Super Auto Pets Card Battle - TCbH Review
Transcript
Hey folks, it's Jack from The Cardboard Herald and today we're taking a look at Super Auto Pets card battle in an off-the-cuff style review where I just tell you what it is, what I like, what I dislike, and some final thoughts after getting a couple plays in. And I'm getting this done as an off-the-cuff because this game was completely off my radar until it showed up at my doorstep courtesy of Plaid Hat Games, the publisher. I had no familiarity with the game itself or the mobile game that it's based off of. So, here we are. Now, what is this game? Well, this is an auto battler, as I said, based off of a mobile game. If you aren't familiar with auto battlers, you still have probably played one in the classic card game of determinism and futility. War. Yeah, war. The game where you just shuffle up, deal out two decks of cards, and then see who wins based off of the arrangement of cards. But, auto battlers, particularly in mobile games or in card games, have kind of taken this a little step further to provide more interesting levers in that through six rounds, in this case, you are purchasing progressively stronger tiered animals that are being added to your deck, and then there's a phase before the battle starts where you arrange your deck in certain orders, and all the animals have different stats and
abilities. Then, you reveal one at a time and they duel out like as if it were war with that a caveat of the winner still has persistent damage, but stays out to deal its own attack to the next thing in line. And the winner of each round gets a trophy. The winner of the game is the player with the most trophies at the end. So, what I like about this is it is charming in its absurdity, this cute destruction that's happening between this juxtaposition of really hyper-specific animals and incredibly common animals, especially as you go into the further packs of the magic pack and golden pack. All of these are stand-alone games, but can be combined and have their own flavors and varieties. I also really like the pick up and play nature. This is something that's extremely easy to teach and the fact that you're limited to having no more than five animals before going into a battle means that you're sculpting and customizing your deck in ways that means that it's a little bit more easy to digest, which brings me to another thing I really like about this is the system through which you start a new round, that rounds tiers of animals are put onto a display and each player has three coins to purchase animals to add to their deck, but you can also sell animals or these apples that are temporary power-ups is really smart and efficient in the way
that it takes you through this escalating scale of the game. And there are a decent amount of gamey hooks that you can intuit pretty easily if you have experience with games on different strategies, builds that you can make for your deck. You can lean into a system where you're continually getting these temporary bees added to your deck throughout the battle and they become stronger and stronger because of some persistent effects of some previously knocked out critters of yours or maybe you want to lean into big beefy survivability. And there's definitely this kind of like a rock, paper, scissors thing going on where you're customizing your deck not only based off of the opportunities presented in front of you, but also what your opponent is doing. And that's the big fun of the game is trying to guess what they're going to do and then trying to arrange your deck and counter them through the purchases that you make. I also really like the triple system where you can take any three animals you previously acquired and cash them in, discarding them permanently from your pool, but getting access to a higher tiered deck than the round currently has, drawing two cards and picking one from it. It's a little bit risky for the bisky, but it gives you some utility and some reasons to pull what might be otherwise sub-optimal animals, so that way you can get the suits, the same hats as symbols on them. Overall, it's just efficient, it flows well, it's nice, and
it achieves what it sets out to do. Now, as far as what I dislike about it, well, the first thing is maybe my problem with auto battlers in general because I've played several at this point both in tabletop and digital formats, and there's always this anxiety that I have that I'm spending all this time trying to strategically think about the perfect formation of my deck, but an apprehension that I'm missing one core element that as soon as my opponent reveals their card, it's all going to fall apart on my end. And you have to be able to just kind of let go and let go to in this case, rip and hope for the best. And uh because the uh hope for the best system, the performance of that still takes a considerable amount of time at the table, it ends up feeling like yeah, I wish I had some more levers and choices in the middle of the auto battle, but that wouldn't be an auto battler. And speaking of which, it does feel a little bit larger in size and scope than really what the format deserves because a lot of this game is built on the minimalism.
There's only one core stat that's both your strength and health, your endurance, how many hits that you can take. And the abilities are for the most part not particularly nuanced. They're more interesting in conjunction or the culmination of a bunch of different stuff. But still, this is pretty rudimentary effects, single stack critters. It feels like the game at 30 minutes is a hair too long. As a 20-minute game, I think this would be perfect. At 30 [snorts] minutes, it does feel like by the end you're like, "Okay, I've seen what this game has and I just want to get to this final round." Similarly, it's kind of a mess at the table. Like there's a lot going on. There is at minimum eight piles of cards to start with and that's excluding your deck, which can be in states of in your hand to be revealed, the critter that's currently in play, cards that are set aside because their text tells you to, and your discard pile. And the last little thing is a bit of a preference thing over anything else. But the aesthetic, while cute and silly and kind of fun in an ironic sort of way that all the animals look like stickers that you'd get from your doctor's office. For coming from Plaid Hat Games, a publisher that is known for having rich and complex imagery, this
the game isn't really a looker. So, for final thoughts, if I had this game in middle school, this would be my favorite game ever and I'd be playing it at lunch all the time. There is that ironic charm, the kind of cutsey element that is definitely sought after in app games and this is an adaptation of an app game, and so I think the look definitely is in unison with that. Uh and I think that there are a decent amount of hooks that you can see where you could build differently. But, for all that, it's still easy to teach. It's easy to pick up. It's certainly portable. You get a decent amount of game for the small amount of box that you have here. On the other hand, there's not a ton of depth, either, which is mostly felt because the game, at least for me, feels a bit bigger and longer than it necessarily deserves. But, all of that said, I had fun the couple of games I've played, and the people that I played against all had fun, too. And that's our review. But, let me know, what is your favorite auto battler? Put it in the comments below, and as always, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting, thanks for being such a great community. You know that. I've been Jack for The Cardboard Herald.