Bandits are such punks.

There I am, minding my own

business as I mosey down a typical dark, wooded pathway,
when suddenly boulders start falling down toward my head
like Louisiana rain. Luckily I survive. But barely has the
dust cleared before I hear one of the morons asking his
buddies if I'm still alive, and after all I've been through
after goblin ambushes, plague-spitting rats, and grumpy
merchants it's just too much to handle. I jump up toward
them, prepared to teach them a lesson with the business end
of my axe, and you know what? I do. Acting out this
scenario, which sprung from a the hand dealt to me in a
virtual collectable card game, in real-time action gave me
more enjoyment than I would ordinarily have gotten out of
this kind of simple attack-and-counter combat.
It's a competent collectible card game on one level, yes, but
it's also an action-RPG with little sprinkles of choose-yourown-adventure stylings thrown in for good measure. The
key triumph of Hand of Fate is that, despite some
complications with the action, it manages to juggle such
motley components without dropping and shattering them
and the fun.
It certainly doesn't hurt that this world oozes with
personality, created by presenting a game within a game.
My in-game character spends all of my sessions seated
across a game table from a guy who looks like Richard the
Warlock from the LFG webcomic, watching as he throws
down cards with attractive art that draws obvious
inspiration from Renaissance woodcuts. He's there for the
duration, and it's a good thing that he's likable despite a

faint air of menace. Always quick to deliver a dour quip in

a sonorous voice ("For eons I have waited for an more
appropriate player; it seems there are more eons ahead," as
he says during a lull), he plays less like a Magic: The
Gathering deckmaster and more like a tarot reader,
revealing my fortune in familiar spreads like the Celtic
Cross.
In a sense, he is: his face-down placement of the cards
resembles the rough outlines of a dungeon map, and
progression hinges on moving a golden gamepiece from
card to card, turn by turn. It sounds a tad complex on paper,
but it's easy to learn the rules and quirks just by playing. It's
crafted so well that, early on, it does more to recapture the
open-ended nature of old pen-and-paper Dungeons &
Dragons sessions than games that bury you under arcane
stats and scripted scenarios.
At the same time, it usually works so well in part because
it's not completely random. My customized deck
determines the possibilities of each level, and it's stuffed
with cards for both weapons and encounters that I've won
from tokens awarded after victories in the roughly 10-hour
story mode. Early on I preferred the Helpful Priest card,
which grants blessings if you give the poor sap half your
food (the resource needed to make the jump from card to
card). At other times I might uncover the Winding Trail,
which might toss me into real-time battle for the chance to
win access to one of the weapons I'd woven into my deck.
It's a setup that would quickly grow boring and predictable
if left alone, but Hand of Fate wisely complicates things by
letting the dealer tossing in curses that sap life or food, or,
in his better moods, friendly priests that can undo the

damage. If there's a problem, it's that he's a tad too

generous for the first few hours, as food replenishes quickly
enough to make failure a near-impossibility. True, the Rock
Fall described above originated from his cards, and it could
have ended in death had I not drawn a "Success" card from
the four cards he slapped down in response. And then
there's the combat, which occurs when I reveal a card for,
say, Goblins, and the dealer draws a numbered card
specifying how many goblins I fight.
The system smartly relies on risks for rewards. You start
off with shabby gear with each "level," but opportunities to
pick up better stuff continually present themselves
depending on how you've structured your deck. Throw a
"Embertown Hero" encounter card in your deck, for
instance, and your travels might lead you to a dying knight
who offers to give you that godly frost sword you stuffed in
your deck if you agree to kill some random enemies for
him.
It's a shame the combat encounters never enjoy the same
sense of freshness of the card game that surrounds it.
They're certainly attractive enough, and they feature a hero
who looks like someone imported Ragnar from the History
Channel's Viking series into the world of Fable II. (Tough
luck if Ragnar's not your type, as customization's a
disappointing no-no here.) Considering how brief they are,
they're surprisingly visually diverse. Some maps feature
our cartoony Ragnar dodging flame throwers and spikes in
a maze; others have him bruising heads in a tavern or on
the outskirts of a primeval forest.

Again, though, it's the combat itself that sags a tad.

Consider it Batman: Arkham Asylum (or these days,
Shadow of Mordor) lite. Our hero uses the X button on an
Xbox controller to slash at the enemy, the Y button to
counter after the prompt appears (if you were smart enough
to stash a shield card in your deck somewhere), and the A
button to dash out of harm's way. And that's about it.
Sometimes I activated special abilities with the left and
right bumpers, but battles usually end so quickly that it's
rarely necessary save in the boss battles that cap each level.
Battles never deviate from this structure, and their
difficulty usually varies only in terms of how many
enemies are on the field (although this gets quite difficult
late in the game). If the dealer draws a Four of Skulls, you
can rest assured you'll be fighting four skeletons, who take
at most 30 seconds to kill. And so it goes on forever,
particularly in the tremendously replayable "Endless"
mode, which pushes you to outlast the dealer for as long as
you can.