A new set for Card Hunter - Castle Mitternacht - has been released:

Castle Mitternacht Launches October 28!

Our spookiest set yet lands in Cardhuntria just in time for Halloween!

We’ve been previewing and playtesting the Castle Mitternacht set for over a month now and we’re super excited to release it!

The new content brings fun new mechanics like transformations—Form trait cards that turn your character into a powerful creature of the night—silver damage attacks, and fun new toys for acid mages, melee priests, human warriors, elf wizards, and more! With 35 cards and 290 new items, we know the set is going to shake things up!

The new content will go live around midnight GMT on Friday, October 28. You can check the time in different time zones on our forums.

At the same time as we release Castle Mitternacht into the wild, we’ll be launching our annual Halloween festivities.

• Spooky ranked boards!
• Creepy limited release costumes in Cuthbert’s shop!
• A Halloween Shop full of cool trick-or-treat props!
• The five winning items from the Aloyzo’s Arsenal #14 competition will also be in the Halloween Shop!

Halloween content will run through mid November.

This release also includes a new Mauve Manticore (#20) with challenging player-made scenarios. If you beat them, you’ll win two player-made items, including the epic 3-Stage Rocket Boots!

For more information on Castle Mitternacht, including a full visual spoiler of the new cards, check this page.

Henriquejr spotted that Card Hunter is running a birthday party right now:

Card Hunter's 3rd Birthday Party!

Card Hunter is three years old! We’re throwing a party in-game, and you’re invited. Celebrations will include free leagues with special cat costume prizes and daily log-in chests. Additionally, the Loot Fairy—who has maybe eaten one too many cakes—will be spreading their loot-enhancing magic across all of Cardhuntria!

Special promotional leagues will be running all weekend. These leagues will be free to enter and winners will walk off with the hard to collect Kee-Tenh figures. For the first time this year all three are available: the cuddly Marroo, the not-so friendly Growler, and the wise Meowquith. The leagues in which you can win them will be Monkey Magic, Lost City Quick Draw, and Triple Duel. Kee-Tenh figures are not available in the costume store and have only ever been offered in our birthday leagues.

Quick Draw is a great way to try out multiplayer even if you’re not an expert as everyone drafts their cards for each match. You can be competitive without having an item collection or knowing what’s going on in the multiplayer meta-game.

LootfairyThe Loot Fairy has been gracing campaign play with their presence for a long time, handing out rare, epic and legendary items. Tracking the Loot Fairy’s location is a fun activity in itself but you don’t need to be on top of it to benefit this weekend as the Fairy will be waving their wand in just about every adventure!

The fun will start at 12am UTC/GMT on Friday the 16th and wrap up three days later. Some local times:

• US (PST): Thursday 16 Sep, 5pm
• US (EST): Thursday 15 Sep, 8pm
• Europe (CST): Friday 16 Sep, 2am
• Australia (AEST): Friday 16 Sep, 10am

From all of us at Blue Manchu, we’re really grateful to our players, and we hope you enjoy the festivities as we enter our fourth year!

Joshua Vanderwall (theEscapist) has reviewed the free game Card Hunter:

Card Hunter brings together a number of different systems for an excellent blend of genres and experiences, ranging from RPG progression to loot hunting to card-based combat. The game's story is an odd one for sure, as the narrative is predominantly a meta-story about an RPG group's campaign, the Dungeon Master's crush on the pizza delivery girl, and animosity between the self-designated DM guru and the new DM. Given that this was the focus of the most prominent character's dialogue, the depth of story that the dungeons have around them is seriously impressive.

[...]

Card Hunter is free to play, with currency (pizza) and content packs being available for purchase in game with real money. Its origin as a browser game is a particularly nice bonus, since even if you typically play on Steam, you'll have to log into the game's servers, where your save data is stored, which means you can pick up whenever you want from a browser, like, for example, if you're supposed to be writing an article at work, but there are goblins that need stabbing. The most recent content expansion is Expedition to the Sky Citadel, which brings an odd juxtaposition of the fantasy setting with a futuristic adventure, complete with relevant loot. There are even entirely new card mechanics involved, like laser weapons that can malfunction when you attack, as well as some entertaining cosmetic options, like a space suit-clad figure to represent your tank.

[...]

In short, Card Hunter is a D&D campaign run by a caricature of young Gary Gygax (at least based on my experience with the Dungeons and Dragons Online dungeon narrated by Gygax), with an hilarious metastory about the pizza delivery girl and surprising narrative depth in the campaign modules themselves, alongside a card-based combat system derived from the loot hunt that is integral to most RPGs. Also, it's free to play on both Steam and the browser.

Spotted by Eye!

Card Hunter is available for free on Steam today.

Welcome, bold adventurer! Card Hunter is a free-to-play online collectible card game which blends together card play, deck building, tactical combat and classic fantasy role-playing in a way you’ve never seen before. Grab your cards, miniatures, dice and snacks, then journey to a new world of adventure on the tabletop of your Game Master, Gary.

MMO-Play posted a short article for Card Hunter about custom scenarios.

For most online games, it's easy to put them in their prospective niche. Some games are pure action, whilst others are empire-building strategy games. However, there are some games that really make an unique impression every time you play it. One of those games is Card Hunter, a hybrid comprised of collectible card games and board games, all wrapped together in an old-school tabletop roleplaying vibe. The fact that Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, is a consultant to the game just adds icing to the cake. While the game features a single-player campaign mode and multiplayer PvP, it does have one feature that many browser games lack, the ability to create your own scenarios. To help familiarize gamers with this feature, let us take a closer look at using custom scenarios in Card Hunter.

Blue Manchu sent a follow up press release with information the expansion for Card Hunter: Attack of the Artifacts has now been released.

Card Hunter: Attack of the Artifacts Expansion Released

Card Hunter's first expansion, Attack of the Artifacts, is now available for play at http://cardhunter.com. Included are over 70 new cards, 200 new items and six new adventures as well as a brand new multiplayer league system.

Explore the mysterious Valley of Tezkal and collect powerful new cards and artifacts from the distant past. Challenge Sharkbears, Umber Bulks and other monsters of legend in fiendishly difficult new adventures.

In the brand new league system, play as monsters wielding devastating monster cards or use your multiplayer party to challenge others on radically new boards to win prizes including pizza, treasure chests and unique figures.

Every day during our launch week, simply log in to Card Hunter to receive a free magnificent artifact chest and try out the league system for free in Artifact Anarchy or Clash of the Geomancers.

Attack of the Artifacts is Card Hunter's first expansion set, bringing new depths to the game that was nominated for Best Debut at the Game Developers Choice Awards and accoladed as the most original game of 2014 by PC Gamer.

Watch the trailer here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lovZkod3eUY

Expansion details and launch specials: www.cardhunter.com/2014/04/attack-of-the-artifacts-launches-friday-25-april/

Find the game at: www.cardhunter.com

Watch a league game: www.youtube.com/watch?v=40ysxz4bEtA

Blue Manchu sent a new press release with information Card Hunter has received a new content update that makes the game bigger, and better.

Card Hunter Gets Bigger, Better with Attack of the Artifacts

Deep beneath the smouldering Black Plume Mountain, three sentient artifacts plot and scheme. Many are the terrible monsters that they have recruited to their cause including otherworldly Thought Munchers, baffling Umber Bulks and swarming Plant Pygmies. Yes, it's the Attack of the Artifacts expansion for the award-winning Card Hunter with all new adventures, cards, monsters and more!

Attack of the Artifacts also introduces organised league play where players can pilot monster decks and explore challenging new multiplayer boards to win prizes including tasty Papa Manchu pizza, treasure chests and unique figures.

Card Hunter's first expansion set launches this month, bringing new depths to the game that was nominated for Best Debut at the Game Developers Choice Awards and accoladed as the most original game of 2014 by PC Gamer.

For more details: www.cardhunter.com/2014/04/attack-of-the-artifacts

PC Gamer has picked Card Hunter as their Most Original Game of the Year.

As gaming genre boundaries continue to break down and old fashioned genre labels lose their relevance, designers are increasingly happy to collide once separate ideas into inventive new ones. None have done that with as much cleverness this year as Card Hunter, which fuses turn-based tactical combat with collectible card games, wraps it up in an endearing D&D homage, and then gives it all away for free.

Gamasutra interviews Jon Chey of Blue Manchu about launching an online game with a small development team. The game their refeering to is the recentlly released Card Hunter.

As a developer with a small team, what have you learned about launching an online web game?

I've been thinking about that in the back of my mind this week – how do we do this better next time? I don't actually know what the answer is yet.

We did do quite a bit of testing on this. We spent several months writing a test system. Our game is relatively simple to play, being a turn-based game – there are very few actions a user can take. We actually wrote bots to play the game. I don't think they can actually finish it, but they can certainly sit there and churn away at countless battles. We load-tested with thousands of bots playing the game.

For some reason of another, actual human behavior was somewhat divergent from the bots, and people were putting a lot more load on it. Obviously, there's no real substitute for having real people play your game. So you run a beta. And we did run a beta as well! We ran a six-month beta, but that was a closed beta.

So I guess maybe the lessons is we shouldn't have launched [when we did]. We should've gone into an open beta where we didn't really publicize it quite so much. We did two things at the same time. We opened up registration and we sent out a press release saying we launched, and ran a special offer on in-game items.

We did the traditional game launch, which is like a full-press, trying to get as much attention as possible in a short window of time. We picked a narrow window too, between PAX ending and Grand Theft Auto launching, when we thought press would have time to cover the game.

That's a very traditional game launch. And I guess that's not a good idea if you're a small developer. You can't pre-scale on the expectation that you might have 100,000 people who want to play your game.

PC Gamer reviews Card Hunter and awards the game with a final score of 85/100.

CH has but one fault that really irks me—there’s no cooperative mode. That’s a big irk. The story-based campaign, which feels so much like the tabletop games my friends and I enjoy on the weekend, is especially painful not being able to share. In a genre where the wonder of live creativity is so integral to the experience, playing alone sometimes feels like you’ve sat down to Thanksgiving dinner and suddenly realized you’ve forgotten the turkey. Everything else on the table is delicious, to be sure, but missing such an important ingredient leaves me still hungry even after the custom map pie. If Blue Manchu can figure a way to get co-op into this thing, they might just have the best board game without a board of the decade on their hands.

Game Informer reviews Card Hunter giving the game a 8.25/10 while saying it's "Much More Than Nostalgia."

Even with its frustrations, Card Hunter is easy to recommend to tactics enthusiasts. The charming nods to old-school dungeon crawls are spot-on, but the depth of the incredibly flexible combat system gives Card Hunter its legs. There’s even a well-designed multiplayer mode that lets you test your skills against fellow online players. The fact that Card Hunter is also a free browser-based game is icing on the cake, and a potent reminder that awesome games are cropping up in all sorts of unexpected venues these days.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a hands-on review for Card Hunter.

Card Hunter is an enormous, accomplished and complete game before a penny is spent. I’m excited to see it grow, even though I haven’t finished all of the launch content yet despite spending three days doing little else but playing. I haven’t had to grind either, although it is possible to replay adventures after a cool-down period. When I find myself struggling, I switch equipment and try again, and eventually, the breakthrough comes.

Every minute that I play, I’m considering options, cursing or cheering as cards come into play, and learning new tactics. Don’t stay away because its free-to-play – from the player perspective, this is the ideal of that model. I just hope it works as well for the creators as it does for me and that the generosity and lack of paywalls and nagging hindrances doesn’t prevent people from parting with their cash. deserve profit as well as acclaim, and Card Hunter is perfectly suited to expansions. I’d be happy if it kept growing for years.

By creating a game that mimics the tactility of a tabletop experience, Blue Manchu also present the rules of ever encounter and skill up-front, though without drowning the player in numbers and stats. Even the interface is commendable, quietly displaying the relevant equipment for each character class and inventory slot as the contents of treasure chests, inventories and shops are explored. It’s as good a turn-based skirmish game as I can remember any studio releasing in a good while, exquisitely presented and mechanically solid.

Softpedia has posted a new review for Card Hunter giving the game a 8.5/10.

Card Hunter uses a classic free-to-play mode, allowing anyone to simply jump in and create a party to try out the core systems.

At the same time, those who want more in terms of rewards and access to some unique adventures can pay for a Starter Pack.

Regardless of whether a gamer spends money on it or not, Card Hunter is a charming experience for those who love the genre and it can easily take up hours of gaming time day after day.

I have two new reviews for therecently released F2P Card Hunter.

Tech Raptor - 97%

I usually shy away from free-to-play browser-based games. Not because they aren’t good, but because they are so focused on making money, that monetization breaks the game. Card Hunter does an incredible job of bringing a card-based role-playing game and putting some monetization in that really only needs to be paid for if you want to do more than what the base game gives you. If you like strategizing, collecting, and role-playing, Card Hunter is the free game that will occupy your time for a long, long, while!

Leviathyn - 8/10

Card Hunter has only just come out of beta and so far there have been quite a few technical problems. The developers have been extremely responsive however, and the problems are all being fixed quickly. There is often someone in the multiplayer lobby chatting with players and helping to sort out any issues that anybody has. In a free-to-play game, it’s value is often in updates and continued maintenance and so far the dedication of the Blue Manchu staff is glowing. It will be exciting to see how they encourage the community to continue growing.

And for last a small  hands-on article from Rock Paper Shotgun.

I’ve played it a couple times in various states, and it’s quite fun. Strategic options are many and varied, and deck building is as utterly compulsive as you’d expect. The plot is also full of cheeky nods to tabletop role-playing, so you will be amused on all possible levels.

Card Hunter is free-to-play, with money potentially unlocking new characters and adventures individually. Alternatively, you can snag a “basic edition” for $25 or subscribe. I am curious to find out how all these various tiers affect multiplayer (if at all), but I haven’t played enough of the full release yet to find out.

Card Hunter is what you would get it you took the tabletop game turned it electronic, and added cards to it. The game is F2P so it wont hurt you to try it as it's available now from Blue Manchu.