This Flash game has been a longtime favorite of mine ever since I discovered it a few years ago online. It’s like Magic: the Gathering meets tower defense! (Curious to see how these two game styles combine? Read on to find out!)

Basic Gameplay

You can play 1-player or 2-player (2-player mode works by having two people play with the same computer, just on different turns). There is also an option for Multiplayer, where you can join a playing room as a guest or as a member and play Castle Wars with others. (For experienced players, there’s also a selection for “Card deck,” where you can build your own deck to face off against opponents, human or computerized. I usually just go with the default deck they give me.)

Here’s how the screen looks as you play the game. Your “hand” of cards is displayed at bottom center; your “castle” (your life points, if you’re used to playing Magic) is blue and on the left, while your opponent’s “castle” is red and on the right.

Each castle has a fence in front of it that starts off 10 units high–this fence is like creatures in Magic that can block combat damage for you. When you have no more fence left, the castle has to take all the damage directly; this is just like when you have no creatures in Magic, you have to take all the hits to your life points directly.

Whenever either player’s castle hits the ground (reaches “0”), they lose. Whenever either player’s castle reaches 100, they win. Your objective is to either take your opponent down to 0 or build yourself up to 100.

Resource Points

As pictured in the screenshot at left, you start out with your castle at 30 and your fence at 10. You also start with 5 resource points in each color, which help you play spells, and 2 of each helper (builder, sorcerer, or soldier). You will gain resource points every turn based on how many helpers you have in each color. Say, if you had 3 Sorcerers but only 2 Builders–you’d get 3 Blue resource points and 2 Pink resource points every turn. Best part: these points stay until they are used, so you can build up your points over several turns to be able to play bigger spells.

Card Types

There are three colors of cards, denoting the three types of cards in the game. You can only play one card a turn.

• Pink cards are “building” cards, all focused around building up your castle and fence.
• Blue cards are “magic” cards, focused around boosting your own resources and controlling the opponent’s resources, with one powerful building spell and one powerful destruction spell included.
• Green cards are “weapons” cards, focused around damaging your opponent’s castle and taking away its resources. There is a really strong destruction spell included in Green as well.

Strategies

Blue is the most flexible of the colors, since you can pump up resources in all three colors with Blue cards, as well as build your castle and take down the opponent’s castle. But you’ll need all three types to win. Pink keeps you in the game while you’re waiting for a good Green castle-damaging spell; Blue helps you build up your resources so you can cast bigger spells to either build yourself up or tear your opponent down. And Green harries your opponent, making them waste their one spell a turn on building themselves back up.

Whenever you see a Blue card marked “Sorcerer,” a Green card marked “Recruit”, or a Pink card marked “School,” play those ASAP–they will increase the number of resource points in that color that you get per turn. This is like playing a land card in Magic; the more you play, the more resource points you’ll get back every turn.

You start out with 2 points in each color, meaning that you’ll get 2 points of resources in each color per turn, and they do carry over from turn to turn. That way, you can build up resource points to play the larger spells.

You’ll notice in this screenshot that certain cards show up darker-colored than the others. Those cards are the ones I don’t have enough resources to play yet; the brighter cards are cards I can play this turn. Just like Magic, you have to have so much of a specific color resource (like mana) to play your spells. If you don’t have 28 Green (weapons) resources, for instance, you cannot play the Banshee card (the most epic destruction spell in the game, which happens to be in this starting hand!).

This game is a great little challenge–it’s harder than you think to defend your castle with just a hand of cards!

To Play The Game: Castle Wars