Card-shuffling strategy Duelyst is powering down next month. Such is the way of free online games, sadly. Bidding farewell to Duelyst in an announcement on Friday, developers Counterplay Games are “saddened to announce” that all servers will officially close on February 27th at 11pm (3pm PST). If you’ve ever wanted to give it a shot – and from the reception it got in the RPS treehouse, you really should – that’s four weeks to give Duelyst one last bash.

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Read this article about the very best free PC games and watch as capitalism collapses around you. There are enough that there’s no reason you should ever spend money again.

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Multiplayer games are the best type of games, because they’re built around the most interesting components known to humans: humans. Men, women, and an awful lot of children.

Internet strangers aren’t always the friendliest bunch, but they can surprise you in ways that a static system can’t. People form the living, beating hearts of the gaming moments I value the most. Join me, then, as I point at the games that encase those beating hearts best. (more…)

Collectible card games have been around for decades, but they’ve really been running hot ever since Blizzard unleashed Hearthstone four years ago. Since then, we’ve seen Shadowverse, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Duelyst, Faeria – there are a lot of these things, if you haven’t heard. They all put their own spin on rectangles with numbers on ’em, but they also universally take cues from Hearthstone and, just as often, each other, and as a result they regularly run into similar problems, the biggest two being how to balance a competitive system and how to price card packs fairly.

Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game, is definitely using some pages from the same books, but it’s also doing enough things differently that it has the potential to solve a lot of those problems. (more…)

Welcome to Spawn Point, where we take something wonderful from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it s worth your time and how to get involved. This time: collectible card games (or at least, the videogame kind).>

Hello, I would like to collect some cards please. Of course, friend. We have a wide variety of fantasy themed cards, ranging from hostile dragon to raving ghoul to

Hang on, what are these numbers? Oh, ignore those, they re nothing to worry about. Look at this wizard! (more…)

Both of our resident deckheads are elsewhere this week, so it falls to me as a recovering shuffleholic to nervously peek at news of the next Duelyst expansion. Over 100 new cards are coming to the free-to-play CCG in Trials Of Mythron, its sixth expansion, with new mechanics and a new one-per-deck rarity. I’m told Duelyst is good, though I nod along enthusiastically with a look of terror and my nails drawing blood from the palm of my hand-holding hand, so this is good. Here, check out the pretty sprites of the expansion’s new units: (more…)

A bug with Hearthstone‘s ranked play recently brought the mode crashing to its CC-knees, but it’s now back on its feet again thanks to a hotfix from Blizzard. When the new competitive season rolled round on March 1st, something awry with the tweaks to the progression system meant that players rank stopped updating altogether. Blizzard disabled the mode while they worked on the problem, and they didn’t get everything back up and running until 12pm today.

So, the joys of the Hearthstone ladder are once again available to all. Before you log back in though, why not keep reading for a minute or two more. I’m not saying you should stop playing Hearthstone. I’m just saying your life might be better if you tried one of these superior CCGs instead.

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Android: Netrunner is a two-player card game set in a cyberpunk world where a hacker and a corporation angrily click their mouse buttons at each other until one of the following things happens:

1. The corporation researches a bunch of terrifying technology.

2. The hacker steals all the files the CEO accidentally left on his desktop.

3. The corporation runs out of ideas, and just sits there going: Uhhh.

4. The hacker dies from too much internet.

We have a much better explanation below. For now, let’s say it s a good game. The downside, however, is that it s not a PC game. You can only play it in meatspace, with real, germ-spreading cards bought from fleshy human vendors of physical antiquities. At least, that s how it seems. Turns out there s an unofficial website called Jinteki.net that lets you play online for free. But is it worth the click? Matt and Brendan take a look.

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There’s nothing quite like Duelyst. Ok, that’s a lie – Hearthstone is a bit like Duelyst, but it’s nowhere near as good. At the heart of Duelyst is the grid that battles take place on, which means every move requires several more layers of thought. I gave it a glowing review last year, and decided to jump back in this morning for a couple of games with the seasonal Frostfire mode.

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There are some good, silly names in the latest expansion for monster-battling card game Duelyst. A goth called Maehv Skinsolder. A mutliarmed sorceress called Shidai Stormblossom. One guy is called “Brome”, which is the most US high school footballer name imaginable. They’re all new generals, part of the 100-card roster of Immortal Vanguard, which came out a couple of days ago. I haven’t summoned my precious winged rat babies in a while, so I can’t say what this adds to the shifting tactics of the game. But I can say that “Ragnora the Relentless” sounds like a good name for a superhero dinner lady. (more…)