Infinity Wars is a new card-based game, kickstarted for PC, that’s created by Lightmare Studios. You are tested on your strategic skills as you try to play the cards you are dealt.

The game has beautiful animated artwork and what seems to be an unlimited number of cards you can collect.  Add in a soon-to-come Star Trek: Next Generation deck and you will be attached to your computer for days.

Infinity Wars starts you off with a starter set of cards which has, as you would expect, very basic or what they call “common” cards.  You begin with 1 resource, which resource allows you to play a card.  The more powerful the card the more resource it needs to be played.  Each turn your resource goes up by one until it reaches 10.

After you receive enough resources you choose a card or multiple cards to play.  They go directly into your support zone. Support zone is where characters are “exhausted” for one turn so they are not able to attack or defend until the turn is over.  Each deck also has three commanders who, after you have enough resources, can be put directly into play, who don’t become automatically exhausted.

After your player is no longer exhausted, you have a choice to put the character card into two separate zones.  These are the Attack zone and the Defense zone.  If you place your character in the attack zone they will deal damage to the other player’s fortress at the end of each turn.

If you place the character card in the Defense zone, your character will not attack, it will remain there until your opponent chooses to attack. Each card has an attack number and a defense number, so planning out each turn is key to winning each game.

As you put cards into play your opponent will be battling to keep you from attacking their fortress while trying to attack your fortress at the same time.  Each card attacks one time so even if it kills someone and still has three attack left over, his turn is done without using the three attack.

If you have a defender that can take a lot of damage, then he will stay in play until all of his health is gone. For example if you have 4 attackers that all do 5 damage and the other player has two defenders, one with 20 defense and the other with 2 defense, then the first defender would take all 20 damage and die and the second defender would not be touched.

You and your opponent both have a fortress that starts at 100% health.  As you can imagine, after the fortress hits 0% you win the game, but there is also another way to take out your enemy.  Next to the health bar there is a “Morale” bar.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how it worked at first, but after watching closely I found that team morale would go down every time your opponent killed one of your card characters.  So, if you send out a bunch of weak characters to play defense for you and the other team is just killing them one after another, then your fortress will be safe, but your morale will hit 0% and you will lose.

After you start beating some levels, the game rewards you with more common cards and “Infinity Points” or IP. You can use these IPs to purchase things like card packs, decks, avatars, or card back covers.  I will advise you that spending your IPs on anything other than card packs or decks would not be smart.

You are awarded Infinity Points after you complete a level, but you only receive 75 IPs, or sometimes even less. The cheapest pack of cards you can purchase is 1050 IPs.  So you would have to play about 14 games to potentially have enough points to buy a pack of cards which has a random 11 common cards 3 uncommon cards and 1 rare card.

I, on the other hand like to save up my IP to buy the most expensive deck first.  The deck gives you 40+ cards and they have a whole array of common, uncommon, and rare cards.  These decks cost 13,000 IPs, so you would have to play around 173 games to be able to purchase one of these bad boys.

This is a good game, but I don’t know who would like to grind out that many games to make a purchase things like that. Don’t fret though; you can also purchase Lightmare Points with some real cash to help you get the cards you want.

So after you play a bunch of games and get rewarded some cards and maybe shell out a little dough to buy a pack of cards, you can create your own custom deck.  There was no tutorial for this, so for me it took a lot of trial and error to figure it out.

You have to set three commanders and each of those commanders can control a certain class of people.  For example if you have a human character in your commander slot, then you can have humans in your deck or if you have a beast in your commander slot, then you can have beasts in your deck.

There are four different card types to choose from while building your own deck.  There’s the character card, which just has the attack and defense numbers.  The ability card deals a special attack, i.e. remove one card from opponents attack zone and exhaust them for one turn.

A location card which builds a defense around your fortress or has a special power, such as, only one attacker from opposing team can attack the fortress.  The fortress card stays in play throughout the match unless your opponent has a way to destroy the card.  Finally, there is an ability card which is similar to the location card except you can only use it once.

There are also seven different factions you can choose from each with their own unique twist.  For example, there is the Descendants of the Dragons, who focus completely on defense, and the Sleepers of Avarrach, which is a class full of robots and zombies who can be resurrected after the character card dies.  The remaining five factions are Flame Dawn, Genesis Industries, the Warpath, the Cult of Verore, and the Exiles.

The campaign mode is broken into seven sections and each section you are fighting in the selected faction.  After leveling up to level 4 you can begin playing games online against other people.  Battling your deck versus another real person’s deck is always fun especially since you can open up a chat with them at the bottom of the screen and talk a little trash.  (I like to talk a little trash.)

At the end of the day, playing Infinity Wars is a lot of fun.  It can be frustrating figuring some things out on your own because of the lack of tutorial.

Also, with Lightmare Studios being pretty stingy with giving out Infinity Points, you may find yourself wanting more without getting that satisfaction.

You may have to drop a couple of dollars to get some Lightmare points, but the game is completely free and, in my opinion, spending a couple dollars on a free game that you enjoy isn’t a bad thing.

If you are wondering if Infinity Wars is worth the download, my answer is absolutely. It has beautiful artwork and will make you want to collect all of the cards.

The game is in its final version of beta and, once again, free to download via its official website, or via Steam.