Not to be confused with Elder Scrolls, Scrolls is the upcoming card game from Mojang Entertainment (the folks who made Minecraft). They have been showing off bits of the game and the last time they showed off a large amount of it was at Minecon 2011 when Minecraft was officially released, but today they re-released the Scrolls website and with it came the first gameplay trailer and a lot of general information. This is a collectible card game that will have a single player campaign, several multiplayer modes, auction houses, over 100+ cards to collect and combine into your own unique decks. Many of these ideas have been done before in card based video games, but not all together in the same package. Before I go over some more details about the game take a look at the first trailer.


Even without the gameplay trailer it's a little hard to tell what the game is all about. From first glance it looks a bit like Heroes of Might & Magic combat mixed with the versus mode from Plants Versus Zombies, but thankfully it is more complicated than either of those systems. You summon units from your hand and put them into play on the board, as does the other player, and you have to destroy three of the enemies five idols. Each of these has quite a bit of health and all of your units will have various abilities and statistics. You will be able to bring in creatures, spells, enchantments, siege weapons and more. It is a pretty normal sounding system for a card based game, but if it has enough variety and balance it could create a good deal of options for each player.



Like everything loot related in the world of gaming each card in Scrolls will be of different rarity. You start the game a good chunk of the scrolls, but there will be plenty that you have to earn through multiplayer victories or through exploring the singleplayer world. With the gold you earn you can purchase scrolls and gear, but the gear hasn't been detailed yet. They are using a price model similar to Minecraft, in which they release the game to the public fairly early on, during beta, and rely on the community to help shape the game's future development. I don't know why I said similar to Minecraft, because that it is exactly the same. They haven't released the price yet, but if it the same as Minecraft it will be around $15.


Don't worry about the release of scrolls yet because it's not even in alpha yet. One of their first announcements on the new website is about the upcoming closed alpha and how they will be sending out invitations for that pretty soon if you had signed up for it before. Honestly I've seen no information on how to sign up for the alpha, but maybe it has to do with people who were at Minecon. The alpha build will not have all the games features and will be mostly about fixing bugs. It will however include multiplayer, singleplayer matches against the AI and the deck builder. Once the game get's to beta they will add more of the features and allow people to start purchasing the game at a reduced price, which will get you immediate access.

I'm glad they finally revealed a lot about Scrolls, but I'm quite worried about the game. Sure it's made by Mojang and people will play it just because of that, but so far it doesn't look to have anything uniquely special. There are a lot of people complaining about the game already, seriously look at the Youtube comments, but I think we should all at least give Mojang the chance to show how deep the card based system is and how much content there will be between singleplayer and multiplayer. It could end up being a great card based game, but we will have to wait and see. Thanks for checking it out and thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun for the heads up.
Main Website: http://scrolls.com/

-Written by Sean Cargle