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The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls - Card Game Review

The Binding of Isaac is a hugely successful videogame, and thanks to two extremely lucrative crowdfunding efforts that netted around $8 million, you could argue that its a highly successful card game as well. The videogame fits almost too perfectly into begin turned into cardboard, with its roguelike genetics being suited to the randomness of dungeon crawler, variable bonuses and and player powers sitting well within the tabletop realm. There's around eighty thousand people who have some kind of variation of the tabletop game. So surely its extremely good because well funded games are always amazing, aren't they.  I'm approaching this as someone who is away from the hype canoe sailing down the river rapids of marketing and excitement and so this is probably going to be dull in comparison. I'm also someone who is a fan of the game, and has spent many an hour running around randomly generated dungeons of blood and filth.  For those unfamiliar with the videogame, you play
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A Very Merry Christmas: Dissent Games Solo Greetings cards


Dissent Games have come up with an interesting idea and one that I’ve not come across before, solo games on greetings cards. I really like the idea, for one, of a card that doesn’t go straight in the bin post birthday/Christmas/anniversary etc etc, and secondly of a little, quick game you can play in a few spare minutes.



Plastic Currents is a very attractive card, having a Japanese Coy Carp pond look, which when buying a card is important. Game play involves attempting to remove plastic, represented by tokens or sweets, from the squares on the card through the rolling of dice. I’m going to be honest it took a couple of read throughs of the rules to double check that I’d got them straight. As someone brought up playing solitaire and patience endlessly, the quiet repeated actions didn’t bother me and I found it quite mindful attempting to clear columns. My one criticism is that there isn’t a scoring process; I would have like a “complete in x moves and you’re David Attenborough on Boaty McBoatface with a big net”. It did feel slightly like a metaphor for plastic pollution as the game rotated round and around seemingly endlessly, but I got there in the end.



Roll & Colour is a Christmas design where you colour in the front of the card. The design is pretty, though obviously more interesting once coloured in. Again, there’s a mindful element to this game as you roll dice to pick a column, row and colour. Slightly counter intuitively the aim is to have different coloured stars in each square. I had a disagreement with my partner as to which would be more attractive, all different colours or the same colours in blocks. Certainly, having the same colours in blocks or in a pattern could give a more satisfying and cohesive game play experience and final image. This card did have a scoring mechanism, and I achieved a perfect score, however, because there are only 3 bands of scoring, if you make just 2 mistakes it pushes you into the worst scoring band. As you can only play once this feels a little precarious, though the aim is to end up with a pretty card, so it doesn’t matter a tremendous amount.



Overall, I’d say that if you like quiet, mindful, process, solo games, then these are very sweet and an interesting idea. You can order them on Kickstarter from 29th October, so keep an eye out! Dissent Games is a female run UK company and well worth supporting so look out for her upcoming game Library Labyrinth. 

We were not paid for this review

You can find out more about Jenny's own projects by going to https://www.manokentgames.com/ 

Or follow them on twitter by https://twitter.com/ManOKentGames1 

You can check out the other games Dissent Games makes by following them on Twitter @DissentGames

If you would like to support more written pieces on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. www.patreon.com/werenotwizards

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