The Amazing American Circus
Target Audience: Those Willing to Take the Lows With The Highs in Card RPGs
Summary:
This is a recommendation in essence, but for a specific subset of people.
I’m going to be straight up from the get go here: The Amazing American Circus is one of those games that I want to love up and down, but ended up being the biggest thorn in my side due to what happened during the review period. To say that I faced some of the worst bugs: specifically saved game bugs, in my review career would have been an understatement: I had 8 separate runs break wildly in that period where I could not continue to make progress. While those bugs seem to be fixed now, I have a form of PTSD at this point. Every time I play, I’m waiting for the game to break again. Hell, even the video I made had a major bug in it. There’s a reason I have around 40+ hours of gameplay without actually beating the game, and to say it hung over the experience would be an understatement to say the least.
– Real player with 57.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Card Game Crafting Games.
This is not a Slay to Spire, this is not a Monster Train. The Amazing American Circus is not a roguelike-roguelite card game, it is more like a card game built around a campaign, with some management sim built around it, in which you need to cover the costs, upgrades etc from the incomes you get during the shows.
If you more curious about the game, and want to check a short, ~20mins long video in which I showing what content you could expect from the game with one circus show (card battle) included, then here is mine:
– Real player with 29.8 hrs in game
Fort Sumter: The Secession Crisis
A very faithful implementation of the original board game, which is a Eurogame by design with a historical ACW theme tagged on it. The game does have a decent AI and can be played solitaire as a result. Statistics on your own profile is available and so you can track your own performance vs. the AI. The only downside is the program still has a bug, freezing the solitaire game play from time to time and it seems Playdek was not aware of the issue. The multiplayer is easy to set up and game with score, measuring how you fare against others. However, there is no world ranking in the game, and different level of AI there is not. You can get notification in email when it is your turn in a game with another. A chat room is available but most of the time it is dormant. There is an alternate mapboard to give the game a variant, non-location look but I doubt people to use such a boring map. The gameplay is abstract and there is no manual inside the game or here on the Steam. You have to download it from the boardgame publisher GMT, as long as you are aware of it. This is absolutely a minor for the newcomer as the game itself is abstract and you are quite probably knowing what you are doing in the first few games. Once you get a hang out of the system, the game is smooth and quick to finish in 10 to 15 minutes. Overall, Fort Sumter is a game of tile-placement competing for control of the areas on the map. Score: 6.5/10.
– Real player with 79.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Card Game Tabletop Games.
I’ve been on the road a ton in the past couple of weeks and played the hell out of this. In about 60 offline games and a half-dozen online games I haven’t noted any gameplay bugs or rules/cards implementation problems as noted in another review. The recent AI bugfix improved the AI, and it’s competent enough in a mechanistic sense, but it' still a bit weak against experienced players, especially as it relates to setting things up in terms of the long game and Final Crisis. To be fair, that’s something the many human players don’t grok until they’ve played a while (which I have as an owner of the board game).
– Real player with 51.2 hrs in game