Redemption CCG

Today's review is of the 1995-present release, Redemption. This Collectible Card Game is for 2-5 players and takes 30 minutes.

Overview

The harvest is great but the laborers are few. Can you do your part to rescue lost souls—and stop your opponent from doing the same?

In Redemption, you play with a deck consisting of heroes, evil characters, enhancements for both sides, and other cards (like sites, artifacts, or lost souls). Your goal is to rescue 5 lost souls from your opponents' land of bondage before they can do so. A simplified turn structure:

Draw phase: draw 3 cards (first player ignores this during their initial turn). Whenever you draw a lost soul, place it in your land of bondage and draw a replacement card.

Upkeep phase: complete upkeep actions, if any

Preparation phase: play heroes, evil characters, artifacts, sites, etc. from your hand to your territory

Battle phase: choose 1 hero (from your hand or territory) to make a rescue attempt on a lost soul; move them into the field of battle. your opponent may play an evil character (from their hand or territory) to block you. Each player may play enhancements to strengthen their character or negate effects/etc. (Note: enhancements must have a matching brigade, or color, to the character.) When everyone passes, the battle resolves by comparing strength of the hero to toughness of the evil character (and vice-versa).

- Battle outcome: if the hero wins (by beating the evil character, even if the hero dies too), rescue one lost soul and place it in your land of redemption. Otherwise, return surviving characters to their respective territories and discard all enhancements used during the battle.

Discard phase: you can play heroes, evil characters, and so on to your territory, then discard down to eight cards.

As you'd expect, there are plenty of special abilities that can negate cards, discard characters, or do other actions. Any special abilities on a character do not activate until/unless that character engages in battle. 

The below two graphics are screenshots from the quick start guide, showing card anatomy and field of play, respectively:

Turns continue until a player has rescued their fifth lost soul. They win! For more information, rules and guides has some helpful links (including this one-pager). The official Redemption page will point you to the Land of Redemption for more resources, to include set releases (each with a card list), resources (with rulebook, 'exegesis guide' or comprehensive rules, deck building rules, etc.), and more.

Review

Tackling any overtly religion-based game is difficult because of all the associations that come with it. Redemption is a mixed bag. To its credit:

- Each card has a Bible verse on it, exposing players to Scripture and its events/characters/etc. in a way that might 'make them stick.'

- The game itself is decent. It moves along quickly, drawing 3 cards per turn is cool, and there can be lots of twists (since there are no costs to play cards) in a given battle.

On the other hand:

- There is no cost to play any card. I think that hurts any collectible game, in the sense that there appears to be 'no point' to playing weaker characters once you get your hand on the stronger ones. 

- Some rules or game mechanics are unclear. There is no point to initiating a battle if there are no lost souls in play, but the rules mentions being able to do so. Why? I don't know. There are other examples; the answers are probably out there, but I'll have to dig into the comprehensive documents and see.

- The theology underpinning the game is (in my opinion) way off. For example, assigning strengths and toughnesses to Biblical characters, binning each as wholly good or evil, and having them in one-on-one battles introduces a host of inaccuracies. Also, playing both good and evil characters sets up this weird dynamic where you are both trying to save lost souls and prevent other people from doing the same (again, bad theology). I could mention more . . . 

I appreciate that the designers felt that a Christian theme would be wholesome. But (as I argue here in summary and here for games specifically) the content we consume is a little trickier than some believe. Putting a Christian theme on a game does not inherently make it good; in fact, it may make the designer's job harder, as you have to both design a mechanically sound (and fun!) game while being theologically accurate. I appreciate what Redemption is trying to do, but I think it misses the mark.

Rating: C+