Pox Nora

Overall score:

Pox Nora is a hybrid game at its finest: an online tactical RPG that you play like a tabletop battle and build like a deck of collectible cards. Play it for a few minutes and you’ll spot a host of obvious inspirations—including Magic: The Gathering, Heroclix, Final Fantasy Tactics, and more—but they are handled so well, and combined so cleverly, that each one seems like an innovation instead of a throwback.

The core game concept is simple: you have twenty runes, and a battlefield laid out on a grid. At one end is your shrine, which gives you a bit of nora (i.e., mana) each turn, and serves as an entry zone for your units. Each turn you can reveal two more of your runes (just like drawing a card), and you use your nora to play spells or deploy units onto the grid. Your units get a certain number of action points each turn, and use them to move, attack, and activate dozens of special abilities. You march across the battlefield, claiming nora fonts (which give you more nora and more places to deploy units) and trying to destroy the other player’s shrine. The controls are intuitive and easy to use, and even one game is enough to teach you everything you need to know to play. After that, the strategy is up to you.

Part of what makes the strategy so deep is the army-building aspect, which feels much closer to CCG deckbuilding than standard army-building. New players can use a number of free decks while learning to play, but sooner or later you’re going to want to take the plunge and buy a few “packs” of random runes (the game itself is free—you just play online through your browser). Combining units, spells, equipment, and relics into your very own deck provides hours of enjoyment in itself, and there are a lot of unique strategies—with six factions and dozens of runes in each, there are a surprising number of strategies to go around.

Once your deck is built and deployed, it becomes a highly tactical game of resources and board control—the winner is rarely the one who blitzes through and attacks the other shrine, but the one who builds a careful defense and uses complimentary units to support each other. Clicking on a unit will show you where it can move with its action points, and clicking the attack button for a unit will show you its range of attack—many of the long-range fighters have a minimum range as well, making them deadly snipers but easy to base and destroy when left undefended.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the ability to customize you units by earning experience and buying new powers or attribute bonuses. Most units have a pretty wide variety of options, so depending on what you need and how you play you could give a unit extra action points, a higher defense, more hit points, better damage, or a cool new power such as healing spell, a damage shield, and so on. The kicker to this system is that everything you add on actually increases the unit’s nora cost, so even a heavily leveled super unit is still arguably fair and balanced within the system. In my experience this isn’t always true—even a level 3 unit can tip the balance of power significantly, and is more than worth the added nora cost to play it. Playing against entire armies of high-level units can be downright annoying for a newbie, but this doesn’t happen often due to the game’s matching system—by which I mean that it tells you the rating and ranking of every unit that challenges you, so you can match yourself against exactly the skill level you’re looking for.

I do have one rather large complaint about the game, which is their rune manager. First the good stuff: it’s all online, and actually runs outside of the game, so you can check your account and browse your units and build new decks from anywhere (I often do it at work when I have a spare minute, and it’s a very pleasant break). The bad part is that actually browsing your units and building your decks can be a huge pain in the neck. There is no search function and not even a filter system, so you pretty much just have a massive list of runes that you have to sort through by hand. Clicking on the name of a rune brings it up in a little window on the left, but each page contains enough runes that the majority of the time you’ll have to click on a rune, wait for it to load, scroll up to look at it, and then scroll back down to repeat the whole process with the next unit in line. I would have really appreciated some kind of filter: show me only runes from this faction, or runes with at least 9 Speed, or runes with “fire” in their text, etc. The deck-building nature of the game provides tons of situations where a feature like this is practically demanded; consider the spell Blister, which deals 10 damage to every unit on the board that is neither a dragon nor a reptile. Obviously you’d want to put that in a deck full of dragons and reptiles, to hurt the other guy and leave you alone, but there’s no way to search for that—you just have to scroll though the names and look for anything vaguely reptilian. There are a few sort functions, such as “list the runes from highest damage to lowest,” but that can only get you so far. A solid system for managing and filtering your runes is an absolute must for this game, and I hope we’ll see one soon in an upcoming patch (and while they’re at it, they could make a lot of game information more accessible in general: a unit’s upgrade possibilities, what the faction bonuses are, etc. They’re not even explained in the rules, you have to dig through the FAQ to find them).

At the end of the day, however, despite my complaints the game itself is accessible, novel, tactically deep, and loads of fun. I spend way too much time playing Pox Nora, because it’s just that good—it’s speaks to me on so many levels, and manages to simultaneously engage me as a deck-builder, a battlefield tactician, and a fantasy geek. Did I mention that it has not only an undead faction, but a frog faction? It doesn’t get any better than that.

The final word is this: play this game. You have no excuses—it’s free, it’s online, and there are eight sample decks to test drive before you decide to take the plunge and start buying boosters. Visit www.poxnora.com and check it out—you’ll be glad you did.

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Written by Fellfrosch on October 04th, 2006