Rise & Ruin

Written by Jason Cisarano  on April 10, 2007

First Impressions: There's a new card game on the web... and it's not poker!

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Looking for a break from the usual FPS shoot-'em-ups? Ready for an experience that promises action without sacrificing the strategy of forming and breaking alliances and partnerships? Searching for a game you can play through your web browser and access via your cellphone 24/7? Then Rise & Ruin, they latest offering from a partnership between Canadian developers Veil Entertainment and Spore Productions may be just the thing to fill the bill. It's a turn-based collectible card strategy game featuring 600+ card types, customizable characters, fully 3D animations, and a mobile interface that allows you to interact with your character when you're away from your computer. It's played over the Internet via your web browser and allows trading and buying cards in order to build the ultimate deck.

Rise & Ruin is set in a fantasy/science fiction universe dominated by four separate factions, each of which features its own special abilities and weaknesses. The four races hail from four distinct worlds, and combat can take place on each world, which can give bonuses or create problems depending on the environment. For instance, the Ralak, a vicious and anarchic species descended from ancient dragons, live on a world that's all fire, desert and ruin, like something out of The Road Warrior. When they fight in the jix'Sin homeworld's ocean environments, they suffer combat penalties. The jix'Sin, by the way, are an insectoid race whose militaristic collective serves one Queen while suffering from internal turmoil.

The other two factions are the Keldei and the Vedyn, who more or less share a homeworld. The Keldei are forest dwellers, individualistic beast-like humanoids with powerful, fur-covered frames who excel at earth-based magic and ax combat. On the other hand, the Vedyn are a race of pure energy beings who live in the Aether around the Keldei world. They're masters of energy magic and smashing weapons but are vulnerable to the Keldei's earth magic.

Each race has cards that emphasize its strengths, while its enemies are guaranteed to hold cards that exploit its weaknesses. The complete deck has more than six hundred cards in four basic categories: attack, defense, special action and modifier. Attack cards vary by potential damage level, of course, but also by attack type, species, and character attributes. For instance a certain attack card might feature an energy attack and be optimal for a Vedyn character with a certain set of attributes or skills (more on those in a moment). Defense cards carry similar details and are often specialized to counter specific attacks. Special action cards can serve as a player's Уace in the holeФ in that they can quickly turn the tide of a battle through drastic events like emptying all cards from both player's hands, swapping a player's cards with those of an opponent, or even moving the battlefield to another world. Modifier cards might be the most interesting of all, since they can be used to change the effects of any attack or defense card by buffing them, de-buffing them, adding special attack types, special damage, and more. The modifiers pretty much give the player the ability to customize his or her deck into a something truly unique.

The player can also develop a unique character in any of the four races to serve as an avatar in the game world. That avatar plays all the cards during a battle, and its stats affect how effective a card can be. Here's how it works. Each character can develop skills in four primary areas: combat, defense, magic, and a specialty category. Within each skill are subdivisions. For instance, combat is divided into hand-to-hand, handheld weapons, thrown weapons and projectile weapons. If a character has a 7.5 rating in handheld weapons, when he plays a sword card he'll be able to inflict up to 75% of the max damage the card allows.

New characters start with their skills at 2.5 and must train to improve their stats. Players can train their characters either through the usual game interface or via their cell phone. Give your a character the order to train a specific skill and they'll train for an hour, improving their ratings. If you do it through your cellphone, you'll get a text message to let you know when the training is complete. There's no limit as to how much or when you can train your characters: they're on-call every day, around the clock. Players will also use their phones to trade cards and communicate with other players as they form alliances.

Collecting the cards will be another important element of Rise & Ruin. Each player will start out with a noob deck of forty cards, most of which will be standard to all starting players and spread equally between the primary card types. Like all collectible card games, though, part of the fun is the possibility of getting that rare, powerful card mixed in with your deck, and the newb deck will include a few randoms to make this possible. Players will have to buy more decks or win cards in battle in order to build a more powerful deck and compete in some of the larger-scale battles. Rise & Ruin's Уvirtual foil packsФ will come in different sizes and flavors, with some specialized in categories like combat or defense, while others will be completely random. The devs haven't announced yet what these packs will cost, but they do promise that this will be the only fee associated with playing the game.