Faeria Review

Faeria is a deck-building, card-collecting, turn-based card/puzzle game that hosts a plethora of features promising to keep you playing for hours. The game takes valuable aspects from top card games such as Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone mixed with the play-style of Heroscape. But does it work? The quick answer is – absolutely.

After completing the tutorial you will know the basics of playing Faeria – it’s a good tutorial that offers plenty of knowledge without overstaying its welcome. Once completed, you will be free to play as you wish, whether that be playing against bots for practice, playing online, or playing Adventure mode, which allows players to play through various solo and co-op challenges. Faeria is very much a game that gives more out the more time you put into it. You’ll be working towards various unlocks such as new game modes, new deck recipes and most importantly, new cards.

Faeria is played on a hexagonal-shaped map, made up of smaller hexagons that players must ‘fill in’ themselves with various types of lands to move across the board. There are four corner ‘orbs’ – place a card next to these orbs and you will be given up to four extra orbs each turn depending on how many you have acquired. Players are given orbs each turn to play cards. Each card has an orb cost to play it; if you don’t use all the orbs you have, they will roll over to the next turn.

The game plays out very much like Magic: The Gathering, only instead of having land cards to play, players have to place the land down on the map to move across it. For example, some cards will require two forest lands to be in play before they can be played themselves. Each turn you can either place a single land card (forest, lake, mountain and desert), place two neutral lands  (gaining an extra orb or draw an extra card into your hand. Learning to use these efficiently is the key to winning in Faeria.

Again, Faeria rewards players for playing. It has a few extra game modes that can be unlocked which are Pandora and Puzzles modes. Pandora is a draft mode, allowing players to make a unique deck and then survive for as long as they can, whereas Puzzle mode players have to complete various puzzles, starting easy and then getting harder. Faeria also has daily login rewards, daily quests and chests that are given as rewards for various activities, from levelling up to completing missions.

There is a whole host of cards available in Faeria for you to chase down (there’s over three hundred of them, which can be upgraded), with several custom decks for you to build and choose your favourite playstyle and encourage learning to make your own deck from scratch. There are always new things to see and learn, so it would be great to see the game supported for a long time. Touch-screen controls are also a welcome inclusion.

Faeria is a card-based strategy title with moreish depth. There’s a lot to do, with plenty of unlockables and new things to find everywhere you look. Things are sometimes a little difficult to read if you’re playing in Handheld Mode, which is an issue with a game of this genre, but otherwise this is certainly a faer-y tale experience.