Before I talk about SolForge Fusion, I want to talk about SolForge. SolForge was its predecessor. A digital-only card game that lived a brief 4 years, and then died. We should talk about why.
SolForge never had a problem being fun. Its core mechanic was, and remains, brilliant and simple. Here’s how it worked.

In SolForge, each time you played a card, it got stronger in future rounds. Decks were small, and every few rounds they’d shuffle all the upgraded cards back in.
This created a simple, but very exciting core tension: Playing the best card for the moment vs. playing a card that might be less ideal now, but was better later.
SolForge didn’t die because of bad mechanics. It died because it didn’t make any money.

But here, from the ashes, comes SolForge Fusion, a brand new digital/physical/web3 card game! Bringing back the traditional upgrade mechanic, it’s replaced its deck construction with a combo of KeyForge and Smash Up.
Gameplay
SolForge Fusion is played over four phases of three rounds each. At the start of each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then each take alternating turns, generally playing a single card into one of five lanes.

One player is given the forge to start, marking them as the first player for that round. They will play the first and third card of the round, while the other player will play the second and fourth (and final) card. Creatures played by the player with the forge are aggressive, meaning they will attack the turn they are played, while creatures played by the non-forge player will defend, but not attack. After one turn, every creature in play moves to the top of the lane and attacks.
If this sounds complicated, it boils down to: alternating first player, and since the first player is somewhat punished by the opponent getting to see all of their plays before combat, they also get to go on the offensive.
At the end of each round, players discard their unplayed cards and creatures slam into each other dealing damage equal to their attack. Unblocked creatures deal damage to the opposing player. After three rounds, cards are shuffled back into their owners’ decks, including upgraded cards, and the process repeats.
Whoever runs out of health loses, and if both players have health after all four phases, whoever has the most wins. There is a bit more to it than this, but this is the general loop.
So, is it worth playing?
Yes.
That’s a yes that I’m going to caveat heavily over the next few sentences, but I’ve had a lot of fun with SolForge Fusion. Specifically, a lot of fun I’ve had exclusively playing the digital version of SolForge Fusion.
I wrote about SolForge Fusion briefly before in 2022, but I was writing about the paper version of the game. To summarize my opinion from then: the game is simply far too clunky to play in paper. In digital, though, all of those issues are managed by the computer, so it’s a silky smooth experience*.
*Compared to the physical game. More on this later.
A second caveat is that I’ve spent most of my time playing the Roguelike PVE mode. It’s a sort of Slay The Spire thing where you pick a deck and fight through a series of enemies, culminating in a boss. While the content feels limited, it’s just very fun to play. Currently there are only 2 campaigns, and only one is free. The second costs $10.
But now that we’re talking about money, let’s talk about the in-game economy.
The in-game economy is a mess.
SolForge Fusion has Web 3 integration. Here’s the whitepaper. I got 3 slides in before my eyes glazed over, mostly because the first 3 pages are the exact same set of words, rephrased.
Side Note: The official position of this blog is that crypto can suck it. At some point I may clarify my position on this.
Now, you can ignore this and play, in which case… it’s still a mess. Even after playing for 18 or so hours, I haven’t saved enough gold to get one permanent deck.
There’s also a premium battlepass that comes with the second PVE campaign. I paid to unlock it, and then realized that the good rewards on it would require me to play 40-60 more hours of the game. Frankly, I feel like I got my $10 worth out of the campaign, not so much out of the battlepass.
It’s just a mess.
Side note: I posted about the grindy battlepass on the SolForge Discord, and the response I got was that it’s intended for long term players who have played the game a lot more than me. I understand that viewpoint, but I think it misses the point, because the end game track rewards are additional decks. As a new player, I would have liked to have more than 4 decks to play with, so that I can actually… y’know. Experiment and enjoy of the game. Which might have led to me playing an additional 40-60 hours. But given that really only have one deck to play with currently, I’m now a bit burnt out.
Bugs and Weirdness
As I was playing a few final games to put the finishing touches on this writeup, I played an online game where the server hit a critical error and crashed, kicking me back to the game’s login screen.

There are also a few goofy UI things. For example, when you complete a quest, it doesn’t auto-claim, so it’s possible to complete your quest and then forget to actually get your rewards.
Also, the store still has purchasable items for an event that already ended, and can’t be played further, so that’s great.
These things are small, but they’re part of a clunky experience that just drags things down a bit.
I’m sure some folks will defend the game by saying “It’s an early access alpha!” to which I say “It has a fully released cash shop that takes real money, as such I will treat it as a fully released game”.
Overall
SolForge Fusion is fun, which is a bummer because I still don’t feel compelled to spend any more money on it than the $10 I put in. Given that I may well be the patron saint of spending money on card games I don’t really play, that probably doesn’t bode well SolForge Fusion’s long term success.
One thing I didn’t touch on in this write-up is that the player base seems low. I didn’t mention it because it’s not really relevant. There’s PVE, and if the game detects that you’re sitting in the PVP queue for too long, it’ll match you against some pretty decent bots that count as players for the purpose of rewards.
So yeah. Download it. Play it for a bit.
Then just decide if you want to play more, or go do something else. I wish I could say that its fun gameplay will carry it to success. But there’s a lot of junk here, and quality is often no indicator of games’ long term profitably.