Sword Girls Closed Beta Review

Where the magic begins...

I recently got a closed beta key for Sword Girls, a anime-themed online card game with many RPG and social game elements. While Sword Girls is not Magic: The Gathering, it is a fairly accessible and frenetic game which makes unique use of the fact that it is an online card game – it can essentially make use of video game conceits that RPG gamers are well aware of, like the brutal RNG (random number generator) upon which hang certain decisions. And yet it maintains a good element of strategic play and the card balance is not bad (and if it is, perhaps the random elements will make it difficult for your to notice).

The Card Game Basics

Maid Assault!

In Sword Girls, you build decks of 30 cards, composed of a Heroine (does not count toward your 30), Followers and Spells. You begin each game with your Heroine, who sets your Life score and has a special ability that activates at the start of each turn. Your Heroine will determine your Faction (probably – sometimes it doesn’t matter much) and gives you a baseline to build upon. In the picture above, the blonde girl in the red dress is Cinia, my deck Heroine. Her ability gives a small, free debuff against an enemy Follower at the start of every turn. From there, I tried to build more toward debuffs. The card up there, the Spell where she’s shown laughing a bit, is also a Debuff spell themed after her. More on this in a moment.

You have a hand of 5 cards, which is replenished each turn. You do not draw cards as a rule – if your hand is full, you don’t draw anything. You always draw solely to replenish your hand to 5 cards. Twice a game, you can Shuffle your hand into the deck and draw an equal number of cards. This can be extremely helpful in a tight situation or to open up more options. Your field has 5 spaces. You can have up to 5 cards on the field at a time – but, there is a greater restriction. Each card has a value, the blue number at the top, which is its Size. You can have a maximum of 10 Size in play. So while I had a card remaining in my hand up there, I already filled out the field – the sum of the sizes of all my spells and followers is 10 total. So until some of those cards clear up, I cannot play any more cards. Your field can shift pretty quickly though.

A moment after: enemy cards revealed.

The turn structure in Sword Girls is fairly unique. Players don’t essentially take turns – everyone puts all their cards face down (you can see yours, but your opponent sees your card back – which by the way you can customize by buying sleeves!) at the same time, then reveals them all. There is a 30-second timer that will force entry into the battle phase. All cards are flipped, and players flip a coin to see who gets to attack first. The coin is colored, and if it lands on the color around your name, your card attacks first – or your spells resolve first. Spells always resolve first in such a situation. The true turn order is pretty much random – my 3-value maid or my 2-value maid could attack first and I wouldn’t really know.

Followers are the meat of the game. Your followers have 5 aspects: their size (as explained above), and then their combat stats and effect. Followers have 3 numbers, from left to right. First is the follower’s attack value, which it deals in a combat. Then is the character’s defense, which subtracts from enemy damage. Finally is the character’s Stamina. These values can rise or drop depending on attacks and effects, but they are not reset each turn. If your follower gets hurt, she remains hurt until you heal her or do something. It is not like M:TG where these values are reset each turn if affected. Finally, some followers have special abilities. Vanilla followers are not devalued, however – they often have better base stats. Followers always counterattack when attacked by an enemy (unless the enemy knocks them out in one hit, they will counterattack if they have stamina left, and this triggers attack effects!), but otherwise they can only attack once each battle phase. Whenever a Follower is defeated, you lose Life equal to its Size value. So losing a powerful card will hurt more than just your field presence.

A Spell is always resolved first, before an attack. So for example, if you win the Coin Flip, and you have 2 spells played and 2 followers like me above, one of your spells will resolve first, then a follower will attack, and then the rest plays out. Spells do huge variety of things. Because of the nature of the game, “burning” a Heroine’s life is a bit restricted, though there are still a bunch of ways to do it. Card drawing is also inconsequential. Buffs, debuffs, and other Follower-related effects are all over the place, often tied to specific factions. My Heroine, Cinia, has a lot of cards related to Maids and Academy cards. There are also effects which affect the Size of your characters, and can be fairly powerful when employed correctly.

The coin flip makes me so nervous.

The tutorial is not exceptionally good at telling you about all the randomness in the game, but once you get into it, Sword Girls is really frenetic and exciting. You’ll find yourself biting your nails as your enemy drops powerhouses on the board while you’ve only got a stable of injured conscripts – and feel the thrill of your fleeting superiority every time the coin flip goes your way, and one of your strongest characters knocks out a strong foe in one hit, denying a counterattack. There is a lot of strategy to be found under the hood, and it’s fun to see it go right (and go wrong). You have no idea what’ll happen until you play.

Deckbuilding: Pick An Anime Obsession

The game has four “factions” and a couple of Neutral cards. Factions have themes and reference card names, heroine names and the faction itself (for example a card might require Cinia as your heroine, or it might reference “academy followers” or it may reference a card name element like “maid”). But there are many cards that can work well off-faction and mixing factions is definitely possible (and often profitable). Playing to theme is very much the game’s strength, however. The four factions are, in a nutshell: Academy cards are maids and magic represented by the noblewoman Cinia Pacifica, and have a broad focus but tend to do a lot of debuffing attack, defense and stamina. Crux cards are knights and clerics and represented by the kindly knight Luthica Preventer, and are survivable cards that buff up a lot. Vita cards are schoolgirls, student societies (prominently, the cooking club) led by Sita Vilosa, and are kind of all over the place, with a buffing, lifegain and some debuffing of stamina. Darklore are vampires and monster girls led by the vampire lady Iri Flina, which focus on risky effects with big payoffs.

The art and flavor text of the game are excellent.

Above is a shot of the deckbuilding screen. Each deck has to have a character, and then 30 cards (maximum and minimum). There’s a lot of different ways you can play the game, and will determine the balance of cards you use. Both the balance of spells and followers, as well as the size values you’ll run, will vary by playstyle. You’ll want to have a mix though, since you will field your field clogged if all you run are 5 value juggernauts – but whether you run 8 slots for huge characters, or 12, or even just 4, will be up to you to decide. Similarly, the balance of spells and followers is critical. Followers will win you the game, but spells are powerful and can swing bad situations your way, or help you maintain dominance. So far I’ve never seen a spell with a value above 3, but it’s possible there are some. Decks with lower value followers can use more spell/follower combos, kind of like white weenie equips in Magic: The Gathering. But big followers benefit from them as well.

You Got Your RPG In My Card Game

As mentioned above, the game feels like a card game of a RPG, with values and concepts that any RPG gamer will be aware of (a cycling “RNG” that determines turn order, attack and damage resistance and health values for every character that remain for several rounds once dealt, unless quickly reversed). What I like about Sword Girls is that it was never built as something that would work as cardboard squares on a tabletop. Because it is handled by a computer, Sword Girls can have all these coin flips, value tracking and random turn orders and random attacks (yes, your followers attack whoever they want, you can’t order them around to that extent), and create fast but still pretty tactically interesting gameplay. It is an online card game, and it has all these unique elements that give it a character all its own. It might sound frustrating but it’s actually really fun, and I feel really accomplished whenever I win (and shake my fist at the heavens when I lose). I have to keep an eye on every nerve-wracking moment of the game, and the winds of fate can shift in a second. It is a swingy game.

There are a lot of extra elements to the game to satisfy not only the company’s business model, but also hardcore social gamers. There is a single player game where you delve into dungeons, fighting repeated card battles against “monster” heroines and then facing a unique “Boss” – a character with more powerful (broken) abilities and higher (broken) life than you, and whose deck strategies are finely tuned to its unique powers. Whenever you win a match, you collect Materials that you can use in the Lab to make new, stronger cards, or which you can use to “transform” your heroine, changing her card artwork (often to a more visually tantalizing attire, such as a fancy wedding dress, or casual clothes) and basic ability.

So many things...

This is a screenshot of the Lab and its many social game-esque options. In the Sci Lab, you can spend Materials such as ores, glasses, stockings and magic paper to make new cards. The interface leaves something to be desired – for example, you don’t know whether you can craft a card until you click on that card and go to another new screen where you’ll see the materials. And then, it won’t tell you how many materials you are missing. It’ll black out any materials you don’t meet, but won’t tell you how many you need to make up the difference. So if you have 2 materials and need 4, it’ll only tell you that you need 4. So then you have to go back and check how much of a material you have. It is awkward and sometimes annoying, especially if like me you spend a lot of time here. HOWEVER it does allow you to see all the craftable cards in the game, which lets you see all the artwork, flavor text and effects without having to get the card, so you can plan your deck in advance.

In the Campsite, you can send your Heroines to go exploring alone. When you want them to return, they may have items with them. You have to explore for a LONG time before you get anything. For six hours, I got nothing from Cinia. I left her exploring overnight (you can log off and she’ll keep exploring) and when I came back the next day (24 hours on the dot) she had 3 ores to give me. It’s nice though, because it’s free materials. Just have a heroine you’re not using explore all the time, and ignore her for like a week and see what happens. Alchemy and Exchange allow you to transmute materials into different materials, and to transform cards into materials, respectively. The better the card, the more materials it will yield. But you can only use Exchange a couple times per day. Alchemy gives diminishing returns – 4 white rocks can make a red rock, for example. But sometimes you need a red rock, and you don’t need 108 white rocks, so it’s a nice feature.

Then there’s a couple of weird, facebook game-like elements. At the Cafe, you can give your Heroines gifts, and they’ll transform, as I said above, changing their attire and effects. This is fairly random too. At the Classroom, you can train Cards. Training puts a card out of play for several hours, and gives it Training Points. Your Friends in the game can help you by poking the cards you have in training. But you can only poke a certain amount of times per day. You can add Friends (and poke their cards) in the Library. Remember, that your friend’s account names are NOT their Sword Girls names for the Library. My account name is WyattSalazar but my Sword Girls name is Wyatt (add me) (poke my cards) (they need it).

Once you’ve got a card trained up, you go to the Gym. For the Gym, you need two cards of the same name to have training (supposedly). Then you can spend the training points to…do something. I don’t know. I’ve never successfully trained any cards. I’m fairly sure what it does is give you a new, better card related to the other two. But this is all hearsay I’ve collected from the Sword Girls chat. I have never successfully trained a Follower but I’m still trying!

You may need the wikia that is being compiled by people in the beta. Not only does it have a lot of the gorgeous card artwork for your perusal, it gives tips on things like transformations, and where to find certain materials. But this is all for the really hardcore folks who want to collect the rarest cards and get the transformations (the transformations are not strictly better than the original characters – they just provide you with alternative baseline strategies). You can play pretty decently with common and uncommon cards. And if as long as you give the lab and exploration a minimum of attention, you should be able to slowly, calmly work your way up to better cards and new strategies. You don’t have to get obsessed with it, really.

The Verdict: Maids Solve Everything

Sword Girls is currently in closed beta. When it comes out for real it will live or die by its business model. So far, it seems there will be quite a heavy grind for materials to make those better cards and compete (not that you have to – you can always just play with your friends, or play the single player dungeons). Paying Tokens (1 token is, in the beta, worth 1 cent, and 500 tokens buy starter decks, while 30 tokens buy single, random cards from a certain Faction) may in the future mitigate some grind if you can just buy materials or better yet, just buy the cards that you want. I will probably still play once the beta is done. I really like the game, it is pretty fun and it’s something to do when you just want to boot up a web browser and spend 30 minutes, and accomplish a bit, and come back to later. Or if I have time, to really dig in and build decks and analyze strategies, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately. It plays well both to a casual gaming perspective and a more hardcore, dig-your-claws-in-it focus.

The interface needs some work, particularly in the crafting bits of the lab, and the tutorial could be a lot clearer about how followers choose their targets and turn order. The boss battles can be horribly brutal. But overall, I think it is a great, entertaining and unique game, with vibrant artwork and flavor and fast, varied gameplay. I would recommend trying to get into the closed beta, and I’ll be playing and keeping an eye on it when it comes out in Open Beta, and then for real, and we’ll see how the game’s grown and how the business model works out for both the casual and the hardcore players.

Also: needs an iOS app NOW. Hopefully not just an iPad exclusive one either.