Devastation of Indines

Yet another Kickstarter I backed. This one didn't arrive on time and was delayed by about 6 months. However, it does deliver on its KS promises though.
So what is DoI about? Well, think of as a fighting game like MvC3 or BlazBlue; but in card form. Yep, that's right card form.

How it works is that you have base cards, which represent moves like grapple, fireball, punch, kick etc. Every fighter will use those base cards. They're fixed. But then you also have cards such as styles, which you use to pair with the base cards. These styles are unique to the fighters themselves and each fighter has several different styles. These styles will modify the bases, making them faster/slower, hit harder/softer etc. Each player has 20hp and they battle it out every turn until one of them dies. For a very simplified version of the rules, click here

So this is what I've received so far for my pledge. I'm actually missing a box which the creator will send to me later on. First, I'll say this. The box is pretty huge considering it's a card game and not a deck building game. The art is also gorgeous, which is one of the reasons I backed this in the first place. 

The card quality is decent, better than PPs High Command at least but I feel just slightly below DC deck building game or Legendary. The vacuum-formed box insert is very nicely done but in reality, it really really doesn't have enough compartments to hold everything after you've punched out all the tokens and so on. 

I do like what they gave you to help seperate each fighter as it were. Usually in deckbuilding games, they give you dividers of some sort to help divide the separate cards. In DoI, they give you cardboard sleeves instead to keep all your cards in. It's a nifty idea but it falls short in some areas. First the sleeves are all the same size, which is a neat idea if your fighters all have the same amount of cards but they don't. Some of them have special trap cards or merc cards or so on, which could mean maybe 4-7 more cards in total. So for those fighters, the sleeves end up bulging a lot more and don't really fit as nicely. The second issue is the bigger issue though. The fact that the cards no longer fit in the box once you've put them in the sleeve. Yes. It's a 'wait, wut?' moment. As you can see, it no longer fits in the nice card shaped inserts anymore. 

Other than that, the components are fine. Except once you add up everything, you're suddenly stuck with a lot of tokens. The tokens alone can probably fill up the inserts in the box. 

As for the gameplay. It's pretty interesting. I haven't had a chance to play too much of it, only testing it out with several different fighters. But I do like the system, although some fighters don't seem quite as effective as others. I do want to try a 2v2 match though, which will probably have to wait till I get some of my friends over. 

Overall, this was a pretty satisfying KS, except for the delay of 6 months. Granted, we're sort of used to it for miniature KS, but less used to it for pure printing KS. It's probably some sort of mentality that miniatures take more time to prepare than just printing card stock or board games.