Twist Twist Stick - Hex: Shards Of Fate's Third Set Out
Slinging cards
What's a CCG without ongoing expansions? Another stack of brightly-coloured boxes to sit beneath a big "SALE!" on a shelf behind the counter at your local tabletop games shop, waiting to surprise folks who didn't realise so many of the were ever even made. The '90s were a wild time, you guys. Anyway, the point is: Hex: Shards of Fate [official site] has received its third card set.
The 'Armies of Myth' expansion brings 250 new cards to the free-to-play virtual CCG, including several new card abilities and a new card type.
The official word on those new abilities is that Prophecy "allows players to embellish cards still in their decks with bonuses" while Shift "can transfer one card's powers to another" and Allegiance "gives players bonuses as long as they have played or are holding cards of a specific race". I do like that Hex seems to pull a lot of tricks that'd be either messy or impossible to do with physical cards.
Alongside the expansion, developers Hex Entertainment dropped a sizeable new patch also adding two-factor authentication, a new tournament mode, and more.
Card-flicker Ben took a look at Hex for us a few weeks back, drawing a lot of comparisons to dear old Magic: The Gathering. "For better and worse, it’s deeper than anything else in the genre," he said of Hex. "If you’ve ever enjoyed a Duels game, it’s the best version of that there’s been, at least until Wizards’ own free to play version appears later this month." Ben's had a look at that now too.