Draft Showdown

I opened this game thinking it was yet another auto-battler to watch for fun, the kind you start up and leave running while you do something else. Exactly three matches in, that idea was gone, because every wrong card you pick costs you in the very next round. In my fourth match I threw away a lead at the last minute by stacking more geese while my opponent quietly collected four sticks of dynamite.

Three cards, and the countdown at the bottom of the screen

Each round the game deals three cards and you take one, and every card is a small bunch of the same troop. One card gives three knights, another five geese, another just two sticks of dynamite. You only get a few seconds to decide, because a timer bar is always running at the bottom. Run out of time without tapping and the game picks for you, and it doesn't pick to please anyone.

Once you've picked, the screen says it's waiting for your opponent, and that's when you realize the other side is a real person, not a bot. My opponents had proper names, Bolt1984 one time, YakovQ another. They were weighing up three cards just like me; I just couldn't see theirs.

That's why the game needs a connection to play, and I tried cutting it to see how it would cope. The menus still opened and the shop could still be browsed, but matchmaking came back with a notice saying it couldn't find another player.

Two armies collide, and someone loses a heart

After both sides have picked, the troops line up on their own and charge, and you no longer control anything. Whoever wipes out the other side's troops makes them lose a heart, and each player only has five.

What makes the picks worth thinking about is that your old troops don't disappear after each round; they stay and pile up round after round. By round ten the two armies fill nearly half the field. One stick of dynamite landing in the right spot can blow away twenty units at once, and all you can do is watch.

My matches lasted about five to seven minutes, much longer than the quick-tap game the name suggests at first. To be fair, that's also why every match has room for a comeback: you can be three hearts down and still turn it around.

A level-3 knight unlocks a card level 1 doesn't have

Outside matches, the game has a collection of twenty-five troop types, but when you start you only have four unlocked, plus a spells section that's still locked tight. Each troop has its own shard bar; collect enough shards, pay some coins and it levels up, all the way to level fifteen.

Leveling up isn't just a few extra HP for show. Taking my knight from level one to level three nudged its HP from 95 to 115 and its damage from 10 to 12, which doesn't sound like much. But the real reward is somewhere else, and the game announces it with a whole screen of its own.

Level three adds a new card to your in-match draws, and that card doesn't add any troops. Instead it boosts every knight on the field to 150% HP and 130% damage. Draw it when the field is already crowded and your whole blob of troops gets a full tier stronger.

From then on, upgrades stop being cosmetic: they change the very deck you draw from each round. That's also where veterans pull far ahead of newcomers, not in how fast they can tap.

Trophies, arenas and the week-long leaderboard

A win is worth thirty trophies, and you need one hundred and fifty to leave the first arena, Frisky Forest. Moving to a new arena also changes the troops you can draw, so it's a milestone worth aiming for from day one.

There's also a weekly league that ranks players by hearts won, with a six-day countdown. Below the table is a strip of reward milestones with coins, gems and a few shard packs. I climbed to first place in the bronze bracket in my very first session, so this one is clearly meant for newcomers.

The serious ranked mode stays locked until you reach Commander level 30, so for the first few days it's just trophy climbing and the weekly race. The game also drops a free shard pack on a regular timer, which you open by swiping across to tear the wrapper, just like opening a bag of candy.

Gems are where the game really holds you back

Coins come easily enough: each win paid me about 124, and taking the knight from level one to level two cost only 100. What you're always short of isn't coins but shards, because the next level already asks for twenty while a win only hands back a few.

Shards come almost entirely from Bit Packs, and those are priced in gems, not coins. The silver pack at 100 gems gives up to fifteen shards, the gold one at 200 gives twenty-eight, and the diamond one at 500 gives sixty-five.

Meanwhile, the free gem supply is just 5 a day claimed directly, plus another 25 if you trade an ad view for them. That's thirty gems a day, not one more.

Do the division and it's obvious what's going on. At thirty a day you need more than two weeks of saving to buy a single diamond pack, and one pack isn't even enough to push a single troop to a high level.

If you'd rather take the shortcut, the Play listing shows in-app purchases from $0.99 to $119.99 per item. And that's before the three 30-day Passes sold separately, which come with double coins after matches, double shards in bronze packs, daily rewards and no ads.

The mod opens exactly that gem lock

Using it is almost surprisingly simple: turn on the switch in the MOD menu first, restart the game, then go to the shop and open the gems tab. There are six tiles with real-money prices there, and you can tap any of them directly. My wallet went from 0 to 200, then 1,200, then 29,400 after a few taps, and Google Play never once popped up asking for a card.

But a pretty number at the top of the screen proves nothing, so I went to spend it right away. Trading 200 gems for a bag of 1,000 coins made the coin balance jump by exactly that and the gem balance drop by exactly that. Buying ten diamond packs in a row poured shards into all four troops I owned.

With the shards I leveled up the knight, and that's exactly when the new card showed up in my next match. After fully closing the game and reopening it, everything was still there rather than rolling back. In other words, modded gems can be spent everywhere that bought gems can.

A few things to know up front so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• The three 30-day Passes go through a different payment flow, so tapping their buy buttons does nothing at all.
• Turn the switch on before you launch the game; if you turn it on mid-session, it won't work for that session.
• The mod doesn't touch the matches: you still face real people and still lose like anyone else if you pick bad cards.

What I liked and what bugged me

What I like most is the look: rounded art and clearly separated colors, so even with over a hundred units on the field you can still tell the geese from the knights. Decisions are quick but still have depth. You only pick one card out of three, yet you see the consequences in the very next round.

The annoying part deserves an honest heads-up too. Almost every free source of resources is tied to watching an ad: doubling your post-match rewards, refreshing the daily deals, the bonus shard pack.

Ads play normally inside VipMod, and watching one does pay out the real reward. But I did run into a playable ad with no close button anywhere, so that time I had to get out some other way and lost the reward.

The game offers twelve languages, and there's very little text in it anyway, mostly troop names and a few basic buttons. On Play it holds 4.3 stars from nearly 29,000 ratings and more than a million downloads.

So who should download it

If you're after a game against real people where each match takes only five to seven minutes, this is one of the easiest to get into right now. No endless skill trees to learn, no two hundred character names to memorize. It suits quick sessions while you're waiting for something, and the card-picking loop is addictive enough to make you go for one more match.

And if you installed it once and quit because you could never save enough gems to open a decent pack, the mod on this page clears exactly that bottleneck. With gems to spare, the twenty-five-troop collection becomes something you actually get to play with, and so do the fifteen upgrade levels, instead of being a chart you just look at.