Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I’m an Xbox man, and I am fairly cheap when it comes to buying new video games. So I only have a subscription to the Xbox Live Ultimate Game Pass (and even that, I buy through a friend who works at Microsoft), and all of my new gaming efforts come through that service.
Balatro was a game that was recently recommended by a friend who enjoys “rogue-like” experiences. In it, players work through increasingly difficult battles with foes who can be defeated by…well, by playing poker combinations to damage baddies, broken into rounds called “antes” and bosses known as “blinds.” In this way, everything about Balatro feels like poker, but with boss battles, cool powers, and a shop between rounds that can be used to upgrade cards in the player’s deck.
Ace of Spades (2025, Devir Games) is a new solo game that reminded me a lot of both Balatro, as well as the earlier card-attack game Regicide. In that way, Ace of Spades has a nice system that helps it stand apart from those other games, but it also feels very familiar if you know those other properties. And where Regicide can be played solo but is better when joined by a friend or two, Ace of Spades is a solo game that can be played with one other person…but I think it’s going to land best as a solo experience.
If you can get past a shocking amount of card shuffling, Ace of Spades might be for you.
That Looks a LOT Like Clint Eastwood
Ace of Spades is a solo boss battler that plays out across 12 rounds. Each round starts the same way: players draw eight cards into their hand from a standard 52-card deck, then proceed to use five of those cards to build poker combinations to slowly whittle down a boss’s hit points to zero before a certain number of rounds (usually, 2-4 rounds) have expired.
Ace of Spades provides a dashboard for players to track enemy hit points, remaining rounds (known here as “duels”), and discard actions that grant a player the chance to refresh their hand with new cards from the current deck, or to renew the entire deck by shuffling discards from the current round with the draw deck. There’s also a handy reminder of what poker combinations do in terms of damage at the bottom of the dashboard. That way, you’ll always remember that a full house does six points of damage, while two pairs only do two points of damage.
On a turn, a player selects five of their eight cards to come up with a combo that does the most damage to an enemy. Early on, the game isn’t too rough. Later, players will defeat enemies and acquire their powers to use in future rounds, such as powerful one-time actions that burn a card or ongoing powers that boost the strength of specific card types. In the final few rounds, players will only have three or four duels to inflict as many as 50 points of damage, which I found to only be possible with the powers that stack from enemies beaten in prior rounds.
This gave each combat round a nice arc, as players need to get increasingly craftier to take down enemies.
An Ace in a Lot of Holes
Ace of Spades has a very nice “let’s run it back” hook, and I found myself reloading to try again multiple times because getting to the mid-game is relatively easy, but getting over the hump is relatively hard. It has the same amount of tension I like in games like Regicide, where it feels like I could win if I get just the right combination of cards.
The dashboard is perfect and setting up the game is a breeze. I found that my main issue with this game was the constant need to reshuffle the entire deck. I’ve done eight plays of Ace of Spades—I played until I finally beat the 50-point boss on easy mode!!—and I’ve already reshuffled this deck about a hundred times, because you have to reset the deck after every encounter.
That has left the cards in a rough state, but for those who love handling a deck of cards, Ace of Spades won’t bother you at all due to the constant need to reshuffle the deck. The rest of what’s here is gravy. I enjoyed the card powers and some of them were strictly better than others (hey, hey, Priest character power!!), so I like that each game plays out a little differently, similar to rogue-lite/rogue-like video games such as Dead Cells.
Games of Ace of Spades run a little long; often, my games took at least 30 minutes, sometimes 45-50 minutes. That won’t bother many of the solo gamers in my network, but the game can sometimes feel like it is beginning to overstay its welcome just as you beat the ninth or tenth character.
Ace of Spades does good work. I’m hoping this is the start of another run for Devir in 2025, following successful campaigns in 2023 and 2024.
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