Ace of Spades

• Designer: Benja Amorin
• Publisher: DEVIR
• Players: 1-2
• Age: 14+
• Time: 40 minutes 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Your path of vengeance has led you to Sweet Haven, Arizona. You know that the necromancer who has ruined your life has taken over the cemetery as his base of operations and you are going to finish him off at all costs. You face Lord Overkill, a supernatural being, but your prowess as a gambler goes beyond sleight of hand.  Channel your magic through poker plays to take out Lord Overkill’s minions one by one and descend into Hell itself to duel the monster who ruined your life. Ace of Spades is a single-player game, or a two-player game if you prefer to play it in co-op mode, that uses poker mechanics to resolve dangerous duels against the worst spawns from Hell.

Place the Hell tile on the table, this has the number 12 on it. To start set up the enemy deck.  Choose a difficulty level that you will play and take the Lord Overkill card matching that level (this has the number 11 on it).  Then with ranks 10 to 1, randomly select one of the four cards of that rank, choosing them in descending order.   Set up your personal mat, and shuffle your poker deck and deal yourself a hand of 8 cards.

Now, reveal the first card of the Enemy deck, and turn the enemy life dial to match the value on the enemy card.  The top card of the enemies deck will tell you the number of hands and discards that you get – make the dials on your mat match these values as well. 

Over the course of the game, you’ll have to defeat the 12 enemies in the enemy deck – and you will do this by playing poker hands.  On your turn, you can either duel or discard/shuffle.

When you duel, you will play a 5 card poker hand (from your 8 card hand) in order to inflict damage on your opponent – anywhere from 2 damage for a pair up to 12 for a 5 of a kind.  In addition, face cards in the combination deal an extra point of damage each and Aces give you three extra damage points! (If you do not use the face cards or Aces in your scoring combination, they do not provide extra damage).  Regardless, you must always play 5 cards in each poker hand, even if not all of them count towards your damage combination.  There is a handy chart at the bottom of your player mat to remind you of the values.

After you play a hand, reduce the enemy’s health by the inflicted damage, and then draw cards from the deck to bring your hand back up to eight.  If the enemy lives, decrease the Hand counter by one and keep going.  If the Enemy is down to 0 life, then remove it from your mat and reveal the next enemy.  Defeated enemies provide you each with a one-time benefit or an ongoing benefit, so keep them near your mat.

Note that there are a few different types of enemies.  The Goon is the easiest one to defeat, and they only provide you with a one-time bonus when you win.  The Villain is a bit harder, but they reward you with an ongoing bonus.  Also, when you defeat a Villain, you must discard all the cards before your next duel and reshuffle the entire deck.  The Lord Overkill is the Boss of your game.

If you don’t want to duel, you can use your other action option to either discard and draw or to renew the deck.  Discarding and drawing is simple, place any undesired cards from your hand to the discard pile and then draw until you have eight cards in hand.   If you choose to renew the deck, you can add any number of cards from the discard pile to the deck and then shuffle those into the current deck.

You lose the game if you’re ever unable to defeat the current enemy in the allotted number of Hands. You win the game if you are able to defeat the Lord Overkill.  At the basic level of difficulty, you must use the Ace of Spades against this final enemy.   The game does have four different levels of difficulty, so you can modify the game as needed to give yourself the right level of challenge.

My thoughts on the game

The game is remarkably straightforward.  Set up the enemy deck, deal yourself some cards and then make the best poker hands that you can.  There is a bit of interesting deck management as you must always play 5 of your 8 hand cards.  This means that you are always reliant on a good draw to make up your next hand after you play one – because you can only keep 3 cards in reserve.

Early on, you won’t have a lot of special powers to do things, so really you just have to draw the right combinations.  You only have 2 draws per round, so you might even be forced to play a sub-standard combo for your first hand, only to use the replenishment of cards as essentially a free draw.  If luck doesn’t go your way, it’s no big deal – the game has really only just begun, and it would take ten seconds to reset.

Once you are through the first scene (three enemies), you’ll now have a decent arsenal of tricks up your sleeve to help you out – and you’ll also have at least one ongoing ability.  Depending on which ongoing ability you have randomly drawn into your enemy deck, you’ll end up having to change your strategy accordingly.

You have to constantly be figuring out when to use your special power as the strength of the enemies invariably rises.  The starting enemy has 5 hit points, and the difficulty steadily ramps up until you need 50 for the boss – and you only have 4 hands and 4 redraws at that level.  As the damage value of the hands doesn’t change, you’ll have to use your abilities and your face cards to ramp up your damage capability.

• SCENE 1 – ROUND 1 to 3
• 5
• 7
• 10 (VILLAIN)
• RENEW DECK
• SCENE 2 – ROUND 4 to 6
• 12
• 15
• 20 (VILLAIN)
• RENEW DECK
• SCENE 3 – ROUND 7 to 9
• 22
• 25
• 30 (VILLAIN)
• RENEW DECK
• SCENE 4 – ROUND 10 to 12
• 35
• 40
• LORD OVERKILL (50)

The game itself really breezes along, and the main challenge for me has been to learn how to amplify my hands and massage the probabilities to get the best chance of having a strong hand when I need it.  It helps to remember that you must shuffle your deck entirely every three rounds – there are times when it’s helpful to know that you are carrying cards over into the next fight and when you know you are discarding everything anyways.

Thus far I have enjoyed my games.  There is obviously a bit of luck in drawing the right cards at the right time.  But with the ever changing roster of one-time and ongoing abilities, you have to be able to craft a new strategy each game to best take advantage of the odds.  

Though I’m not yet tired of the base game, there is also already one expansion available, Call of the Zombies, which gives you new enemies that sequester one card that was used to defeat it.  As I’ve only won the base game once thus far (at regular difficulty), I have no need of any additions or alterations to the game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.  Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…