It feels depressingly pointless to write a review for this game now that it's all but confirmed dead but I want to sing its praises regardless. Krosmaga is a remarkable card game that avoids a lot of the trappings of more modern design with a few cool tricks all while having an amazing presentation. One of the best novelties of this game involves the use of actual character sprites for their monster cards complete with death and attack animations. Of course, these are borrowed from the developer's other properties but it really helps selling its unique mechanic with lanes.

In this game, you have five lanes you can place monsters in with each creature having a different movement speed indicating how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the map. At the other edge of the monster summoning lane is a concealed Dofus egg which has a two out of five chance of being fake. This somewhat randomizes your efficiency on how fast you can steamroll a game. Even if things go perfectly optimally for you, there is a chance you are unlucky and picked wrong twice. You still get to unlock more lanes as recompense but it means you'll need to start the walk all over again while the opponent could have been finding their footing. Now, if the enemy is capable of retaliating, they can inadvertently tip their hand on which of their Dofus is the real one by how much effort they dedicate towards protecting it. On top of that, decks are restrictive in their size only allowing forty five cards with a cap on how many super rares can be included. This makes your dedication more noticeable and can even be used to bluff.

This combination between tactics, decks, and randomness does its best to keep the game feeling like a proper card game that doesn't get as bogged down with the higher levels of play. It keeps its whimsy that makes these kinds of experiences fun to experiment with to see new results. A system I quite enjoyed (later removed) was the ability to level up your super rare named characters up to two times each. This meant every special card you got could blossom into two more so long as you found ways to play the card. You even got to see animations of the characters in action if they were animated in one of their shows anywhere as a bonus. I was constantly thinking up new decks just to unlock new options later down the line. The leveling could be exploited by bouncing them back into your hand but that did not impact my experience.

All in all, I wish this game was still supported as I have never played something with such a commitment to the aspect of card games I personally enjoy. The controlled deck size kept the decks focused. The randomly decided objective positioning forced more uncertainty outside of deck shuffling. And the progression of your cards kept you wanting to invent new strategies whether or not you found the card especially appealing. For such a quaint little game in comparison to its contemporaries, I feel like it just scratched the card game itch perfectly in a way nothing else has.