Verses of Enchantment review

There’s a lot of negativity in the gaming community surrounding the use of AI in game development, and for the most part I understand why that’s the case. When people think of AI being used to make games they think of writers being replaced and art being stolen, and let’s face it that’s horrible. There’s scope for AI to be used for good though, no matter how hard it is to see it happening. And so I present my (as far as I’m aware) first review of a game in part created with the help of AI, Verses of Enchantment.

Merle is the son of a magician who discovered a great secret in the field of spellcasting, and after his dad rocked the world of magic he went into hiding and started a family. Now fully grown it’s time for Merle to head out on an adventure of his own, and continue in his father’s footsteps. This means wandering the land in search of other magicians and duelling them to gain their knowledge, in badass poetry battles.

Yes, in the world of Verses of Enchantment magic is cast by calling on the power of words. Words in this game take on the form of cards, which you can use three of each turn to try and lower your opponent’s health. Your more basic cards will just have effects like “deal 10 damage” or “heal 10 health”, but there are also damage over time status effects, cards that prevent your opponent from healing, and cards that help you draw more cards to choose from next turn. It’s fairly standard combat for a card game, but is perfectly enjoyable.

What makes these duels different to other similar games though, is that when you play your cards for a turn an AI generated poem is written. These poems are honestly pretty impressive, if a little dusty and old fashioned. Each of these poems will be packed with keywords that fall into a selection of different types, such as gloom, nature, and ego based on the cards that made them. The amount of these you get is random each time, but using these to your advantage is important if you want to win your duels.

As you build your deck on your adventure (more on that later) you’ll probably want to fill it with specific types of cards that take advantage of the poems you’ll write. Some cards will deal massive damage if you have a load of nature words in your last poem, or others will cripple opponents with nasty status effects for multiple turns if your last poem has the right mix of word types. Because of the randomness of these keywords, there’s a little bit of luck to take into account when planning your next move if you want to dominate the competition.

Each time you beat an opponent in Verses of Enchantment you’ll be offered either some cash or a card from their collection. You can only have fifteen cards in your deck at a time, so carefully putting together the right pile of cards is an intricate task and cuts will have to be made. Collecting cards is also how you progress in the game, with a certain number in your collection needed to move onto the next chapter of your adventure.

This is where my biggest issue with Verses of Enchantment rears its ugly head. Because beating opponents to get cards is how you progress, the best way to move on to the next chapter is battling the same people over and over again until they have no cards left. This gets old pretty fast, especially against easier foes.

To find the different rival magicians you need to learn from, you’ll have to wander around the map that’s made up of a set of locations joined up by roads. Moving across one of these paths uses up a ration, so there’s an extra element of buying food you’ll need to worry about too. Each town on the map sells rations for a specific price, and this changes every few days. You can sell your rations in these towns too, so as long as you buy low and sell high you’ll have plenty of food to keep you going on your adventure.

If these extra food management and exploring elements don’t appeal to you, there’s also a more straightforward gauntlet mode you can play that puts you against back to back opponents with new cards to build a deck with as you go. There’s also a versus mode where you can play against the AI or a friend with any decks you craft on your adventure, which is a really cool feature.

Verses of Enchantment is an interesting deck building game, which uses AI and poetry in a really unique and very thematic way. The campaign does have a few issues with repetitive battles and the poems themselves aren’t exactly Wordsworth, but if you’re interested in playing a card game that does something completely fresh, then grab your quill and get the rhyming couplets ready.