New Game Round-up: Shooting Superhot Cards, Phasing Past to Present, and Reduxing Three Kingdoms Redux

A bullet misses you by millimeters. A dozen more come from every direction. Armed red guys are everywhere. You take a breath, check your options...and play a card.

In the micro deck-building SUPERHOT Card Game, you use abilities and items to deal with increasing threats. Threats you eliminate are added to your hand, giving you improved abilities and more options while bringing you closer to victory — but you need to be careful because the more cards you use, the faster you move through time (represented by a line of obstacles moving in your direction).

In more detail, you need to interact with obstacles — whether killing them or knocking them out — to increase your future possibilities for interaction or to give you more time before bullets appear! The cards that you use are discarded to the obstacle pile while cards you pass by are placed in your personal discard pile, creating a mini-deck of cards. The game has three types of obstacle cards: enemy, scenery, and objects, with each type giving you different abilities when they're in your deck.

People will figure out all sorts of strategies to use these cards in ways that the rules don't envision. We think that's a feature, not a bug. Phase is a game that celebrates the kind of overpowered, surprising, inventive player strategies that got left behind when CCGs "became so serious".