Star Realms Fits In A Jacket Pocket And That's The Whole Pitch

This lives in my bag, not on the shelf, which tells you most of what you need to know. Two decks and a stack of authority cards, small enough to genuinely fit a jacket pocket, and it hits the table anywhere there’s a flat surface and another person willing to lose fifteen minutes with me. One reviewer put it as the training game for deckbuilders, and that’s fair, it’s not deep in the way a longer engine builder is, but the core loop of buying from the shared trade row and attacking your opponent’s authority directly is immediately satisfying in a way plenty of heavier games take an hour to build to.

The physical scorekeeping is the one component I actively dislike, the little authority cards for tracking life total are fiddly and easy to knock, one reviewer said they just got rid of them entirely and I’ve started doing the same, a phone note works better than the cardboard. Beyond that the components are solid for the price point, the art carries real personality per faction even at this small scale.

It does get repetitive over a lot of plays, and a few reviewers flagged the yellow faction as clearly weaker than green, which tracked with my own games once I started paying attention to it rather than just grabbing the highest cost card on the row. It’s not a game I’d want as my only deckbuilder. As the one that comes with me when I’m not sure what the evening looks like, nothing else in my collection replaces it.

Four stars. Not the deepest thing I own, easily the most reliably useful.