Meet Helga, the Whale.

Helga the Whale is a sort of miniboss in this card game called Spectromancer : Gathering of Power with which I've become acquainted through the unlikely offices of a very numb and broken reimplementation for the iShits aptly called Kard Combat. Kard, you see. It's edgi & hyp.ⁱ

The game is very well made, in the Heroes II sense of "very well made". It's quite smooth at the edges, the animation you see above for instance was obtained simply layering together the savegame - because yes, Spectromancer allows you to save a battle as a collection of jpgs.

There are 192 cards divided in 22 schools. Four of those are common to all players, and cointain 12 cards each. The other 18 contain 8 cards each, and since all players get exactly one they create 18 different professions each player may specialise in. The player deck consists of four cards picked at random out of each of the four common schools plus four more out of the player's specialty field.

As far as PvE goes, the campaign is limited, you could probably tear through it entire within half an hour. Single player duels are not bad, on account of the computer having decent AI.ⁱⁱ The PvP is well fleshed out, allowing hotseat, lan as well as Internet play. So far I've won about two dozen battles against random people on the webs and lost about as many, which from what I can see looking at the lists is reasonably common. Luck, I suspect, plays a part.ⁱⁱⁱ

Certainly a splendid way to spend one's time while travelling, at least to my taste.

1. It is perhaps worth plainly stating at this point that whenever you see anything which may have any sort of redeeming feature whatsoever floating among the odorous offerings of the corporate sewage network you're best advised to do a little searching. Chances are there's a genuine if obscure article somewhere which the Crapples of this world are trying to suck the life out of. [↩]
2. Perhaps as a testament to my middling intellect, I win about one game in ten against the AI on the highest difficulty setting, and it does not visibly appear to be cheating. [↩]
3. On the other hand the same person ran the all-player tournament something like three times in a row, so perhaps luck doesn't play as large a part as all that. [↩]