing that ), but I think it made the game more balanced now. A lot more balanced actualy. There ARE still some overpowered high value runes ( mostly legendaries ), which are hard to kill on the "battlefield", but a lot less of them, than before, when SOE was running the game. You can't buy individual runes anymore with gold, but now you can buy packs and boxes with it. Which I think is even better ( lot better ). Since in those boxes and packs, you have 10% for an exo and 5% for each exo to become a legendary. So, if you are lucky, you can get on a roll and get rich a LOT faster than we used to, when we had to grind gold like madmen, to get the rune which was worth 150 000 gold. ( there were 500 000 gold runes later as well ).

This game is unique in so many ways. Strong deck is not the only thing you need. You need to closely put together your deck considering a lot of things ( stealth detection, destroying equipment, anty-spell, anty-heal, boost-heal etc ) all depending on your deck synergy. And then, you also have to play the perfect game once the match starts, with perfect strategy, since every bad move might mean turnover and you losing the game, no matter how good your deck is. I remember beating 10-15 games in a row in ranked matches with only common / uncommon / rare runes, but in a deck which had amazing synergy and me focused on the game 100%.

So if you are looking for a CONSTANT challenge, never the same battles, literally MILLIONS of possible deck builds, this IS THE GAME! Elves, Dwarves, Barbarians, Demons, Liches, Undead, Zombies, Witches, Paladins, Warriors, Voils, Dragons, Lizards, Swamp creatures, Frogs, Snakes, Beasts, Fairies, Treefolk, Wizards, Titans, Constructs - they are ALL in this game spread out into 8 unique factions! Don't even look for anything else, there just isn't anything like it out there. This game is amazing!

PoxNora is a great game with a lot of depth - give it a chance, the new Developers are cleaning up the bugs, improving outdated maps and gameplay and generally making everything more modern and fun!

The game can be very addictive, opening packs is a lot of fun and you can compete at the highest level without any cost if you know how (I may write a guide for this)

If you've got the patience this is a great game, and DOG seem to be taking it in the right direction.