SANCTUM is an online card game in where you play one of the Twelve Houses. Your goal? Invade the opponent’s home base, called a Sanctum. You do this by casting spells, and advancing your armies on the playing field. But there are obstacles along the way: Mountains, desert terrain, enemy armies, and the opponent’s spells. Not to mention summoned monsters…

This game is similar to Magic: The Gathering in that you must have mana to cast spells. The major differences in this game and Magic are Sanctum adds a game board., and you don’t have mana cards. You must capture the towns that lie in your progress to the opponent’s Sanctum, which then can generate any of the mana types for any house, but once you choose, you can’t change the mana it will generate, and the other benefit of owning a town is that it produces recruits suitable to your House.

The Twelve Houses are: Justice, Body, Mind, Making, Unmaking, Hope, Despair, War, Death, Abomination, Nature, and Life. The six mana types are: World, Order, Mystery, Clarity, Strife, and Will.

The five different spell types are: Alteration (alters the recruits or mana generation), Manifestation (a variety of effects, from temporary mana gains to fireballs), Summoning (you guessed it–monsters!), Conjuration (enchantments that can affect recruits, towns, and Sanctums), and Hero (summons Unique characters–each with their own special abilities).

You start out as Unranked–meaning you can play, but you they don’t count in the overall ranks. Once you buy X amount of cards, you then become Ranked, and thus will begin the long climb to the top spot of Number One.

The Verdict:

So is this game fun? You bet! Can it get expensive in the long run? You bet! With the initial run, plus two expansions (Bloodlines and Oppositions) it can put a major dent in your funds. But with the power of trading, you don’t have to spend a lot to get a good deck. The citizens in the online community for Sanctum are in general quite helpful, but some are like sharks–if they smell a newbie, the challenges will strike you from all around. Accept their challenges if you dare, and for your sake, watch out for the following people: Fafnir, KennySP, Whammo, Dracha, Xerxes, Tupacalypse, Starsurfer, and anyone else with more than 20 wins. They are good, they will hurt you, but best of all, they will help you be a better player.

Of course, if your ranked while they’re “helping” you, it could mean that climb to the top spot will take a lot longer than you hoped…

“Graveyard” Greg is the unofficial Whipping Boy for Sanctum. He’s now waiting for his very own Hero card, and is pushing for the Gaming Outpost to be the thirteenth House.