Who tried it?
Who tried it?
-brontos
I haven't tried it yet. I'm interested in it as the concept of it sounds neat.
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The game plays as follows. One side chooses to be evil, commanding different kinds of bacteria, and one side chooses to be good, commanding antibiotics. Each turn, players cast more bacteria and antibiotics. There are certain spells, which act as either sorceries, with an immediate effect, or as enchantments which remain on the board.
The goal of the game is to defeat your opponent. Each side begins with 20 life. During the battle phase, the "evil" hero selects bacteria to attack the "good" hero. The good hero selects antibiotics to defend. The antibiotics strike first. Each antibiotic has a list of bacteria that it can defeat. For each bacteria killed, the evil hero loses a life. Then the bacteria deal their damage. Each surviving bacteria deals one damage to the good hero.
The only way an antibiotic can be defeated, is when the antibiotic is a second line therapy for a bacteria. In this case, both the bacteria and antibiotic are defeated. Otherwise, the antibiotics ignore the bacteria. (An antibiotic may be a second line treatment if perhaps the antibiotic is only moderately strong against the bacteria, or the antibiotic is so valuable as a therapy that it is reserved for severe diseases, or maybe the antibiotic has side effects).
The way games usually play out is that the evil side can cast cheap bacteria, but they are easily killed. The only ones that really stay are the very drug resistant bacteria. And those attack over and over until they are stopped. The good side can cast more and more antibiotics and soon the good side builds up a sizable army unless bacteria kill the antibiotics. But the only way to kill antibiotics is to know the bacteria for which the antibiotics are second line treatments.
It turns out that I am really desperate to learn about antibiotics and microbiology, and I really wanted this game to work for me. However, I had a hard time learning from the game. When learning medical microbiology, you want to learn about first line treatments, but the strategy centers around second line treatments. In addition, the cards emphasize lists of bacteria that antibiotics can kill and lists of antibiotics that can kill a bacteria. Learning from these cards would involve memorizing immense numbers of associations between drugs and bacteria and I can't imagine anyone would learn well this way.
It would probably be far more useful to learn conceptual information that gave one a deep understanding of bacteria and drugs. One might learn about characteristics of bacteria (cell wall, envelopes, capsules, virulence factors, etc) which gave them specific properties. One might be interested in which bugs caused pneumonia and which bugs caused ear infections. One might be interested in which antibiotics are used to treat specific conditions, such as dog bites and pink eye. But none of that kind of information is available from the cards used in play. The card creators do provide some of this information, but it is presented in the form of stories about the cards, posted on the website, a kind of "lore", which is separate from the game.
As a pure game, I found Healing Blade difficult to enjoy. As with good card games, it is fun to look at the cards, and see how powerful they are, and think of strategies, and create decks. However there are many problems with the game. The game itself is quite buggy and crashes easily or goes into illegal states that require restarts. There are probably a zillion cards and situations that cause "negative player experiences" and can totally take away the fun from a game. Here are a few examples.
- When a certain card is played, you switch cards, allies, and life totals with your opponent. Doesn't matter what has happened to that point, how much strategy you put into your deck, your skill of play, etc. All that is traded with your opponent.
- There is a card that essentially says "cast a fireball every turn". Considering each bacteria does one point of damage, and considering the evil hero is lucky to have 2 or 3 bacteria on the board, a single card like this can make the game silly to play.
- I think the good side has another card that acts like Wulven's full moon and gives 2 or 3 life every turn. In practice, this also makes the game silly to play.
I like what the game authors tried to do; they tried to turn a challenging subject into a card game, making it fun and addictive. I think it's a great goal. It just doesn't work out so well here.
Web based game available here:
http://www.healingblade.com/
I really like it. At first I was a bit lost with the bacterias and antibiotics names, but I got it now.
I'm just wondering why it isn't a TCG instead of a simple Card game with fixed decks. I find that a bit sad.
-brontos
I don't know... I had both unlocked directly.
-brontos
I tried the web version a couple of weeks ago. I think it's more like MTG. Not that I played MTG but I know defending the hero with creatures is an MTG thing (that's if I got it right in one game). For me it's complicated but I'm sure many people would like it.
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