Star Realms Fits in the Same Pocket as My Radio

This one lives in the same pocket of my pack as the radio spares, no exaggeration, two small decks rubber banded together and it’s never once felt like dead weight on the four miles up. That’s most of the review right there for me. Everything else it does well is a bonus on top of packing light.

It’s a straight deckbuilder, buy cards from a shared row, attack your opponent’s life total, first one to zero loses. Simple to the point of blunt, and I mean that as praise. Taught it to the one hiker who found my tower in July inside ten minutes, no rulebook required past a first pass, and we were three games deep before dinner.

The solo and two-handed modes are why it earns a real spot in the rotation and not just a backup. I run the PvE missions against myself most weeks, and they hold up fine as a way to burn twenty minutes between smoke checks. Combat’s swingy though, no getting around that, a couple of well timed attack cards and a sixteen point swing happens before you’ve had a chance to react, and more than one person online mentioned considering house-ruling the starting life total up from fifty because the game can end almost too fast to feel earned.

Only real complaint, and it’s a small one that a few people flagged before me: there’s no good way built in to track life totals. No dial, no board, nothing. I’ve used a stub of pencil on the back of an old radio log sheet for a season now, works fine, but it’s the one place a two dollar cardboard wheel would have made the whole experience feel finished instead of improvised. People who play it on the app don’t have this problem at all, which tells you something about where the physical version falls a little short.

Rating a 4. Docked mostly for that missing tracker, not for anything the game actually does wrong once it’s moving. Cheapest, lightest thing in my pack that still gets played weekly.