Deck-Building the Body

When I first heard about Star Realms, I wondered what all the hype was about. I already owned deck building games. The basic mechanics looked almost identical. When I saw it on sale for less than ten dollars, though, I figured it was at least worth a shot. I had no idea that it would eventually become my favorite deck building game that made me think about the nature of life and faith. Not bad for ten bucks, huh?

If someone’s played deck builders before, Star Realms only takes a minute or two to explain. Players start out with an identical set of cards that earn various forms of currency. Star Realms calls these trade and power. 

Trade is used to obtain new cards from a row of cards available to both players, costing between 1 and 8 points depending on the card’s effect. Whatever isn’t spent by the end of the turn is lost, and the player draws another five cards in preparation for the next turn. This, again, is fairly standard to the genre. Power, and what you do with it on your turn, is what starts setting Star Realms apart from its predecessors.

My main complaint about games like Dominion or Ascension is that they are generally isolated experiences unless modified to act otherwise. Everyone is building their self-contained points engine. I once saw a game where a player left the table whenever it wasn’t their turn and still won soundly at the end of the game. Star Realms differs in that there are no points. There is only standing on the shattered remains of your opponents empire.

This game doesn’t only introduce conflict. It revels in it. Every turn players fill their decks with new ships to add to their armada. Trade ships increase the flow of income per turn. Assault ships look to destroy anything in their path. Outposts, the only cards that are allowed to persist from turn to turn, function as defensive structures against oncoming attacks. In the course of play, you will be looking to get the ships you need to overwhelm your opponent’s defenses and watch them fall.

The cards are divided among four factions. The Trade Federation, Star Empire, Machine Cult, and the Blobs. Each faction has something they are good at. Trade federation is good at keeping you alive and getting piles of trade. The star empire is about the business of making your opponents pay – in the form of discarded cards. The Machine Cult is about cleaning out useless trash to make your deck lean and mean. Finally, the Blobs are the all powerful hammer of this game. They bring the pain.

Factions go beyond just a loose collection of themes though. Many of these cards have special added affects that only happen if there are other members of that faction in your hand at the same time. These range from adding more power, gaining authority (the name for the game’s ‘life points’), drawing extra cards, etc.

This mechanic makes you change plans on the fly, creating a fluid strategy that changes based on what you can get your hands on.  You might love filling your deck with Blob cards, but if everything you see is from the Star Empire – you have to change course. Even if you get your blobs, the other player may be grabbing up all the trade federation cards. No matter how hard you hit them, they’ll bounce back if you don’t do something.

It was this give and take – the dynamic of unity and diversity – that got me thinking. I saw a microcosm for life, the universe, and everything in this little deck of cards. No one wants to be in a place where there no one relates to them or cares about the same things they do. We are communal creatures, varying only in the degree of social interaction we seek out. At the same time, the echo-chamber effect is very real. If all you do is surround yourself with the same people, ideas, & activities, life becomes a one-dimensional experience. It turns in on itself and retreats from the rest of the world.

I see this prominently within the church. Community is a recurring theme in the bible, even from the very beginning. We’ve done a poor job of acting on it, however. We  war against each other within the church, each trying to prove that the way we do church is superior to the way somebody else does. Outside of our walls, one only needs to look at the parable of the good Samaritan to understand that unity and service are not limited to geography or association. And there are many other verses we could cite.

There is so much that we can learn from one another. So many ways we can grow and build something beautiful together, so why are we so worried about making sure everybody looks and thinks just like us? Go it alone and you won’t be as strong as you could be with others. Stay inside your own faction all the time and your weakness is exposed.

The tension is what makes the game worth playing.