iOS, Android, PC
Temple Gates came out of nowhere in 2017 to rock our worlds with the, still fantastic, digital port of Race for the Galaxy. While we know they’ve been working on it’s dicey cousin, Roll for the Galaxy, we also know that they’ve hooked up with Stone Blade Entertainment and have been working on their 2-player card battler, Shards of Infinity. Looks like the latter has been getting the bulk of the attention because, today, they announced that beta signups are open.
Shards of Infinity is a 2-player deckbuilder which differs from that other big 2-player deckbuilder from Stone Blade in a few important ways. First of all, it’s not a victory point chaser. Instead, it takes a CCG approach in which each player is trying to reduce their enemy to 0 hit points. Secondly, it uses a resource called “mastery”. You begin the game with none, and can buy some each turn. If you reach 30 mastery, you can unlock your Infinity Shard and instantly beat your opponent.
The digital version from Temple Gates looks to follow in the very polished shoes of Race for the Galaxy. We’ve been promised online multiplayer, an AI based on Keldon Jones’ awesome AI used in RftG, and hotseat multiplayer. From the press release:
Shards of Infinity is the second mobile board game release for Temple Gates Games, coming on the heels of the award winning Race for the Galaxy app. “The reason to play a board game on your phone is to take advantage of digital-only features,” says Theresa Duringer, CEO of Temple Gates Games, “including AI, automated setup and score keeping, and the ability to play with friends remotely. Our goal is to nail these with lickety split performance.” The AI for Shards of Infinity is an extension of Keldon Jones’ AI for Race for the Galaxy, which uses neural networks to create challenging opponents.
The beta is open right now to iOS, Android, and Steam users and you can signup right here. From what I can gather, if you are an Android or Steam user, the beta will be in the Early Access format. That means you’ll have to pay for it up front, but will then own the app when version 1.0 rolls around. iOS, on the other hand, offers a free beta experience, but you’ll have to buy the app when it goes live at the actual launch. So, it’s pretty much the same thing, I think.
Head over and sign up now and we’ll keep feeding you any new info we can glean about Shards of Infinity before its expected release in Spring of 2019.
I’ve started a diet today, so forgive me, but I’m in a grumpy mood. I have a hard time calling an app “very polished” when it hasn’t managed to be patched for the new iPhone resolutions in over a year. “Very Polished” is Through the Ages. “Good, but needs some updates” is Race for the Galaxy.
Shards of Inifinity sounds interesting but hopefully it does enough to separate itself from other card battlers.
If I listen hard enough, it could sound as if they’ve taken the best bits of Solforge (which I ruddy adored) and polished them. Add in a good offline AI and what could there be not to love?
Plays up to 4 players from what I’ve seen so far in app.
Has some of the good bits of Ascension and Star Realms merged into one, either focus on damage to kill off your opponents and their champions (champions being like bases from SR), or build up enough of the star symbol to power up your shard, which gives you infinite damage, allowing you to kill everyone else at once.
I’ve had a couple crashes so far, and it doesn’t yet support online multiplayer.
If this were some kind of 4-player Star Realms (meaning a deck builder where victory comes through combat) with asynchronous, I’m an absolute day 1 purchase.
It seems like that’s exactly what this will be, pretty much same play loop as Ascension or Star Realms.
They’ve done async with Race for the Galaxy, I’d certainly hope they’d do it again for this.
Will chime in when multiplayer lands.
Due to my, apparently, stunted reading comprehension, I missed completely that this is actually based on a tabletop game. That makes me even more interested.
You’re going to love the fact that Shards has the same resolution issue.
Maybe they just don’t know how to fix it…
It’s a pretty Star Realms-esque game, isn’t it?
The Focus mechanic, to boost cards’ abilities, is a goodie, as is allowing some cards that you’re waiting to play on your next turn shield you from damage.
In a funny way, that it plays so slickly, for me doesn’t help. With Ascension, you’re in no doubt that it’s a card game at heart, the cards have a certain physicality about them; you read them, flick them onto the board, double tap them to see your options - relatively there’s a lot of manipulation to become familiar with.
With Shards, it’s just tapping gorgeous glass-like artwork that slides swiftly and effortlessly to and fro with a beautiful woosh. It works very well in RftG, but here I’d like a more ‘handsy’ experience.
Online multiplayer is live and it’s pretty awesome.
Also they added full iPhone X support and it’s flawless as well…played a ton on my phone AT LAST.
There are some server problems at the moment for some (can’t create games and multiple notifications per single turn) but they are on it.
The app is on the right track to be glorious…it’s the child of Ascension and Star Realms which is awesome for me as I loved both and I much prefer fighting against an opponent than a multiplayer solitaire score chase.
You set up an account (mail + mailed code which act as one time password).
Then you simply put your account on every device you own to sync multiplayer
It depends on the publisher and the game. I’m not supposed to post anything about the TtA expansion, for example.
I talked with Theresa at Temple Gates and she didn’t mention that anything was embargoed. I will double check. My spring break starts tomorrow (we’ll be driving until Saturday, but then I’m planning on catching up on this huge backlog and start posting like a madman) so it would be good to know what I can post. Will let you know.
Considering that their beta feedback method is a public thread at BGG, I’d say it’s safe to talk about it.
That site’s still around?
Seems to be hanging on. Unfortunately, the iOS Boardgame Blog seems to have died off. Haven’t seen anything posted by Brad in months and the unpaid minion he gets to do his dirty work for him has been slacking lately. The only one of my subscriptions that gets any traffic is a bunch of complaining about Yucata being down (again).
Jhschaer at iCloud for invites, added @whovian223 and @kennfusion to games
It appears there are not actually any clocks right now. 30 minutes, 1 week, it’s all infinity I believe.
I like the multiple paths to victory in this one, versus Ascension or SR
NO HE IS NOT!!!
(wtf does it mean “body seems unclear”. Maybe this will post now?)
Eheheheh GG!!!
I LOVE this game.
You can go for 30 mastery and use the infinity shard, but if you are not super lucky at the very start with mastery cards, it takes time and generally you will use the infinity shard just when your HP are dangerously low.
You can go for attacks, but that will neglect mastery that gives a lot of advantages during mid play.
You can go for crystals to get the best cards, some are really ultra powerful (but you need 7).
So far I had the hardest time against @kennfusion with his absurdly high defense and tons of champions.
A strategy I couldn’t replicate yet (one time despite me having like 15 attacks per turn he won with having always 10-20!!! defense).
So many possibilities…I keep discovering new weird combos from apparently unrelated cards (which I forget the second after I used them of course).
The game is also incredibly fast and tense when both are online.
GLORIOUS GAME.
I think our game fell off, I thought I hit rematch, will resend now.
I do think though that the game is more like Star Realms than it initially appears, especially SR with missions. Although Infinity Shard strat is missions light, since it is known.
But in SR essentially Mitigation > Aggro > Scrap > Mitigation
It appears that this game was also designed with somewhat of a meta in mind also.
For instance, the way to beat someone going hard into an Infinity Shard win, is heavy aggro.
I do really enjoy the game, still trying to crack the code.
I played a few games against Chris Shaner over the weekend, he is a champion SR player. He was just demolishing me, and I know his strat in SR is to counter build. So I suspect that is a big part of next level strat in this game. Unfortunately, in Async, it is hard to remember what your opponent is playing over a few days.
Ha! No Easy AI can stand up to my fearsomeness! Deathblow on the way, suckah AI.
I’m in. Very little idea what I’m doing, but I’ve played enough deck builders to grasp the basics.
Well, that’s annoying. Guess I should have read the rest of the thread a little more closely.
It’s michael dot j dot geiger at gmail. I’ll add those of you listed in this thread as well.
What’s that you say? Literally infinite damage? Yes, please!
BEST. GAME. EVER!
I just realized they totally borked the view your own deck. you can view your discard, but when you try to view your deck, it’s the opponents I think. Beta, so all good, but helpful to realize.
No undo yet, right?
Just inadvertently scrapped my Infinity Shard; forfeited. It was comedy gold.
@geigerm If you wonder why I didn’t use the infinity shard with 30 mastery last turn it’s because I just mis-tapped the button
Shards of Infinity is imho the best async deckbuilder in years, possibly the very best.
The child of Ascension (also its ‘sequel’) and Star Realms, fast, accessible, varied and deep.
The app is fantastic as well, both on iPad and iPhone.
Game is out next month, as per Temple Games recent tweet.
The beta is already super solid and polished, and they just added an awesome feature, optional jumbo mode for better reading on iPhone (works great).
Not here - worked fine last night and this morning. What’s broken about it?
Hey, this is Jeff a developer from TGG. Sorry about this. We’ve had a few (like 4 or 5) reports of people with this issue. We have gotten some crash reports from Android and submitted a patch to fix the issue we saw there. Crash reports from Apple take a couple days to go through there system, so we don’t know for sure that is the same issue folks are having on iOS unforutnately, but it seems fairly likely.
That patch should be released for Apple devices any moment now (build 1629). When you get that build if things work (or don’t) could you let me know at beta@templegatesgames.com.
Again sorry about this and thanks for the report.
Awesome to see a developer show up here! Thanks for the info.
An update is already out.
Impressive.
In also!
ablackfyre1 attttt geeemail dottt cm
Love playing this one with my kids, now i am ready for you guys.
I’m matthias at buehner minus hsk dot de
Maybe I’m a little late?
Ingame name is Feygor as here.
I invited a lot
You should be able to go to your online account page and reassociate your account w/ your email address and have access to your games again (if an email address is still in the box there, just delete and readd)
Game is out.
Shards of Infinity di Temple Gates Games LLC
Guys, I’ve added all I could find in this thread, if I missed anyone I’m sorry. Please add me up and invite me for a game!
I have the paid version. Coincidentally or not my Friends List now only shows some of my friends … and if I try to add one of the missing ones I get the message that the player is already a friend of mine. So I cannot add them but also I cannot see them in the list to start a new game with them.
@JammaTal has the same problem. Is it just us?
@greysphere I can DM you our email addresses if that is helpful.
Edit: My Friends List on the Steam version is one person shorter than my Friends List when viewed on iOS.
Sorry the ‘reveal’ bug isn’t fixed for any game, and sorry we’re not planing on fixing it for existing games and just letting those go away. But in theory it shouldn’t propagate any more due to the rematch issue.
@Blackfyre
You too eh? The problem has been reported and a fix is being worked on … some earlier posts refer.
Wow! I am now twice as popular as I was yesterday!
@greysphere Once again … thanks for the quick attention and action. Most reassuring
I LOVE this GLORIOUS game.
FTFY
am i the only one who hears the wind cries Mary?
uhm…the game cries premier league on Challonge? or double elim?
The StoneBalde Ascension tournaments format is … Group Stage “everybody plays everybody once” followed by Single Elimination Stage “best of 3” with the final being “best of 5”. They use Challonge.
I guess that only makes sense if we get enough players. The key point is that elimination (in Challonge) can be based on “best of n matches” which is better for a game like Shards than a single match shootout.
Hi All, I just jumped on this bandwagon and added everyone above as friends (im mhatke in game). I’ll send some practice game invites. Decline if you don’t want to play. No hard feelings.
Tourney soon?
Just don’t make me play @Pitta the first round; I’d like to survive for a bit…
Let’s go, bitches:
Jumbo mode is such a welcome feature. The tiny text on most deck builders is a big turnoff for me. (Near sightedness and fifties are a brutal combination for mobile device usage.) Just being able to clearly read the cards without squinting or reading glasses immediately launches SoI into GoTy status. And the game itself is rock solid and FUN.
I think your final deck? And I dunno about one faction vs the others… I do know that the “end turn” and “play all” being the reverse of Ascension is really fucking me up.
I’m playing a 3-player game and I quite like it. We are not enforcing any targeting rules, so right now it is a big free-for-all. I’m not going to argue that it is better than 2-player, but a couple things I’ve noticed:
Games seem to take longer, so you have even more combo opportunities.
There is a greater likelihood that the card you want but can’t afford will be gone when it comes back around to you, so there is added tension when it comes to opportunity costs.
Even without targeting restrictions, I haven’t encountered too many issues with hanging up on one player. All that does is allow the over player to stay healthy and build a strong deck. So far, it seems to make the most sense to distribute damage to everyone to keep the threat of losing a possibility.
This is a great duel game, but it does work quite well with three, and I assume 4.
Of those available online (I haven’t looked at the latest ones in paper), the two most recent probably come closest to that. Gift of the Elements allows you to clog up the other player’s deck by chucking unplayable monsters into it (but this can backfire, as there are also cards that key off them); and Valley of the Ancients has a tug-of-war over control of three temples. It’s all still very much multi-player solitaire, but there’s more direct antagonism than earlier sets featured.