Hand of the Divine
One of the biggest hurdles to joining a board game night at the local Enchanted Grounds combination board game/coffee shop is learning the rules. There’s one person in the group who is a total expert on the $90 game they brought, and they slowly and (hopefully) patiently lead you through a game or two before you can finally maybe understand it after a few hours, at which point I’m about ready to go home anyway. Solo games are easier, because – while there isn’t anyone around to answer any questions you might have – there’s no outside pressure to learn something quickly or even well. You can reference the rulebook at any moment with no judgment, and there’s sure to be some YouTube videos explaining the rules to you in different ways, as well. Unlike many video games, where things can happen without your input and you just have to react, single-player board and card games are fully and entirely propelled by your own actions, choices, and abilities. Hand of the Divine is like that: a complex, solo card game that is at first overwhelming. But after a game or two you really get it, and you get to become that person that brings it to show all your friends. I’m that person now. Let me tell you about it and why I couldn’t understand anyone not liking it (if they give it a real chance).
This is the final Catalog-released Powerdive Games game (for now! … but there are a few left on Itch that I might come back to later), and Powerdive Week ends like it started: with a card game. Unlike Soliterra, though, which is simple number-stacking with a standard 52-card deck of playing cards, Hand of the Divine goes the complete opposite direction. Not only are there a bunch of ridiculous cards you’ve never seen before, but completing games will give you points that can be spent to unlock new “spheres” (deck types), totally changing the game. Expansion packs that aren’t micro-transactions? How novel! It’s like how games used to be.
First released as a demo on Itch (that even saves and transfers your progress to the full game!), HotD opens with a tutorial that explains the mechanics, but not why you’ll come back to the game over and over and over. When you get into the actual meat it becomes more clear, with not too bad of a learning curve, but still a lot more than Soliterra. Your hand is at the bottom of the screen, and the shop from which you can purchase new cards is at the top. Each card has a type and a number, and you’re able to play cards into the discard pile by matching either the type or the number, like in Uno. But each card also has its own abilities that activate depending on how they’re played, like in Magic: The Gathering.
Time for the jargon-filled, one-paragraph rule rundown, but as simply as possible. You spend each turn building Power, Influence Points (IP), and MP, and you have a limited number of turns until the end of the game. You start with 10 turns, but each time you get enough MP, you get an extra turn. Power turns into IP at the end of each turn but is also spent to add more cards from the shop to your deck, and there are global leaderboards for “most MP in one game,” “most IP in one game,” and “largest card collection” (by buying more cards from the shop during the game instead of letting your Power convert to IP). There’s no “win” state except to get your numbers as high as you can. And you can use your earned IP at the end of the game to buy different “spheres” of cards, each with their own thing.
At the beginning of each game, you choose three spheres, like “math” or “cooking” or “dinosaurs,” and a big part of the game is figuring out which spheres interact with each other in beneficial ways. Some spheres have cards that you need to play in a certain order, or they rob from your MP pool to pour points into IP, or some are focused on drawing lots of cards and keeping your turn going for longer. Finding combinations that multiply each other’s effects is the point – it was meant to have these ridiculous combos that almost break the game.
The developer wrote this postmortem about balancing and breaking card games just like this, and it was one of his great joys. He wanted to bring that feeling to the Playdate and he nailed it. At first, you’ll be ecstatic with a 20-point turn, but within a few games and some fiddling with strategies you’ll be multiplying cards with each other and earning 100 points or more with just a few cards. And there are so many additional spheres to explore, with 1,771 possible three-sphere combinations, that you’ll always be finding another wacky combo that gets you onto that leaderboard.
It's good that games are limited to 10 turns (well, plus whatever MP can buy you), because the biggest problem with this game is that it’s maybe too good and too big. Honestly, I kind of bounced off the demo when it first came out. “Too complex,” I thought when I just did not have the bandwidth for it. And it does take a solid hour before you’re really understanding what the game is, and which parts of your brain it activates, and why you want to try so hard just to see the numbers go up.
Is that a lot to ask of a Playdate game? Maybe it used to be! But by the end of 2024 the system has really come into its own, and there are now games that can rival the investment you’d put into a multi-million-dollar AAA game on a home console. Not monetarily, not at all. This game is just $9 and you can spend literally hours on the free demo. But it’s a game that demands your attention and a little bit of yourself to really get the most out of it. And when you’re done, you’ll wonder… can more games be like this, please? How am I so invested in a score-chasing, single-player card game on a tiny black-and-white screen? Who knows, but it really, really works for me. Too bad I have other games I have to play, too!
(Free demo released March 29, 2024, on Itch. Full game released April 9, 2024, on Catalog. Copy provided by developer, like all the others this week. Thanks, Powerdive!)