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Flash Fun: Castlewars and Castlewars 2


Princess Castle
Princess Castle

If you’re looking for a quick Flash game to play to kill time during your lunch hour, you can’t go wrong with a quick game of CASTLEWARS (or, spelled with a space as CASTLE WARS).

This two player game card game (or single player against the computer) places you in charge of trying to grow your castle to 100 bricks high, while preventing your opponent from doing the same.   Every turn, you select a card from a pool of 8 available cards from the deck to play.  Some of the cards will benefit you, others will attack your opponent in some way.   Then it’s your opponent’s turn to select a card.

Each time a card is selected from the pool, it is replaced with a new card from the deck, so each player is always picking from the pool of eight cards.

At the end of both players’ turns, internal resources (Crystals, Weapons, and Bricks) for both players are replenished.  As some cards have certain requirements based on your available resources, you may find that you can’t play certain cards until you have built up a reserve in that category – don’t worry, the game will highlight what is or isn’t playable for you.

You have a few items at your disposal:

  • BRICK WALL:  A brick wall is an extra line of defense between you and your opponent.  As long as you have a wall, then it will take the brunt of any attack aimed at you, protecting your castle height.  But as soon as that fence falls, then your castle is vulnerable to attack.
  • BUILDERS:  the more builders you have, the more bricks you receive at the end of each round of play.  Bricks are most useful in building the brick wall defense line as well as increasing the height of your castle.  In essence, you need bricks to win.
  • SOLDIERS:  Soldiers make weapons, and the more weapons you have, the more destruction you can place on your opponent’s castle and wall.
  • SORCERERS:  Crystals are what Sorcerers make, and with many crystals comes great power.  From summoning more weapons and bricks, to destructive dragons or constructive pixies – crystals are always a good thing to have
  • CUSTOM CARD DECK:  Feel free to modify the card deck to make the game easier or harder overall by increasing or decreasing the number of powerful cards available for players to use

Castlewars was written in 2007 as an update/tribute to the already existing card game ANTS by Miroslav Nemecek.

So now a few years have passed.  Castlewars, while entertaining in its current incarnation, needed to be updated for the 2010’s.

Which brings us to CASTLEWARS 2. 

The gameplay is exactly the same as the original Castlewars, but the graphics and sound have been completely overhauled for a new era.

The card deck contains many of the same cards, and some new ones to choose from, and the player animations remind one of the classic PC game ARCHON, where the onscreen characters act out the players choice on screen.

The biggest difference is that the computer AI is much, much more refined from what the original game had before.  Players who found themselves winning Castlewars on Advanced on a regular basis will have a tough time working through Castlewars 2 on either the medium or hard levels.

All in all, Castlewars was one of those classic coffee-break games that worked just fine in its original form, but was worthy of a refreshing update – which Castlewars 2 brings in spades.