Hey gang, its been awhile since our last blog update. For those of you who haven’t been following us on Facebook and Twitter, there’s been lots of exciting news in the last few months.
Star Realms organized play is here!
The first round of game day and tournament kits have been sent out to stores, letting Star Realms fans battle for exclusive promo cards and playmats previously only available to Kickstarter backers. Have your local game store contact their distributor to start setting up organized play in your hometown. Due to demand, supplies are currently limited, though a reprint is on the way!
Contents of the tournament kits.
Star Realms Second Printing
Star Realms has proven to be a smash hit, though it means we’ve rather quickly run through the game’s first printing. A second printing is already underway, and will hopefully be available sometime in July. The second printing is identical to the first, save for some minor copyright corrections. We’ve also listened to your feedback on how the Authority cards can sometimes be hard to manage, and we’ve added symbols to the corners to hopefully make them a bit easier to use (though a pencil and paper is never a bad option either!)
The new and improved Authority tracker.
Star Realms Digital Play
We’ve all been hard at work perfecting the Star Realms digital game, coming soon to iOS, Android, PC and Mac. Many of our Kickstarter backers are loving the beta, and we’ve been having a blast playing Star Realms against our loyal fans (feel free to issue a challenge to “Vito” and prepare for destruction!). We now have some details on what the final game will include.
- Ranked online play (with unlockable avatars!)
- 15 thrilling campaign missions, with normal and hard variants.
- 3 challenging levels of AI.
- Pass & Play mode
- More!
Star Realms on Tour!
To help promote the game, the Wise Wizards Game crew will be hitting up four of the most popular game trade shows around: Origins Game Fair 2014 in Columbus, Ohio (Jun 11-15), Gen Con 2014 in Indianapolis, Indiana (Aug 14-17), PAX 2014 in Seattle, WA (Aug 29 – Sep 1), Spiel 2014 in Germany (October 16-19). At each of these shows we’ll be bringing along an exclusive alternate art promo card. Origins is just a week away, so here’s a preview of what you’ll find inside the official Origins coupon book:
Expansions
I’m excited to announce… what’s that? All out of time? Oh well, we’ll have to save this topic for another date. Enjoy conquering the Star Realms my gaming friends!
-Vito Gesualdi, Community Manager
@vitogesualdi
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Terrific game, a go-to for quick fun (and quick teaching). Exciting news, thanks for sharing!!
-Ric
I love Star Realms. I love how quickly you can assemble a fast deck, and how challenging it is to mount a defense if you’re aiming for a late game victory.
Online play is frustrating because people often take several minutes on their turn. I’d like to see much faster play online, more like Hearthstone.
Thanks for a great game!
The solution to this issue is not to eschew async mechanics altogether, but to include an option for realtime matches.
The way async makes it possible for people wih busy and (slightly more) real lives to enjoy online play even when there is no time to schedule or enjoy online sessions, makes the asynchronous paradigm a small revolution in gaming. There are whole communities and groups of iOS gamers like me, who never used to play online, but now do it frequently and regularly thanks to the constant access and freedom to take turns at my own convenience that async in the pocket offers.
Heck, Ravenmark Mercenaries (one of the premium iOS async titles and TBS games) has even built a competitive community with tournaments, prizes and ladders, around async play, much like Star Realms aims to do. That’s competitive online multiplayer even for those that never have more than a minute of contiguous time to spend online… That’s possibly one of the coolest thing smartphones has given back to the gaming world 🙂
@wylliam The online play was designed for asynchronous turn-by-turn play, so you basically log on and play a few turns every day. It works better on your mobile device as it lets you play on the go!
I’m sadly not a kickstarter back, any idea when this will be released on iOS for those of us who missed out? I’m really hoping this will replace my Ascension addiction since that will be going away soon.
Let me preface this by saying that Star Realms for iOS tops every gaming wish list I have (including those that do not involve iOS at all 😉 ).
Now, for either the devs or beta players, I have a few question regarding the async implementation (pet peeves of mine for async mechanics):
1. Do (or will) push notifications bring the player directly into the match? (There are still a rare few async games where pushes only bring the player to a lobby or main menu, wasting quite a lot of time for those of us who play many turns per day.)
2. Can we remain in-game and essentially enjoy Star Realms as a realtime title if we wish, or are we forced out to a menu/lobby after making our turns?
(Very few async titles work as thus these days, but the otherwise titanic Starbase Orion still suffers from this completely inexplicable ailment. There is absolutely no reason not to let players play any match as a realtime affair, with the async mechanics kicking in as soon as one players leaves the game. Luckily, this is now the diamond standard for async mp.)
3. Will there be an integrated chat system? (Has proven to be very beneficial for community building, and almost essential for competitive environments in async titles.)
4. Will there be a pretty litle button that lets us jump to the next game with an active turn (preferably a button that shows badges for unplayed turns in other games)?
In general, look to Carcassonne for iOS for one of the most feature-complete asynchronous systems (and also study Ascension and Playdek’s recent async titles, the lack of a chat system notwithstanding). Any games that just copies Code Monkey’s design philosophy for async mechanics will feature one of the market’s finest turn-based multiplayer systems 🙂
Has the second printing already happened? I bought the game on Android and love it! (Sure wish I would have seen the Kickstarter)
In any case, I’d really like a physical copy of the game, but it appears that Amazon is sold out. Thanks for any updates!
If you read this and are annoyed that there isn’t a realtime option for
online multiplayer, write and complain to the devs!!!
I want to play this great game with other people but this lobby system is so frustratingly slow!
I play the game in real time with my friends, so why on earth would I want to play a few moves a day online? That’s a fish on a bike.
Will the expansions be available for online play? It would be a cool thing to have that AND for those of us who have the physical game, if and when an expansion is purchased, you could get a code to unlock that expansion for online play. Just a thought.