CastleCombatTheGauntletJune2016Rob over at KidRealm has been busy. Not only has he released a new game, Emoji Zoom!, but Castle Combat has received a fairly major overhaul. A new 200+ card set has been released using the updated graphics of the last update, but also changing the structure and rarity of the cards. Now cards are divided between Common and Legendary. There’s different rarities for each type, but these two distinct types of cards make up the new deck format.

Called Half and Half, each 16 card Castle Combat deck can contain up to 8 Legendary cards, using only a single card for each Legendary. Commons make up the rest. Using old cards? That’s fine! Rare cards take up Legendary slots. Rule of thumb? Up to half of your deck can be Legendary. After that, the rules remain the same. No mixing Good Guys and Bad Guys, and decks can be 1 color or 2 color, and have neutral cards mixed in.

How do the new cards look? Really nice. They’ve come a long way since I’ve started playing Castle Combat. Card descriptions are now inside a bronze plate at the bottom of the card, and card numbers have been added to every card so players can track their collection. The new booster packs will contain 4 Common cards and 3 Legendaries.

Last, but not least, I had mentioned Emoji Zoom at the top of this post. These are a deck of round cards, each with an Emoji and a number on them. They can be used to play several games like a matching game, a dexterity tossing game, and more. My 6-year-old has been having a lot of fun with them. It seem Emoji are a popular thing at school right now, so the game hits the market at just the right time.