After learning about it from Kongragate (as part of the "Best of 2009 Quest" no less), I've been playing Elements obsessively for the last few days, mostly playing PvP (unupgraded). I think this game is the cat's meow. There are several reasons.
First, the game is really well balanced. That is incredible given the number of cards and play mechanisms. I assume this was not made by a big company with lots of play test budget, which makes it even more laudable. I was wary of the "no summoning sickness" at first, but I've become a fan. It does contributed to "gotcha wins", but hey, it works both ways and it simplifies things considerably.
Second, the UI is exceptional. Almost perfect. I've played computerized TCGs in the past, and for the most part, they sucked. That's the difference, I suppose, between a game written by game programmers who like TCGs vs TCG creators who just learned game programming. The fact that you've managed to pack so much into a *Flash Game* is absolutely astounding. (BTW well done on the vector graphics: I scaled up the game in Firefox and it looked beautiful. I even played a couple games on my Android phone, but it wasn't really playable - easily fixed, I'll talk about it below.)
Third, the fact that Elements was first born as a program really opens up the possibilities of adding cool new game mechanics that would be prohibitively difficult in real life, but easy in a computer. I'm talking about cards like "Cloak". Or even "Nova": can you imagine having to turn each of 12 counters in a RL game? It would be excruciatingly painful. Then there is the "Fallen Elf" - again, you *could* do that in RL, but you would need extra equipment and it would take forever to execute. You can tell the game designers, freed of such considerations, really had fun designing this thing. I'd like to see more of that.
Fourth, the real payoff of a beautiful execution (did I mention that I love the lo-fi but eminently practical text-based deck management system?) is that each game goes really fast. This has the same effect on player knowledge and skill as computer based poker: in RL you can play 30 hands of poker an hour. On a computer you can play 100+. That means that Elements decks can grow and change faster than Magic, and the meta-game will probably be 10x as fierce. But even cooler for the game designer is that you get a boatload of play testing, and it's ALL visible to you. This quality is essential to, for example, Blizzard's success in keeping WoW balanced.
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Even with a game as good Elements there are a few little things which I think can be improved:
- As much as I love the lo-fi deck management with strings, there needs to be some in-game way to store a few Deck strings.
- As a newbie, it is frustrating to have to swap out your current deck to sell or upgrade the cards in that deck. I imagine old pros have less of a problem with this as they probably keep several different decks handy (or even just a fistful of pillars for this very purpose). I realize this constraint actually has a lot of UI simplification benefits but it is annoying, especially when you just won a card, you put it in your deck, and then you want to check it's price. Or when you need to sell an active card to buy a new active card.
- I'd like a way to share my decks and look at other people's decks in-game. This should be opt-in, of course, to protect people's deck privacy if they have some secret sauce.
- Upgrading seems like it's egregiously difficult. 1500e *per individual card* is kinda crazy when you're making, let's say, about 20e per hand. That's 70 games played to pay for one upgrade. That's 2-3 hours of play time. For a deck of 30 cards that's 60-90 hours!
- I wish there was a way to opt-out of the end-of-game casino cut-scene. Yes, I like getting free cards, but I don't like waiting for the slot-machine animation to finish. Not to mention, just aesthetically, I don't like the Las Vegas reference - it doesn't fit the game.
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Mobile: The other night I installed Flash on my Nexus One and went to see if Elements would run. I didn't think it would, but to my surprise (and delight) it ran! It was even quite playable, with only two (or even one and a half) exceptions. The biggie is that it's hard to pick out cards from your hand. The reason is that the visible card area is too small to pick out with a finger. And for some reason zooming on a Flash app in the N1's browser is rather slow. The second reason is that there is no spacebar, and finding the "Done" button takes some work. If those two UI issues were fixed, Elements can run as-is on a smartphone!
