Revival Is In Open Beta: A Free Collectible Card Game Set In The Longwake

Revival is open. No invite, no wallet gate, no waiting list. Open a browser, and you are in a collectible card game set somewhere the rest of our catalogue does not go: the Longwake, a North American frontier built out of folklore rather than out of westerns.

Start with what it is to play. Revival is a duelling card game. You bring a deck, your opponent brings theirs, and you take turns spending Foxfire to put creatures on the board and effects into play. Foxfire grows every turn, so the first turns are small and careful and the later ones are not. Creatures hold the line, keywords bend the rules, and the shield behind them is the thing you are actually trying to get through. A match takes a few minutes.

The part that makes it ours is the setting. North American folklore is not one tradition, it is a collision: old superstitions carried across the ocean by people who could not read, meeting a continent nothing in them described, meeting each other, and meeting the traditions already here. Scottish haints in the mountains. German charm signs painted on barns beside them. A French lumber crew flying a canoe home on a deal with the devil, on terms. Our favourite piece of it is a single light over the water that appears in Northern Ontario as a nuisance and in the Louisiana swamp as something that waits for a boat to follow it. Same spirit, same name, and it learned something on the way south. There is a page inside the game that tells the whole of it.

There are 171 cards, and they are split across five realms that do not get along. A card costs more in a deck that does not share its loyalty, so a deck is a real decision rather than a pile of the best cards you own. Deck building is free and unlimited: four pre-built decks are handed to you so you can play immediately, and you get a build slot of your own to fill.

For solo play there are three campaigns. The realm campaign runs seventy stages across five quadrants, each one graded from one to three stars, and every tier pays out: experience for clearing it, more for clearing it well, and a card for clearing it at three stars. The hero campaign is a different shape, four heroes against eight opponents each, where the rewards are specific named cards rather than a draw from the pool. And the Ascent is a ladder that gets harder the further up you go.

Practice is a separate mode with nothing at stake, and it has two things worth knowing about. Puzzles are fixed positions with exactly one solution: no deck, no draw, no luck, just a board that can be won this turn if you find the line. Special encounters change a rule for the whole match rather than handing anybody a stat bonus. Both are the best way to learn what the cards actually do.

Two players in a duel can now talk to each other without typing. Click your own shield and a wheel of reactions opens. It is a small thing that makes a match feel like it has somebody on the other side of it.

Revival is in beta and it says so on every screen. Things will move, balance will change, and some of it will be wrong in ways we have not found yet. If you find one, tell us. Play it at revival.vendettasaloon.ai, free, in the browser, on desktop or a phone held sideways.