Deckbuilding Card Games Are Branching Out At Steam Next Fest And I Couldn’t Be More Excited

There’s certainly nothing wrong with traditional deckbuilding card games (plenty of us are patiently waiting for Slay the Spire 2 to devour our lives, after all). But some of the most exciting new games in the genre are mixing it up, adding elements of tactical RPGs and tabletop games to go beyond their deckbuilding roots. Steam Next Fest offers a great chance to demo some of those upcoming titles and get an early look at the future of card games.

Deckbuilders and tactical RPGs have a lot in common already, and Shuffle Tactics bridges the gap beautifully. At a glance, it could be mistaken for a standard Final Fantasy Tactics-style game, giving you multiple units to move along a grid and use to combat enemy forces. But rather than a set list of commands, each character has a hand of cards to buff allies and attack opponents.

More than just a clever idea, Shuffle Tactics is an excellent tactics game. Its deck of cards is full of interesting tricks, like an ability that throws the protagonist’s sword across the map, and a whole series of cards that can only be used while the sword is out of its user’s hands. Positioning is also a big deal, and lining up enemies so you can knock one into the other and defeat both is as viable a strategy as it is satisfying.

Unlike some tactics games, fights are short and sweet in Shuffle Tactics, giving you just enough time to test your strategic abilities and not dragging on for too long. You move between these bite-sized engagements quickly, occasionally breaking up the routine by visiting with NPCs that can upgrade your deck. Shuffle Tactics doesn’t stray too far from its roots in tactics and deckbuilders, making it a great way to get your fill of both genres at once.

As We Descend moves a little further from its deckbuilding origins, pulling in elements of adventure games. Its combat will be familiar to deckbuilding fans, with each character in your party getting their own hand of cards, which can be upgraded between battles. It does add a nice twist in dividing the battlefield between guard zones and support zones. Moving characters between them changes which abilities they can use or adds other effects. Each battle also has you protecting a powerful artifact called the lantern, which must survive for your party to make it.

Between battles is where As We Descend really sets itself apart. The game begins in the City-Vault, protected from an all-consuming miasma by an arcane shield, and it’s your job to make sure that shield stays up. In the City-Vault, you can play special cards to interact with citizens, which lets you shop, upgrade units, or have chance encounters that have a variety of rewards and consequences. Each expedition outside is meant to gather resources for the City-Vault, which you can only carry a set number of at a time. The game’s combat is great, but it’s these narrative and light city building segments that really make it shine.

Venturing even further, Into the Restless Ruins changes the very core of the deckbuilding genre. Your deck of cards is still essential, but here it’s used to build a dungeon rather than fight. Each of your cards represents a different room, which you’ll connect together in the build phase to make a path through a perilous dungeon. When you’re played all the cards you can, you then explore the level you just built, automatically fighting enemies on the way with bonuses granted by the rooms you placed. Your goal is to find a number of seals hidden in preset rooms along the way, which let you progress further and eventually take down a boss.

The dungeon-building process is novel, pulling from tabletop RPGs like Alone in the Dungeon and Ex Umbra, which let you generate and explore dungeons, as much as it pulls from deckbuilders. While combat is a core part of Into the Restless Ruins, it scratches a creative itch in letting you puzzle out the best way to build your own dungeon to reap the best rewards.

Roguelike deckbuilders have been a staple of indie games for years, but there’s still plenty of room there for surprises. I’ll probably still get utterly lost in the charms of plenty of more straightforward deckbuilders (again, Slay the Spire 2 is going to ruin me), but after Next Fest, I’m more excited to see how far developers can push the genre to create something totally new.