In truth it’s less a card game than a
game built from cards. It’s a
cardboard kingdom dealt by a
disembodied game master who
narrates the campaign.
Characters, items, and
buildings slide across
the table as they come
into play, while
hundreds of cards
depicting roads, grass,
and seas are spread out
to form an overworld
for you to navigate
tile-by-tile. If you’ve played
Inscryption orHandof Fate, where
fantasy lands are abstractly suggested
by a few crude tokens, there is a
certain wow factor toVoice of Cards’
more total worldbuilding.
But the wow wears off. There’s
little variety or poetry in these
building blocks, just acres of
repeated grass and mountains, as
sparse and basic as the 8-bit tilesets
of a NES DragonQuest. You can only
paper over so much. Flashes of
invention hint at the idea’s potential- an ailing hero getting more
dog-eared, a death represented as a
violent tear – but these are rare.
Compare it toThronebreaker, the
Gwent RPG, which magics
avalanches, sieges and multi-limbed
beasts from similarly static parts,
and Voice of Cards seems... flat.
PLAYEDOUT
Under its novelty art it’s a straight
JRPG, as traditional as they come.
There’s a hero and a dragon, and lots
of villages and dungeons between the
two. There are small soap operas in
the former, endless random
encounters in the latter. There is anutritionist obsessed with muscles,
but that’s the only real reminder that
there’s a weirdo at the wheel. If the
writing is only gently amusing
throughout, it’s helped
by the delivery of the
narrator. He’s voiced in
English by Todd
Haberkorn with a
pleasingly droll disdain
for all the unfolding
nonsense in the game.
The adventure
doesn’t outstay its
welcome, either. The whole thing is
over in ten hours, even if you take the
time to explore every corner of the
world map and uncover rare
equipment. If anything, it could be
shorter, by stripping the padding
from two late game dungeons.
Forcing us through floor after floor ofsurprise monster attacks is duff at the
best of times, let alone when it’s all
rendered with the same dingy card
tile. Again: why opt for an art style
that amplifies repetition?
It doesn’t help that Voice of Cards
never finds its, well, voice in combat.
It doesn’t riff on card games or deck
building as you might expect; it’s yet
more conservative JRPG thinking
given a cute reskin: every hero has a
deck of four moves, but is that really
any different from selecting actions
from the menu in, say, Final Fantasy
I? You could make the case that
building that ‘deck’ of attacks nods to
some modern favourites, but I only
had to swap in three moves during
the whole campaign, which speaks to
the redundancy of that.
Like so much here, fighting hints
at ideas that could be more engaging.
Like the way it decorates the
battlefield with the ephemera of
tabletop action. There are physical
dice to roll to inflict status effects,
and counters acting as mana. But
because you’re fundamentally
playing the same hand of moves
every turn, there’s none of the
spontaneity or improvisation that
defines even the simplest collectible
card game. The art of these things is
how your brain seizes (or not) on the
luck of the draw. This system asks
practically nothing of you.
What a shame that so little of this
takes flight. The current trend for
leaning into videogaming’s tabletop
roots has proven such fertile ground- fromInscryption’s onion-like layers
to the tarot-fuelled brilliance of
Handof Fate(a game you’d do much
better to discover in place of this) –
that I’m sad that a singular talent
like Taro couldn’t do more with it. A
real busted flush.
55
Strip awaythe framing
and Voices of Cardsisa
throwaway JRPGthat
unfortunately never quite
finds itsbite.VERDICTH
ot on the heels ofInscryption (see p90), Voice ofCards is
another cardgame where all is not as it seems. But where
Daniel Mullins’ feverishcabin battler deals you a hand of
jokersand, for me, provedmorethan the sum of its parts,
SquareEnix has barelyshuffled the deck. This is despite
featuring creativeinput fromYoko Taro, he ofNierand papier-mâchéhead
fame. Come to this expecting his galaxy(moon?) brained genre subversion
and the biggest twist is how ploddinglybasic it all is.SHUFFLE KNIGHT
VOICES OF CARDS: THEISLANDDRAGONROARS doesn’tplay its cards rightByMatthew CastleThere’s little
variety or
poetryin
thesebuilding
blocksNEED TO KNOWWHATIS IT?
A traditional JRPG
reskinned to resemble a
card game
EXPECT TO PAY
£25
DEVELOPER
Square Enix
PUBLISHER
In-houseREVIEWED ON
RTX 2080 Ti, AMD
Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core
processor, 16gb ram
MULTIPLAYER
No
LINK
voiceofcards.
square-enix-games.
comTAROCARDSFourcharactersworthyofYokoTaroTHE HERO
Notable for
not being
heroic. Yes,
for once a
hero who is
completely in it for themselves
with craven dialogue choices for
every occasion.VILLAGE
HEADMAN
A village
where humans
and monsters
co-exist paints
a picture of hope, before this
freak rocks up and spoils things
with his ‘colourful’ diet.AUREO
A powerfully
hench
nutritionist
who casts a
long, bulging
shadow over a town of wannabe
bodybuilders. If anyone is getting
worrying fanart, it’s him.THE
INNKEEPER
Inn visits are
free, but every
innkeeper
justifies their
generosity with increasingly silly
reasons. People will do anything
for a good TripAdvisor write up.VoicesofCards: The IslandDragonRoarsREVIEW