Ironclad Tactics

Ironclad Tactics is a mix of real-time strategy and card games. First, you choose twenty cards to form a deck. The cards include fighting units (mainly giant robots or American Civil War infantry), tactic cards (which affect, for example, unit movement), weapons (to be placed in the robot's hands) and other parts which affect unit health, speed or attack values. Then you play a map with those card. A map consists of five straight lanes where you play your units, usually at the left side of the map. The units walk towards the right, shooting at enemies as they move; if an unit reaches the enemies' side of the screen, it scores VP (Victory Points) to its owner. Whomever reaches 8 VP first wins.

During the battles themselves, at any given time, you have five cards to choose from. In order to play a card, you need to spend AP (Action Points), which are slowly replenished with time. In some maps, you can increase the AP replenishing rate by holding strategic positions in the map. But there is a catch: as time passes, your cards continuously scroll sideways. If a card leaves the screen, it is replaced by a new one chosen at random from your deck. You almost never have enough AP to play your whole hand, so the game becomes a hectic affair where you must make quick decisions about what cards to play and where before they vanish from your hand.

As you win missions, you are rewarded with graphic novel style cut-scenes which tell the story of an alternate American Civil War with giant steam powered robots, and you unlock new cards. Cards are also unlocked by reaching special goals within each map.

The game also has multiplayer modes: a cooperative story mode and two competitive modes.