Card City Nights Walkthrough

Game Introduction – Card City Nights

Card City Nights is a puzzle matching and collectible card game from Ludosity.  Gamezebo’s quick start guide will provide you with some tips and hints to help you collect all eight legendary cards and become a card fighting master!

Quick Start Guide

Getting Started

• Card City Nights can be purchased and downloaded by clicking the “Available On” options at the top of this page.
• When you start the game, you will automatically face a tutorial challenge.
• After the tutorial, you can access the overworld map and deck building functions at any time by tapping their respective icons.
• To initiate a fight, select an opponent in whichever area you travel to through the map and tap the image of crossed swords. Winning matches will earn you booster packs, gold or both which can be used in deck building and shops, respectively.

How to Play

• Card City Nights is played on two three-by-three square grids. Each player takes turn drawing and placing cards each turn on one of the openings on those grids until they either can’t make a move or run out of health.
• Every card you play has at least one arrow pointing in one of eight directions. By matching these arrows together cards become connected.
• Most cards have one or more symbols (a green cross, a sword, a shield or a coin). These represent the kind of combos they can create. By connecting cards so the sum of their symbols is three or greater, you create a combo.
• A shield combo will give you defense points (as many as there are shield symbols), a sword combo deals damage or disables a card, a coin is neutral and the green cross will revive disabled cards into play.
• Each combo will play out according to whichever symbol was dominant in the chain. If the symbols are tied, you can choose between those effects. For example, if your chain has two swords and one shield, it is an attack combo. If it has one sword, one shield and a neutral you can either earn one health or do one damage.
• You must play a card each turn if you can. There is no way to skip a turn even if making a move will put you in a worse situation.
• If you run out of cards, you will take increasing damage every turn when you would normally draw a card.

Tips and Strategies

• Neutrals are Always Useful – Neutral cards are the most versatile in all of Card City Nights. They generally don’t have a great many effects and they can’t deal damage or heal you directly, but they make excellent connective tissue between other cards. More often than not they have more arrows than their counterparts and a wider variety of directions they point. They’re least useful in decks focused on dealing direct damage, but even those should have a few.
• Revivals are Always Necessary – Even if it’s just two or three, you always need a few cards with the ability to revive your disabled units. No matter what tactics you’re using there is always the chance that the enemy will disable you and leaving dead cards on the board can unravel any strategy.

• Attrition/Defensive Strategy – You can easily make a deck with a mix of every card type to try and be ready for any situation. I, however, prefer to think of the game in terms of three primary strategies: attrition, lock-up and damage. Attrition means building a deck with close to the maximum number of cards (40 or so) and outlasting the opponent by using defensive and revival cards. The idea is to keep your board clear and your defense high so the enemy runs out of moves or runs out of cards before you. Revival combos mitigate disabled cards and defensive combos keep your health from hitting zero. It’s a long-term strategy, but it works.
• Damage/Offensive Strategy – This strategy relies not just on making as many attack combos as possible but making each combo count. These sorts of decks require cards that do double damage and attack directly against the opponent’s defense, rather than their cards. You want to fire as many combos with three damage points or more as possible so that it’s difficult for the opposing player to heal themselves. The advantage of this deck is that it forces the opponent to waste resources on defensive combos, and might even lead to an attrition victory. The downside is that it can take a while if the opponent has a great deal of defensive cards
• Lock-Up/Disable Strategy – My personal favorite strategy is lock-up. This is a high-speed tactic that requires fewer offensive and more neutral cards than each of the others. The idea is to get as many one-damage combos out as quickly as possible to disable all possible moves on the enemy board. It works well because, in addition to moving the enemy towards defeat, it slows down or even cancels their ability to heal or fight back. However, the reliance on versatile neutral cards leaves less room for revival combos. Also, if the enemy is highly focused on direct damage they may outpace your strategy somewhat. Still, the benefits often outweigh the risks as it’s the quickest, most efficient way to win most games.

• Look for the Signs – Like all collectible card games, you need to pay attention to what works and what doesn’t and adjust your deck composition accordingly. In the case of Card City Nights, this is more literal than subjective. Your deck needs to have cards with arrows that match in order to play. For instance, if you find yourself with tons of downward-pointing cards and never enough upwards-facing ones, consider subtracting or adding more of each, respectively. At its heart this is more of a puzzle game than a card battle game. Imagine trying to play Tetris without any line pieces and you’ll get the idea.
• Reduce Enemy Options – When disabling an opponent’s card, go for the ones with the most arrows pointing to the most spaces. This not only keeps the opponent from using that card, but from making any kind of combos from those directions in the future (unless they revive or remove that card some other way). One of the best ways to do this is by waiting for the player to start a combo, then lock up the card they’re most likely to add as the final unit in that chain.

• Spread Yourself Out – Different opponents in Card City Nights will provide different prizes for victory. There are eight legendary cards which you must earn to progress the game and which can only be earned from the boss of each area. Others will provide booster packs from different series of cards or even just gold coins to buy singles. Don’t limit yourself to farming one particular foe for new cards, as you’ll never be able to collect them all that way.

Congratulations!

You have completed Gamezebo’s quick start guide for Card City Nights! Be sure to check back often for game updates, staff and user reviews, user tips, forum comments, and much more here at Gamezebo!

Steven Strom

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Steven "The Future of Games Journalism" Strom plays entirely too much Dota 2. He sometimes plays games when he's not too busy writing about them and their place in our culture, and thinks maybe they're not just a fad after all.