Overview

Richard Garfield (The creator of Magic the Gathering, King of Tokyo, Keyforge, Android Netrunner, etc. etc. etc.), you son of a gun, you did it again! You made me spend more money on one of your card games! And then the designer of the deck builder Ascension is involved in this too, Justin Gary!

But Solforge Fusion isn’t strictly a new game, its from a digital game that was discontinued back in 2017, brought to physical form with some new tweaks: like having pre-made decks (like Keyforge) that you combine together for one play-able deck (like Smash Up). When going into battle, you’ll have 1 deck of 20 cards, then 2 side decks of 20 cards each that will level up your cards as you play them!

Oh, and every starter kit you get of Solforge will contain slightly different cards, since they’re algorithmically generating decks. So your copy will not look exactly like the one featured.

How to Play

You’re trying to kill your opponent’s Forgeborn of 50 health before they kill you. To do that, you’ll be playing 2 types of cards from your hand, spells that just do something, OR creatures that go in one of the 5 columns to later attack your opponent. Each creature has an attack value, how much they attack for, and then a health value, for when they take attacks, and doesn’t regenerate.

The turn structure goes like this:

• Draw 5 cards

• 1st Player (has forge card) will play a card + free actions

• 2nd Player plays card + free abilities

• 1st Player plays card + free abilities

• 2nd Player plays card + free stuff

• Everything attacks each other

Back to just playing a card, you just smack down something from your hand- if it’s a spell, you do the thing. If it’s a monster, you choose a column to put it in. If you have the forge, you have to play in the front. If you don’t have the forge, you have to play in the back.

So front and back is important because only the front creatures will ever initiate attacks: and they’re the main way to deal damage to your opponent by attacking them directly. Of course to stop it, your opponent will put creatures in the same column, which in that case they’ll just fight each other, attack value will decrease each other’s health. You can only have one monster per column, and a monster cannot ever initiate an attack if its in the back. Since all creatures attack simultaneously at the end of playing cards, you’ll often see creatures killing each other off, some direct attacks to people’s lives, and some creatures surviving attacks with low health.

But then you see the little symbol that says “1” on the card pictured? Well this is where the LEVELING up system comes in, where every time you play a level 1 or level 2 card, you take the level card higher than it, and put it in your discard. Then when the current card would go away, it gets banished, or removed from the game. So when you draw this named card again, you have the higher level. The level 3 cards are single use: if a level 3 monster dies, it gets banished from the game.

The reason why you’ll see these ‘leveled up’ cards rather fast is because at the end of your turn, aka after you’ve played 2 cards from your hand, you discard your entire hand, pass the forge card, and then draw 5 cards from your deck… and once you’ve done this 3 times, you completely reset your deck, taking your discard, you know the one that has a bunch of upgraded cards, and shuffling it into your deck, then drawing 5 new cards.

Each of these instances of deck is called a ‘deck cycle’, where every time you do this, you level up your forge born, granting them access to that level ability: so if we’re at level 2 for our second deck cycle, we can use the top row ability as a FREE action, but you can only use it once per deck cycle, aka once within 3 turns.

Last mechanic to flesh out is the ‘free’ actions you can do your on your turn, before or after you play cards. Sometimes its just as simple as a card saying ‘this is free!” Others will be tapping creatures to use their abilities on the board. And then using your Forgeborn ability counts as a free action.

Last last thing, is that when you don’t have the forge, and then the turn ends to later get the forge, all of your monsters in the back row will get bumped up to the front.

That’s it! You keep playing turns of passing off 1 card each for 2 cards played, then fighting, then discarding your hand, and drawing a new one. This goes until someone completely dies, or you’ve done 4 deck cycles, then the game enters ‘sudden death’ where whoever takes damage first loses. There’s a LOT more to the game, but this will get you definitely enough understanding for now.

Pros

Cards feel great in the hand, which is a huge check for a CARD game. But visually, they’re also very easy to keep track of, like solid borders for levels, or smart symbols. Card descriptions are really easy to read (not like old Yugioh cards sheesh), with concise wording and generous use of bolded key terms. Then there’s some minimal flavor text for fun.

Then the Forgeborn card that you pass around, or flip around since you have 2 of them, is super clear to see. The mats also separate columns well.

So now we’re onto gameplay pros, and of course we have to start with the innovative leveling up system that is the standout mechanic here. Upgrading your cards by constantly replacing them in your deck makes you view a mage dueler in a completely new way, it’s almost like you’re deckbuilding as you play.

This adds a whole ‘other layer to ‘simply just playing 1 card a turn’, because now you have to factor in the card’s current usage, how it could get better later. The leveling up system can play with extremes, showing seemingly useless level 1 monsters for them to become huge level 3 things. Like there’s a level 1 dragon that’s hatching from an egg… can’t really do diddly jack. At level 2 it’s a good creature with reasonable stats! Then level 3: oh my goodness do 5 damage to all of your opponent’s creatures right when you play her!

But you gotta play around just playing that dragon egg early game before you can get the real dragon deal. You can only play 2 cards before everything attacks each other each turn, do you want one of those card drops to be a creature that just sits there with 0 attack?

Here’s a spell example: Necrovive, that forces your opponent to kill one of their creatures. Then level 2 is the same thing… but if they have more creatures than you in play, it’s free to play from your hand. Then level 3 is just ALWAYS free to play.

Did you see how the level 3 isn’t -that- much better than the level 2 Necrovive in that case? So there’s a flexibility in how to approach the leveling up system, where maybe during learning games you’ll initially always rush a level 3 dragon… but most of the time, leveling can be a lot more nuanced, especially because there’s only 2 card drops a turn. Maybe you’re ok with keeping on a level 2 monster and not rushing to hit level 3, because you want to upgrade your level 1’s to level 2’s for a more balanced deck?

Maybe certain progressions actually aren’t a good fit against your opponent, because they/re playing and leveling cards too! So as they also level cards, you’ll get an idea of what type of strategy, or deck they’re going for. If they are going for a bunch of minions, maybe you pursue counter minion cards to level those up! IF they like to play a lot of low health monsters, you could ramp up cards that damage every single monster on the board!

There is really SO much diversity in how to level up your deck, in really this pseudo-deckbuilding game, with ZERO duplicates in the game. There’s 20 unique cards, all with 3 different forms, making Solforge Fusion a game FULL of abilities and interactions, and here’s some more that really stood out:

• A Phoenix (Lvl 2) that if you keep it alive, will automatically become the level 3 Phoenix… and when that dies, it goes back to the level 2 Phoenix!

• A Palladium Pulsemage, where you tap her to make each player destroy their lowest attack creature… and when fully leveled up she kills off your opponent’s creatures for free!

• -A mage named Lyria, which when played, lets you play a random level 1 creature from your discard, which also levels that up! Level 3 lyria gets you any level 3 creature from your discard (get the level 3 dragon heh)

As you play and upgrade more, you’ll notice how cards start creeping into each other for nice little combos, and more details on that in our video below. You basically can trigger a bunch of free actions by fulfilling conditions on cards, sacrificing creatures, abusing your discard and banish pile… good card game stuff.

BIG shoutout to the game only letting you normally play 2 cards a turn, then discarding the rest in a deckbuilding system, because late game, it doesn’t punish people for drawing some level 1’s, as you might not even get time to play them. And even if you happen to luck into a bunch of your level 2 cards all at the same time during your second deck cycle, it doesn’t suddenly swing the game in your favor, because you still only have 2 normal card drops.

Plus, since level 3’s immediately get removed from the game after dying, sometimes you don’t use them NOW, because you wanna keep in them in your deck for later usage, which is gonna keep attentive opponents on their feet. Especially good for level 3 spells.

Then you need to play around your opponent’s Forgeborn too, and how they level up, because those will be free abilities that swing the tide. Solforge Fusion really has you play around the deck cycles of every 3 turns, getting familiar with what your opponent is shooting for, as you level up/deckbuild around each other.

There’s also positioning to discuss, of the 5 columns x 2 rows! You can’t normally move things that attack what’s in front of them, so you need to think about initial placement well. Or sometimes creatures HAVE mobility to move once a turn! Or there’s some weird abilities that reward you for playing in a certain leftmost area, or things that deal with adjacencies. And you can always ‘replace’ creatures on the board by killing them off for something in your hand, which makes columns not feel ‘stuck’.

We gotta really talk about playing stuff in the front OR back of the columns, because when you have the forge, AKA you’re the first player, you can only play in the front, when you don’t have it, have to play in the back. But then the forge holder switches as we’ve covered… which makes you approach turns differently based on how you have to position! If you have the forge, and don’t kill your opponent’s spawns in the back too, that could come back to haunt you. You can’t totally ignore them, but you have some more time to take care of them.

Then there’s 2 keywords that throw a wrench in all of this, Aggressive AND Defender. So Defender means your guy is ALWAYS in the back, which means not only do they never move up, but if you have the forge, you can play this guy in the back for some nice flexibility. And then Aggressive is vice-versa. This keeps positioning tense, since the person who goes last before you fight HAS to play in the back, to ‘balance out’ their final say. But then AGGRESSIVE gives them the final say with an attack! There’s the capacity to have a free attack on your opponent if they don’t manage lanes well, so if you have the forge you ALSO sometimes have to play defensive…

This starter kit also has some really good replayability, because even with the same deck of 2 mashed up decks, you get 2 Forgeborn to pick from every game, where the pick of one will alter your strategies. With ZERO duplicates, it really does feel like with each opening hand you are gonna start thinking differently, and having different level 3 monsters late game. And then you can always mix and match the 4 prebuilt decks for 6 possible decks.

Last pro is that the game runs quite true to time in terms of mechanics, though if your group thinks a lot the game can run a little over an hour. Creatures are constantly leveling up and getting stronger, meaning that an attack on your opponent’s life directly could eventually be a third of their health. Plus, your Forgeborn abilities tend to do a good job of having powerful swings (one can give a +12/+12 to a creature).

And then if those tier 4 Forgeborn abilities aren’t enough, the game immediately ends after that fourth deck cycle, so you just see who has more life.

CONS

This game HAS NO RULEBOOK. I REPEAT, SOLFORGE FUSION HAS NO RULEBOOK IN THE BOX.

Right when you open the box, there’s 0 rulebook, 0 pamphlet, rather you have to just search the game rules online. This feels INCREDIBLY rushed as a product, where they just wanted to ship the game out before the rules were cemented, so they just have you solely go online. This can be an incredible turn off, because a board game is literally just rules.

The online rules (as of January 2023) feel very minimalist that can confuse even veteran Card game players. It doesn’t explain deck cycles clearly, or how when things normally die, they actually go to the banished area (instead of the discard like most card games). This is really atypical for a card game and NEEDS to be stressed.

If you want more in depth, print-able rules… this is literally just a text document… which explains things fine, but come on, people WANT diagrams for examples. Again, this feels rushed.

There are gonna be some questions that we just couldn’t find the answers to, like:

1) Do Creature types have to match exactly the ability ask, or can it be a partial match? (e.g. Zombie Dinosaur and thing just talks about zombies).

2) When you negate a card ability, when it dies, can the death effect still activate?

We’re assuming no to both of these.

All you get in this box involving rules is this little reference sheet that explains some of the bolded content, as in less than half of them. And then there’s only 1 of these references for a 2 player game!

There is also NO included way to keep track of life points, which feels a little TOO minimalistic for a product… since that’s your literal win condition. Yes this can be a bit common among some card games, like starter kits of Yugioh AND Magic also don’t come with ways to keep track of life, but we’re reviewing this as a board game so it’s MISSING components. But yes, most people are going to use an phone app to keep track of life, I’m suspecting Richard Garfield did the same, but like, maybe that should be mentioned in the rules? Maybe something on the mats could have worked here too?

The mats are really rough, where them being paper mats are constantly sticking up and having cards not sit very well on them. Plus, the corners of the mat area literally cutoff, where it looks like they took the Kickstarter neoprene mat art, and just got off the edges to fit in this box.

The other components that aren’t cards aren’t much better either, like tiny little card-material discs to keep track of your Forgeborn ability that looks like garbage from a hole puncher and are hard to pick up. You should probably just rotate the Forgeborn after using their ability.

And then the little square cards they provided to keep track of health are thin and hard to pick up, and you can’t see them very well from across the table, they block a lot of the card, and when you ever rotate a card for whatever reason, the modifier can get confusing.

Problem is, Solforge Fusion is inherently a tricky game to play physically. You see, even if you provide your own dice, to keep track of things constantly getting buffed, damaged, or healed, attack and health go up AND down. So you’ll run into problems of forgetting whether or not something is up health, or actually down health. Ugh… this makes sense why its so fiddly because its based off a DIGITAL card game. If you play on the official TTS mod, having a modifiable number on top of each column to literally ‘click’ to go up or down saves a lot of headache.

Seeing as you can’t have a digital screen in front of each column in real life, 4 colors of dice is probably the best compromise. And we can see why they didn’t include 4 colors of dice, because my gosh that would be pretty expensive, dice are more expensive than cards to make. Or you could just suck it up and use the square cards.

Actually there’s more fiddly things about Solforge in real life, like how whenever you upgrade a card, you have to find and take that card from the separate pile to the left of the game, then put it in your discard. While this isn’t THAT bad once you organize the upgrade decks, it can cause some issues when you forget to upgrade a card, or forget to banish the lower card when it dies, and then you have to do some doctoring mid-game- oops I drew 2 copies of this card when I wasn’t supposed to.

Or how after the game, it’s gonna take a little bit more time to clean up the game, as you separate level 1’s from level 2’s and 3’s, and you’re probably gonna want to organize the upgrade decks at some point.

We have 1 actual gameplay con, with some issues of balance. So again, Solforge is going to have different decks in every starter kit, so your experience may vary. But to the side, we have the behemoth level 3: 30 health, 30 life, AND breakthrough (does difference between attack and defending creature health to opponent’s health), and cannot be affected by opponent’s abilities/spells (MTG Hexproof). This being played as a 1 card drop in a game where you typically only have 2 card drops, and can only be killed through direct combat is a stifling thing to play against. The idea is that the level 1 and level 2 versions of this should be ‘so’ weak to scale into this payoff, but something about the numbers still feels off. Maybe take off hex proof and some attacking strength if it’s gonna have breakthrough? Or lose breakthrough altogether?

For the most part, the game seems balanced, but this is a definite cautionary tale of what can happen when card design is a little too strong.