5th Cell, the developer of handheld curio Scribblenauts, has announced its new game today, called Castlehold. It’s a card-based tactics game – which is a bit of a surprise, given the sharp left turn from Scribblenauts. And it’s also very good, from the brief bit of it that I’ve played – which, hands up, was maybe a bit of a surprise to me too.
It’s out today in early access on Steam, it’s free-to-play with optional microtransactions, and it does suffer from a bad case of fonts. And if we’re being brutal, there is a touch of the less-fashionable mobile game to it all, too, thanks to a mish-mash of styles and familiarly broad-sweeping army types like ‘medieval’ and ‘western’. But! It is good, and I am a snob, so we’ll just skip past the aesthetics here and get to the meat of it.
Castlehold is played on a symmetrical island map, made of exactly 19 hexagonal tiles. Like a Hearthstone or a Magic the Gathering or any other card battler, you play one-on-one, against another human or the AI, bringing your custom-built or preset deck of characters that form your army and playing them onto the map turn-by-turn. The goal is tactical, or strategic maybe, in that you have to get a unit of yours from your castle, the tile nearest to you where they spawn, to your opponent’s castle at the map’s opposite end, while they of course are trying to do the same.
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