Previews

PGC London 19: Kaijack Card Attack is a monster card-battler from the team behind Crap! I'm Broke

Fight for territory through the art of blackjack

PGC London 19: Kaijack Card Attack is a monster card-battler from the team behind Crap! I'm Broke
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| Kaijack Card Attack

Arcane Circus cropped up a couple of years ago with the delightfully depressing Crap! I'm Broke, an odd collection of mini-games where you were forced to work a series of part-time jobs to try and scrape by in the hard, hard world.

Thankfully, the studio's next game is taking a totally different approach. Named Kaijack Card Attack, it's all about giant monsters battling for territory in a poor, defenceless city. With card games. Naturally.

The kaiju of this world are indestructible, so violence simply isn't an option for them. Instead, they fight with a blackjack-esque card game to decide who gets to take control.

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The setup is pretty straight forward - a roulette wheel decides how many points you start with, and what point total you're aiming to get as close as possible to. Then you and your opponent are dealt a card, which you can use to boost your score or alter the target score either positively or negatively.

You don't know what your opponent's planning, so it's all about trying to second guess your enemy's strategy to make sure the target score moves in your direction.

Get closest to the score and you'll score a point - get it bang on and you get two points. It's first to three, so rounds are pretty short and sweet, and it really is anyone's game right up until the end, which can make for some exciting, tense moments.

There are plans for different cards too, along with each kaiju bringing a special ability into play, but at the moment this is all just in a design doc somewhere - though the early prototype does look quite promising.

The art style is lovely too, with bright, cartoony kaiju towering over the city in a peculiar mix of terrifying and adorable. If there's one thing this team knows how to do, it's create an interesting look for their games.

It could be a while before we see more, however. Arcane Circus is hoping to get the game out some time this year, but it could well be 2020 before it actually lands on its planned platforms of Android, iOS, and Switch. And we might have all been killed by card-playing kaiju by then.

Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.