Life and death decided by the draw of a card!
When an accident claims his life, Gareth finds himself reborn on Acamida. Dropped into a world where sorcerers draw magical power from a deck of cards, summoning monsters and flinging spells, Gareth must adapt to having arcane power at his fingertips. It’s just a shame he’s found himself with the weakest cards around—goblins!
Joined by a fallen goddess, a deposed demon king and surly local, Gareth sets out into Acamida. In a realm where experience points and levels are very real, Gareth must grow stronger if he intends to have his second life last longer than his first. With monsters around every corner and dungeons beneath his feet, Acamida is a dangerous place.
As Gareth finds new cards and grows in power, the rumbles of war stir in the west. If he’s going to survive Gareth will need to master his deck and find the strength hidden within his goblin allies.
My Opinion: 662 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is a transported to a Fantasy RPG world story with card game mechanics used as the RPG progression and battle system. While I really appreciated the work that went into using a new kind of game system and thought the rules and system were implemented well, there were story issues that made this a less than entertaining read. To be frank, I got bored.
First the positives. The card game mechanics are well thought out and you could tell they were based on popular card games like: Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. Each deck holder had a specific theme for the monsters and spells they could summon, clear costs and effects for those cards, and the ability to upgrade the decks and the deck holders feats and mana. There were such clearly thought out rules, that the author even had a formalized ruleset at the back of the book. While there wasn’t anything groundbreaking with the system, it was consistent and anyone that likes card games will recognize and appreciate the effort it took to create something custom like it.
Action, when not using the card game system, wasn’t half bad and the larger late story battles felt appropriately complex considering their scale.
The negatives. The story was frankly predictable. Nothing ever happened that I couldn’t see coming chapters away. I kept hoping there would be some great twist or an unexpected character death or some surprise, but nope.
Part of this has to do with an inherent conflict between the card game system and the kind of story told. For me, playing a good card game is part building a good deck with tricks and strategies. The other part is the luck of the draw that keeps an element of randomness and forces me as a player to make intelligent decisions to play the best I can with the hand I’m given. That random element is a fundamental part of the tension of the game. But in the story, that tension doesn’t really exist. Most of the card battles lacked any real tension because the main character (MC) couldn’t lose. I mean, there was no story mechanic for him to lose without being killed in battle, so he couldn’t lose and thus there was plenty of plot armor where he or another character was saved because they miraculously drew just the right card at the right time to win. Often these cards were never seen before or had such a low chance of being drawn, it rightly felt like a story cheat that they came up. This also made the action, when the card game was used, feel predetermined.
Now, these aspects could have been made up for if the characters in the story had been more interesting or if they were better world building or dialogue. But again, this fell flat for most of the story. The main characters felt a bit flat without complex motivations and for much of the story felt a bit like caricatures. Though there was a concerted effort to make the dialogue funny and bantering between characters, it often ended up feeling forced and artificial because the main characters in the story had almost no time to break down what should have been near insurmountable cultural differences. The three main characters: a man from our world reborn, a thousands year old goddess who sorted though souls, and a native lizard girl each had very very different life experiences, cultures, and languages. Yet, within moments of meeting each other, or at least not being enemies, they are joking and bantering like they all grew up together and have the same cultural references for each corny joke or pun. I get what the author was trying to do, create a fun group that would banter between fights and adventures, but it felt forced to me considering the character’s disparate backgrounds.
Overall, while I appreciate the effort to try a new game mechanic, it wasn’t enough to make the story entertaining. I didn’t dislike the story, but found it to be predictable and forced in several aspects and thus lost interest and got bored with it.
Score: 5 out of 10