Chase sticky-fingered dragons across the cosmos (or just fly around, ramming spaceships) in this sci-fi deckbuilder

Takara Cards - Early Access trailer - YouTube

There's usually at least one game in early access I'm waiting on the full release of before I try. At the moment, I'm holding off on anime finance sim Stonks-9800. But it's easy to miss a release when there are so many games coming in and out of early access all the time, often without advance notice. So let me give you a heads-up on one of them: board game-esque deckbuilder Takara Cards, which leaves early access on January 17.

Each hand of Takara Cards represents a single jump in your spaceship's journey, with a variety of enemies to defeat before you can accelerate to hyperspeed. You can see what each ship, drone, and cluster of asteroids is about to do on the next turn, but you've got a limited amount of power to spend on cards that might counteract that. Maybe you fire the forward gun and then barrel roll out of danger, or maybe you power up the shields and ram someone.

In the early access version I've found myself doing a lot of ramming. While I can shoot fore and aft with the cards in the starter deck, there are plenty of times where I can't line up a shot and it's easier to just ramp up the shields and suffer a collision. Hopefully later decks will let me play it in a less pinball way.

Each ship's deck is themed around fantasy folk, beginning with dwarves, and with elves and humans unlockable later. The story has you on the hunt for space dragons who stole from the Federation, and the climax of each run is a showdown with one of those dragons. It gives Takara Cards an FTL-like structure, and between jumps are pick-a-path choices that might boost your various flavors of karma or, as happened to me, force you to pay your taxes.

There's voice acting for these interludes, but I gotta say, it's not great. Fortunately you can turn it off in the options, and hopefully it'll get replaced in the full release, or a subsequent update. You can find Takara Cards on Steam.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.