Ace of Spades

^{review by Alapai}

Ace of Spades is a solo card game from Devir Games based around poker. In it, you create poker hands in order to deal damage to demonic creatures in order to try and defeat the necromancer Lord Overkill.

To set the game up, you choose one of 4 difficulties from Easy to Nightmare and grab the appropriate version of Lord Overkill and place it face down (the wide side with an 11 in the upper left corner) on top of the Hell Tile. Then, in descending order, you randomly pick an enemy and place it on top of the previous one, such that you next place a card with 10, then 9, etc, all the way down to a card that has the Ace of Spades logo on the top. Next, you shuffle the deck of playing cards, drawing 8 for your hand. You then flip over the top card of the enemies deck, noting its health on your playmat’s enemy life dial, and placing the card under the mat so the life points are covered. At this point, the top card of the enemy deck shows you the round number in the upper left as well as what you set your Hands and Discards dials to for the round. On your turn, you can do one of three actions, Discard, Renew or Duel. To Discard, you reduce your Discard dial by 1, then discard any number of cards in your hand and draw that many. To Renew, you reduce your Discard dial by 1, then shuffle the discard pile into the deck. The main action you take in the game though is to Duel, where you reduce your Hands dial by 1, then play out a poker hand to deal damage to the current enemy, drawing back up to 8 cards afterward. Each hand deals a different amount of damage, with more powerful hands dealing more damage. When you deal damage, you reduce the enemy’s life dial by that many points. If you reduce the enemy’s life to 0, you defeat that enemy. If your Hands dial is at 0 and the enemy still has health, you lose. When you defeat an enemy, you take the card and put it aside. Each enemy has a bonus that you can use later on in the game, with goons having a one-time bonus and villains having a permanent bonus. You then reveal the next card from the enemy deck, noting health, Hands and Discards like before. If you can make it through all 12 rounds (the last one being Lord Overkill himself), you win!

Ace of Spades is a very challenging game. While early rounds are relatively easy to get through, later rounds will require dealing lots of damage in relatively few hands. As anyone who has played poker knows, powerful hands are tricky to get. So while getting a pair isn’t too tricky, you’re only doing 1 point of damage if all you can get is a pair. Getting a full house is much harder, but can do 6 points of damage, which is pretty good. Later enemies though might require doing an average of 10 points of damage per hand which requires you to not only get powerful hands, but utilize bonus damage from defeated enemies or playing face cards as part of the scoring cards from your hand. Utilizing your Discard dial to its full potential is important, making sure to reset your deck every once in a while and making sure the hands you deal damage with are as powerful as possible.

As weird as it seems to sleeve a deck of playing cards, any game I get, I am sleeving my cards. For Ace of Spades, that means sleeving the deck of playing cards and the enemy deck. Fortunately, playing cards are the same size as card games like Magic or Pokemon, so it was easy to get sleeves for that deck. The enemy deck uses Dixit-sized cards, so there are fewer options available, but there are still a good number of sleeves for those cards as well. While the player mat with its dials is a useful tool, it is larger than necessary and I generally found myself lifting the mat to move the dials each time. Since it also didn’t fit into the box that I moved it into, I replaced the mat with 4 dice (1 d10 and 1 tens d10 for enemy life, 1 d6 for Hands and 1 d6 for Discards) and a print-out of the damage amounts from the bottom of the mat. While it doesn’t look as cool as the mat, it also shrinks what I need to store by a lot. A 300-count cardboard box is perfectly sized to fit the Dixit-sized cards and the playing card deck can fit on top of that well. While the Hell Tile is a little large, as is the rulebook when folded in half, both can fit snugly on top of the cards, under the top of the box when folded together. And with the mat replaced with dice and an extra card, it all fits nice and neatly in the box.

If you’re looking for a solo game with a lot of challenge and a good amount of luck, where you are trying to best play poker hands, I do recommend Ace of Spades.

Ace of Spades is available now from our webstore.