Earlier this year, the latest in a seemingly endless parade of licensed match-3 combat games was announced: Magic: The Gathering – Puzzle Quest. While I’m a fan of both Magic and the original Puzzle Quest, the merging of the two properties …
On the off chance you're not familiar with Magic: The Gathering, we're talking about the granddaddy of all trading card games here. It's been around for nearly 20 years in its print form, has millions of players, and is played competitively as much as it is for fun. This sort of thing doesn't happen by accident. In case these numbers didn't make it clear, let me spell it out for you - Magic: The Gathering is good stuff.
Thanks to top notch releases like Shadow Era and Kard Combat, it's become abundantly clear over the last year that trading card games (TCG's) are a perfect match for touch screen devices. Despite this, the granddaddy of them all - Magic: The Gathering - still hadn't made the transition. That's about to change.
I'm a proud member of the original Magic: The Gathering generation. In fact, I've still got my original deck sitting around here somewhere, with its (incredibly dated) powerhouse cards like The Abyss, Vesuvian Dopplegangers, and a beat-up Black Lotus. As a result, I was really interested to try out Magic: The Gathering - Tactics, which promised an experience that's both simultaneously familiar and new. After spending some time with the game, I have to say that it's certainly not bad, but it's not nearly as much fun as I remember the original card game being.