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About the Team
Manacaster Games is a privately-funded game studio studio focused on game balance systems, core gameplay loops, and building scalable technology architecture. We were founded in 2019 by a group of life-long gamers who wanted to build better games with good underlying fundamentals. The team is based in Portugal, with an city center office in Lisboa and an olive orchard office in Ribatejo.
We designed the Manacaster card game because we wanted to explore fresh angles in the “strategic card-battle” genre. We’re all veterans of existing board games, card games, and video games, but nothing that existed at the time was something that we could easily share and play with our nerdy friends.
About the Game
Manacaster is a precision-balanced, non-collectible tabletop game with a free-to-play digital twin. We elected to make our base game available in non-randomized packs to ensure that players can always access to ready-to-play decks. The market for collectible and tradable games is already well-served by existing games and making our game collectible would only complicate our final product.
Each card in Manacaster represents an equal balance of Costs and Benefits. Costs are usually paid with mana, but some cards also require you to pay in blood; by losing precious Life points, discarding cards from your own hand, or even destroying your own units!
We use a bunch of mathematical equations to calculate the power level of each card to ensure no individual card is “just better” than others. Instead, each card must follow a series of mathematical and logical criteria before being accepted by the design team. A card that is “unbalanced” by even a small fraction of 1 mana will be rejected.
Because all the cards are joined together by the same underlying equations, applying balance changes and updates is a simple matter of updating the underlying balance math.
Skeptical about a mathematically-balanced game with over 500 cards? Join our alpha test crew and try to find the overpowered strategies our designers missed! We triple-dawg-dare you.
Launch & Release Dates
Digital Alpha starts Jun 1st.
Gamefound campaign for printed decks opens July 1st for 30 days.
Gallery of Cards
Browse the card gallery here.