Star Realms: Frontiers Solo Challenges
Nemesis Beast ***
One of the original challenge cards issued with the Gambit Set long before Frontiers, this always felt like the default solo mode on nights when managing two decks myself was too much hassle, and the beast's behaviours became second nature through our occasional scrapes. The escalating crisis as it gathers more and more power is still good drama, but I'm quite bored of it now.
I couldn't remember why I'd battled the pirates less often than their contemporary beastie, then I got leathered in a few short rounds by a run of red cards. Accounting for card prices suits the spacebuckling theme, but it also makes it a lot swingier, sometimes unplayably so.
Moving on to the mature Frontiers challenges, things get more interesting. Having the boss actually play the cards (in its way) brings it a bit closer to the regular game, while keeping the escalating danger of the Nemesis Beast as more cards get assimilated each round.
This has replaced the Nemesis Beast as a better default challenge now, so this was already a worthwhile exercise.
It's easy to forget that this game has a semblance of lore behind it when you're pitting multi-faction rainbow decks against each other. Removing one of them to act as today's baddies is good enough novelty that it's worth the fiddly setup and reintegration involved. The resulting Blob gauntlet is bloody hard, but you might as well give it a few goes while it's there.
Things get experimental as the boss sprouts four faction-coded tentacles (I said tentacles) that need to be taken out faster than they can grow in bouts reminiscent of lone samurai game Eiyo or that episode of Turtles where the creature from Dimension X grabbed Splinter. I admire the creativity, but it's a bit too removed from the Star Realms experience.
The Machine Cult's turn in the baddie chair, and randomised kamikaze mechs proved much more manageable than regimented Blobs, especially since their deck gets diluted while the player's gets streamlined. I also benefited from a docking promo card that I shouldn't really include for fairness, but I have to remove enough cards as it is. I wanna use me ships.
Finally, the automa is playing proper Star Realms! And it takes absolutely ages! It should be game over when they start playing enough yellow combos to discard most of your hand, but there's plenty of time to get ahead before then. This is probably about as good as an automated player can get, and I fudged the rules to let them buy as much as they could, poor soulless sod.
The inevitable Trade Federation showdown is overly fiddly to the point that I'm not sure whether I was doing it correctly, but it seemed the least interesting of these even if I wasn't already tired of segregating decks.
Fave: Automatons
