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Card Hunter is a wonderfully genial sort of name for a video game - and the video game it belongs to seems suitably inviting, too. Blue Manchu's debut seeks to blend the collectible card game genre with the endless thrills of a good dungeon crawler, and if that doesn't sound cozy enough, it's also wrapping everything up in trappings that invoke the pizza-fuelled late nights of an '80s D&D session. I gather if you roll a double six, Judge Reinhold and Steve Guttenberg will appear and destroy you.That D&D element is worth dwelling on before we get into the action itself, in fact. Although Card Hunter plays out in a web browser, Blue Manchu's used every trick available to give proceedings a lovely tactile feel. Your cards are dealt and deployed with a sharp, papery snap, while the tokens that represent your band of heroes - and the ghastly horrors they encounter - are made of thick, chunky board, and are pummeled into oblivion accompanied by the colourful crashes and crunches of uncommonly vivid sound effects. The playing area, meanwhile, is another piece of card laid out on what looks like the family dinner table. Paperclips and many-sided dice can occasionally be seen off to the side, while vanquished units gather along the edges the longer you play. Best of all, the quests you go on are represented by cheaply-printed booklets, fronted with limited-colour images and suitably pulpy sizzle text. You can almost smell the mimeograph ink.
It's enough to convince you that you're in safe hands here, and it turns out, of course, that you are. Blue Manchu's a bit of a supergroup affair, as it happens, with team members that include Jon Chey, a co-founder of Irrational Games, Farbs, the genius developer of Flash oddity Captain Forever, and other assorted veterans of places like Looking Glass and Trion Worlds. It's not surprising to discover that Blue Manchu's director Joe McDonagh spent a few years looking after Jimmy Lightning and co. at PopCap, the masters of audiovisual feedback. Card Hunter's still in beta, which means it has a few rough edges, but the Peggle-like attention to the details that really matter is already clearly evident.
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