MAGDA is live
- Athena
- Sep 22, 2020
- 1 min read
MADGA is a solitaire card game about traveling in space by using your dreams as fuel. An AI called MAGDA jealously wants to keep you for herself and prevent you from gathering the necessary artifacts to travel back home. The game is live on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 30 days. You may back either the standard or the Collector's edition that includes foil cards and features MAGDA in a saucy pose. There is also a Limited Edition option that gets you a story book and additional artwork.
For as long as you, the pilot, are sleeping and dreaming, MAGDA is pleased. When you land on a planet or carry out a mission, however, she gets angry and throws obstacles at you. On each round, you will be dealing 3 cards from the Pilot deck in front of you. This is called the Queue. You also select a Manifest card that will give you your current objectives. Each of these objectives has arrows that point in different directions. On each turn, you select one of the cards in the Queue and play it next to any of the Manifest objectives. If you reveal a Crew card, you can take it to assist you.
When you draw a card that irritates MAGDA, e.g. a planet card, you have to immediately draw a card from her deck and suffer its negative consequences. You win if you manage to reach your home planet.
I first thought it was a relaunch as I already met this game. The Unfiltered Gamer had made a review quite some while ago (more than a year). I wonder what delayed it so long.
It still seems to me that you have very minimal control over what happens. Some MAGDA cards say 'if you have this, then...' You may be lucky and not have played that particular card at that time, or not. And if you draw the card that says 'if you have played the HOME card, you lose' near the end of the game, where's the fun in that?
All that said, I like the artwork a lot.
I asked on the Kickstarter about the seeming randomness and luck. Here is the reply:
"at first glance it seems like it's all luck driven but when you play it, you'll realize there are a myriad of what we call, "micro strategies" that can help you win. This is mostly based around the fact that there are only one of each harmful "MAGDA" card in the deck. Never duplicates. So if you pull a specific "MAGDA" card early in the game, you know you'll never have to worry about it again and can use certain cards and strategies that she can no longer attack. Keeping safety cards on top of your queue (so you can play them at a moment…
Yes, the Hungry Gamer said so and you can clearly see from the playthrough how random it is. I especially dislike the insta-lose cards.
I like the theme and concept of this one, but I'm not sure about the gameplay. Videos make it look overly luck driven.