When I introduced Card City Critters yesterday, I mentioned that we’d have three starter decks available for play at Boston FIG, though starter decks might not be quite the right word. It’s best to think of them as a bit like choosing a starter Pokemon.
Before I go over the decks, a brief reminder that you can play Card City Critters this coming Sunday, December 7th at Boston FIG 2025! And if you want to keep up to date on the game, you can sign up for our mailing list here, or join our Discord here.
Today, I’ll be introducing the first of the three, Beach Day!
First though, before you decide if sun, sand and seagulls is your style of play, lets talk a a little bit about how Card City Critters is actually played.
Basic (Card) Gameplay
A game of Card City Critters is played over a set of turns. Both you and your opponent start with 15 life, and the first player to reduce their opponents life to zero wins! You do this by calling up critters to fight for you, and casting spells to power them up, or slow your opponent down.
We’ll talk about Critters cards first.
All Critters have a cost to play. That’s the number in the upper left hand corner of the card. Sand Dollar has a cost of 2.
There’s a few ways to tell if a card is a Critter, but the easiest way is the big number in the circle under the art. That’s the critters power. Sand Dollar has a power of 2.
Power is how much damage a critter can do when it attacks. For a card like Sand Dollar, that’s only 2 points of damage! It’s not a lot, and since in Card City Critters, only one critter can attack per turn, it would take a long time to defeat someone with just Sand Dollar.
But Sand Dollar has one more thing going for it, and that is its ability. The first time you tuck a card each turn, that ability triggers, and lets you draw an extra card! But what exactly is tucking a card?
Building up at the Beach
In Card City Critters, a lot of different cards use tucked cards, but Beach is the one that cares the most about them, so much that even their most basic little guys use tucked cards.
The first big thing that tucked cards do is provide a buff to power. Forecaster Crab starts out as 0, but since they tuck a card under themself when they enter, they immediately become a 1 power Critter.
Other cards in the Beach Deck use tucked cards to activate effects, such as this Seagull Crab.
It snatches tucked cards off other Critters in order to make itself more powerful! Fun Fact: This trick is shared by Seagulls, who as a group, like to snag things from other critters to perform effects, or buff themselves. The pinnacle of this is probably the Queen Gull.
Even the spells in Beach tuck cards!
Packing Up From The Surf and Sun
Of course, Beach Day is just one of the starter decks. If you find that tucking and untucking cards is a little too complex, you might have a better time growing and rearing mighty dragons with Dragon Hatcher. Alternately, if you really want to challenge yourself, you might be the perfect person to prune the twisting and tangled Homegrown garden deck.
Want to learn more about these other two? Keep an eye on the blog over the next few days.