[…]
Luckily, functionally-alright-if-sloppy-combat isn’t the only thing Hand Of Fate has to offer. I find that what drew me in wasn’t so much the brawling, it was the storytelling.
What makes Hand Of Fate’s narrative particularly neat is that it’s multi-layered. On the surface, the story that is going on is the ‘duel’ between you and the Nameless Card Master. The Card Master (who does all the talking) makes frequent references to the ‘stake’ and ‘the cost of losing’, and guesses at your reasons for playing the game. The surface narrative is that of a man gambling away something important — His soul? Nah, that seems too cliché — for the promise of undefined power. The Card Master, on his end, has a history of his own: he was a player of this game before he was a dealer, and the game is as it is now thanks to him — but not only him.
But beneath the surface of this ruling narrative, the cards themselves tell stories of their own. It’s outright mentioned several times that these cards are drawn from ‘your’ memories, that they represent significant events and places in your life that you are revisiting through the medium of the game. And Hand Of Fate cleverly handles these mini-stories, drawing them out over multiple cards and multiple play sessions by way of its deckbuilding and token mechanics.
[…]
