Octopi Games has developed an interesting little hybrid game. Intrinsically a card based strategy game, Pox Nora takes the RPG “levelling up” mechanic seriously and allows your cards to accumulate experience with which to buy new skills. You and an opponent square off on a grid map and fight a turn based contest to eliminate the other person’s home base. Your card deck is shuffled and unveiled a few at a time, limiting play to the cards you can see and you can afford – playing a card drains from your “nora” reserve.

As an aside, I’m not sure why games need to invent words like “nora” when it is basically ye olde “mana” idea and cash would work as well. But nora it is.

As a card collecting game, it’s not very good. I never liked the idea of virtual cards, and the artwork ranges from good to shockingly bad. The card look is really just a come-on to the Magic people since they are effectively playing pieces that just happen to be activated by cards. So it is more like a new-fangled GMT board game than anything else. Cards activate spells and artifacts, as well as units, but are never reshuffled once uncovered. There is a cool down that prevents you from immediately reactivating your Elven Assassin, but the mystery of what is available to play erodes pretty quickly.

Which is a good thing, because victory depends on setting up combos of spells and attacks on your opponent and you can only do that if you know which cards you have available. The combos are the main strategic element at play since the wargame itself is pretty simple.

Few games depend so heavily on the map. Unless you choose the map it can be very easy to find yourself in a match completely geared to your opponent’s deck. One map has deep chasms that can be crossed by flying units. If your opponent can get a flyer out in the first turn and you can’t, both of the vital Nora resource areas will be lost. Another has a vast lava river, enabling anyone with a lava walking unit to gain a huge advantage. With a limit of 20 cards per play deck, there is no way that your deck will be both balanced for every exigency and effective in combat. Something always has to go.

The cumulative effect of all this is a game heavily weighted towards experienced players. Though Octopi tries to balance things by having upgraded units cost more in nora, the tiny bonuses that a single upgraded unit gets can be monumental when 11 units are upgraded. It takes time for the combos to become apparent and you might not even have the cards to pull off the wizardry inflicted on you – new decks of cards can be purchased at the Rune Store, so a determined player could buy his way to repeating what he has seen.

Card packs are very reasonably priced, and there is promise of both a rune trader and a bot battle area, both of which should help newbies considerably.

The verdict? Still uncertain. Pox Nora is the kind of game that I want to like, but end up feeling indifferent about. The higher level battles can be very interesting, as experienced players flail away at each other, but they can also drag out into stalemates. Lower level battles are people just moving their units forward on a map that looks like it should be hexes. The balance between the various faction bonuses is still being worked out. It’s a good light boardgame to play with friends, but I can’t see how the promised guild play will add anything to what is essentially a 1v1 game.

You start with a ten dollar credit at the Rune Store, which is enough for a single 32 card pack. So there is no reason you can’t just jump in and try it yourself. I’ll check back in a month or two and see how the game has evolved.