A Little History

SpiritWars premiered in 1998 on WON.net, Sierra's now defunct online game service, and when WON was purchased by the Flipside network and was merged into their casual game service, Randy Chase, the developer, decided to keep it going, running it himself. The game's enthusiastic fans followed him off the service, and have kept it going ever since. Now in version 3.0, it's been iterartively developed over the years until it now contains a veritable wealth of different 'spirits' and maps, and has become a highly polished, smooth-playing game. This is, of course, one of the advantages of this kind of online game; it gets better with age and polish.

Astral Masters is a fantasy-themed trading card game (TCG). In other words, it's something like Magic: The Gathering, albeit simpler. It has two big things going for it: First, the interface is slick. Unlike some digital TCGs that try to replicate the tabletop TCG experience too closely, it's easy to figure out what each card does and how to deploy it effectively. Second is the price--a mere $20. Magic Online charges you by the card, and your cost can accumulate pretty rapidly; many other TCGs also have a "boosterpack" or subscription model. For a reasonably low, fixed price, you can play Astral Masters forever.