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
Radiant Offline Battle Arena (ROBA) is a card based version of a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA. (I will now revert to acronyms as that's a lot to type repeatedly). Initial impressions upon opening the box, are that there are a lot of characters to choose from for your team of three heroes, which could be good for longevity, given the amount of combinations possible. Each hero comes with it's own set of cards and all 3 decks are shuffled together to form your skill deck from which you draw your hand each turn. A deity is also selected and the accompanying three Conduit cards are placed on the board with your heroes "defending" these. This reminded me a little of the game play I love in the Legend of the Five Rings LCG. Each player also received a deck of item cards which can be used later in the game, as power is earned by defeating heroes, destroying conduits or from card effects. Power can also be used to level up heroes as the game progresses.