Scrolls Review Scrolls, Mojang's new turn-based card battle game, is hard. Really hard. To put it into perspective I am an avid gamer and it took me three tries to get through the tutorial. The AI is absolutely amazing, it counters your moves and anticipates you so well that Normal mode is quite easily my equal and anything above that punishingly hard. However there is also the option to play real people. You ask to play over an IRC client. I wasn't able to test this out unfortunately because the only people who own the game are people who went to Minecon, selected people from the preorder list and anyone who bought a certain edition of PC Gamer magazine. To be able to spawn scrolls you require points. To get points you destroy scrolls. You can also swap scrolls for two other scrolls although you can only do one of these per turn. Each scroll is worth X amount of points although the amount of points it's worth has no relation to the amount you get when it's destroyed. Scrolls are also destroyed when spawned in the game. Points respawn every turn so you don't have to destroy too many to spawn basic scrolls. The highest amount of points I've spent so far is 7 and that was 2 more than I usually get. You also get lots of useless duplicates so you can get rid of them. The goal of each game is to destroy 3 of you opponent's five totems. Each has 10 health points not including blocking objects. There are 4 types of scroll: Creature - These are your attack force, humans, wolves, rats and bunnies (I know, I was surprised at this but don't underestimate them, they increase exponentially and pack one hell of a punch) Then you have structures. Some of these just block the opponents path but others give benefits to certain scrolls (Junkyard improves Rats) or buff adjacent creatures. While these block your opponents you can pass through unscathed. Then you have your indirect scrolls. Enchantments and Spells. Enchantments can be placed on your scrolls or your opponent's scrolls to buff or do damage to them. Take note that you can accidentally buff you enemy and do damage to you. This gives a nice realism to the game. Spells don't affect individual scrolls but give a boost to all of them or affect your totems etc. If you want to get better scrolls, you can buy them in the store with gold you get for winning a round. One good thing about this currency system is that if you have a lot of money to waste then you don't get an advantage over over players as you can't buy in game items or in game money with it. However this could change looking at Mojang's wish to eventually get "Auction Houses". While this suggests using in game money some gamers organise real money payments. Oh well. Once you have enough cards you can customise multiple decks and play how you want to play. Conclusion: Scrolls may still be in alpha but it is a well designed, well coded game with balanced gameplay and hugely challenging games. The graphics aren't perfect but they are fairly good. It has a nice store and deck builder for customisation. I highly recommend it to any seasoned gamer who doesn't rage quit at the slightest problem. Mojang has, in my opinion, hit upon another winner