Gudnak has a great name, and maybe that’ll be enough to overcome the gigantic obstacle that the genre of games that are trying to become lifestyles struggle with.
That obstacle: gluttony. Customizable competitive card games are the definition of an oversaturated market. Step into any local game store, and you’ll see the locus of competition for space and time on full display.
Gudnak has a lot of things going for it, but it also struggles with a few usability issues. I also imagine it will have a market visibility problem going forward, but that’s not for me to decide.
What’s a Gudnak?
Gudnak is an ambigram, which the back of the box helpfully tells you, meaning a symbol that can be flipped and retains its shape. The game is played on a grid of different sizes depending on player count, with square cards functioning as units and spells. You have a 20-card deck that serves as your game timer/health bar (reminiscent of my beloved Ortus Regni). If the other player occupies your gates (the square in front of your stronghold/deck) at the start of your turn, you discard a card. No cards? You lose.
Gameplay is reminiscent of Summoner Wars, where you’ll add cards to the board, move them around, attack other cards, and generally try to reduce your opponent’s ability to take interesting turns. There are innovations like building “stacks of doom” that Civilization 4 players might be familiar with (you can stack cards with identical traits), and the game is punchy and quick.
Your turns are two actions, and you can repeat them. You can move cards one space, you can attack an adjacent card, which is just a simple number comparison (you win with more, die with less, both die in a tie), use abilities, and do a few more context-specific actions. The aforementioned stacks of doom allow for interesting plays where you build a pile of units that become increasingly or decreasingly powerful as the ones on top get killed—Gudnak has some layers. You also have tactics cards that you can cast to do various fun things, and the four factions that come in the base set have nice variability. It’s a nice package.
Aesthetics and challenges
Gudnak does have dissonance in an uninteresting way: excellent art paired with a weird tone. The art is awesome; they’re clearly drawing from crapsack worlds like the worlds of Hidetaka Miyazaki or Gene Wolfe. They’re going for grimdark, but they’ve paired the grimdark with a sort of tongue-in-cheek, Marvel Cinematic Universe patter, millennial-coded self-awareness that I find extremely off-putting. Don’t tell me your game is fun in your rulebook. That’s like a guy on a dating app saying that he’s “nice” and a “good person.”
Additionally, as good as the art is, they’ve fallen prey to the greatest sin in contemporary gaming–microscopic text. What are we doing here, people? I’m not asking for large-print format books here, and my eyes are fine, but when you have a game about dueling interactions, you gotta make stuff legible from across the table. Hell, legible from my side of the table would be nice. The industry is on notice; this happens way too often. Plus, we need to stop with square cards. A rectangular grid and cards would have been fine, and you don’t run into the grain-based shuffling problems that square cards generate.
Complaints aside, the truest challenge that Gudnak is going to face as a competently designed and fun-to-play system is, drumroll, deck construction. Playing with the pre-constructed decks is fine, and you’ll get some mileage out of them, but the juice is in deck construction. The challenge there is that deck construction games depend on dedicated player bases and groups. I think there’s quite a bit of fun in this box, and I’d like to see more stuff, but that’s entirely market-dependent.
Yet another CCG is going to be a challenge, but I wish the developers of this game the best. Also, do not play the game with more than 2 players. The strengths of the system are replaced with tedious-wack-a-mole.
GUDNAK! (wanted to get it out one last time)
