Thunderstone!

I remember when I was, oh, about 11 or 12, my dad bought me a huge binder of Magic: the Gathering cards.  I held it with a strange reverence, this giant block of unspeakably rare and valuable pieces of a brilliant game.  What made Magic so brilliant, apart from it's elegant, crisp rules, was that playing the game was only really half of the game; the other half was DECK BUILDING.  Assembling my 60-card machine, from which I would draw my cards and make a giant mess of it.  Seriously, I was trash at playing Magic; I couldn't even manage when I made a card-for-card remake of a champion deck.  But the deck building, that's what enthralled me.

Flash forward to the futuristic gaming-paradise of 2011 and deck building has become a genre in it's own right. What happens when Magic's meta game gets its "meta" appendix removed, the fantasy gets more grimdark, and all of a sudden it's a race to see who can stop the end of the world?  Thunderstone!

A World of Adventure.  And diseases.

And Thunderstone is a race: two to five players see themselves cast into the role of leader of a party of adventures, though you never fight yourself.  The party, and all its equipment, is contained in your deck, and it starts out absolutely shit: some terrible Militia, barely strong enough to hold a tiny dagger, and a small assortment of "helpful" items.  But, my friend, it does not stay like this for long.  Each turn you can choose to do one of three things: buy a card from the village to add to your deck, have a fight in the dungeon, or rest.

You can fight monsters in the far back, but they require more light to battle without penalty!

You think resting sounds uninteresting?  Almost a waste of a turn?  Well, when the game beings, you will be spending almost all your time in the village, trying to recruit stronger (read: strong at all) heroes, or purchasing spells or items, all to aid you in the dungeon.  But then, when you have amassed this cardboard host of war, guess what?  All those crap cards from the start of the game?  They're still there, like the horrible person you had to invite to your game night or else one of your friends wouldn't come.  Resting lets you take one card from your hand, and annihilate it, never to be seen again.  Making your deck a leaner, more vicious thing.

An early hand.  5/6th's of it is an embarrassment to heroes everywhere.

The whole depth of the game comes from striving to make sure your hands are worthwhile: ensuring every card is pulling its own weight, and casting out the chaff when needed.  Rest is really the glue that holds this game together.  In a race, wasting a turn is the worst fate you can suffer.  The option to rest, and getting rid of the worst card in a hand of bad cards, ensures no turn is wasted; it looks like you slowed down, but really?  You're getting faster.

A late-game hand.  Still a few starting cards rattling around regrettably.

But this is not a game of mere cards and statistics.  It is a game of MONSTERS and FANTASY and HEROICS.  And as any good heroic fantasy, the world will conspire to thwart your efforts.  You see, the game is won by whomever has the most victory points in there deck when the game is over.  And these VP come from gaining monster cards, with the mightiest and most terrible foes worth the most.  When you slay a monster, you don't merely gain XP and remove their presence from the dungeon (you do this too).  You keep hold of their corpses, which are added in as cards in your deck.  These are dead cards, both literally and figuratively; they do fuck-all except bog down your party by polluting your deck.  But they're what you count to win you the game.  So your honed, 6-card deck of the mightiest heroes and heroines is worthless at the end of the day: results are what matter to the peoples of the Dark Fantasy Kingdom You Live In.

You can stick to just fighting the toughest monsters to keep your deck fast, but you may have a long wait for a killer hand.  Or do you take victories where you can get them, at the risk of drawing monster cards when you needed results?  You'll also want XP (also obtained by killing monsters) to get better heroes, so that you can kill the strongest monsters, but how low do you set your standards at any given time?  Once again, it all comes down to managing your deck size, weighing the short-term loss in potency with the game-winning VP and current need for XP.  And of course, if the dungeon deck is nearing its end, it may be best to grab what you can, because there may not be time left before you'd reshuffle those monsters back in anyway!

Hydra will ensure you do not leave the battle unscathed, while Lich Lord is just a dick.

Thunderstone really is great; it is a true marriage of card gaming and dungeon crawls.  All of the excitement and glory, without needing a table that you could land a helicopter on.  There are also no dice to be seen, for you haters of chance, and there is a beautiful self-correcting difficulty curve at work.  I was worried that having very strong monsters early would break the game, but since everyone has to deal with that giant Hydra That Is Also On Fire, the experience remains balanced and exciting.  Who will be the first to hold tis burning heads aloft, and cry victory?  Will it be YOU?

Recommended for: seekers of hour-long adventure, owners of small tables, and the sworn enemies of dice.

COMPARISON CORNER: DOMINION
Think back to when you were a child: did you want to one day, if you worked really hard, be able to buy a nice plot of land?  Or did you want to slay a Lich, who with his dying breath cursed you to death, only to then deflect the curse with your magical life-saving sword?  If you answered the former, you should probably look at Dominion before Thunderstone.  Also you were a pretty boring kid.

Dominion is the original deck building game, and it has had praise and awards and money heaped upon it, and for good reason.  It's elegant, to be sure: a simple rule system with a vast, emergent complexity emanate forth from the interplay of its never-the-same-twice card pool like Platonic forms.  It's a beautifully designed game, but it's not a beautiful game, sadly.  It never quite comes alive, laden as it is with drab nobles and inconsistent artwork. It also has serious turn-length issues, where one player can take three minutes comboing action cards and re-shuffling until he draws his ENTIRE DECK, and the next guy just has a handful of money.  Thunderstone is the opposite.  It's a little simpler, yet paradoxically has more rules, but it's so full of flavor, beautiful artwork, and it just overflows with tropes.  Both have their merits and ultimately are both worth your money, but the theme, group appeal, and higher production values of Thunderstone put it over the top.