A fun game, simple rules but engaging. Played it with my 7-year-old.

By this point just about every card game is a descendant of Magic: The Gathering, but thanks to the collectible card game bust, it's taken awhile for the market to muster up the courage to try again. The hybrid digital/card game is a new approach to this existing market, which takes the best of both worlds and combines them into physical and digital worlds. Lightseekers is the latest iteration of this new style of play.

The basics are the same as Magic and even Pokemon. Your goal is to reduce the opponent's health to 0. When you play more than two, you try to defeat your target on the left and defend against the enemy on your right. There are three types of cards: attack (to inflict damage), defend (to avoid damage or heal), and buff cards (to bolster attack/defense).

Curiously, cards are "turned" which sounds an awful lot like "tapping" that Magic: The Gathering claims is unique. The difference is that the cards can rotate 360 degrees, which can be a bit confusing when you see numbers upside-down on a card (because it does something when the card is upside-down but facing you). This can get confusing, as there's no limit to the number of cards in play or number in your hand, so you can have quite a few cards rotating at different rates!

The playmat, similar to Pokemon's playmat, outlines where to put your deck, discard pile, hero, items, and helps keep track of life. Each player has a hero card, a deck of 35 cards containing 5 combos and 30 action cards. These cards are divided into four categories (attack, defend, buff, and item).

Each round, players perform up to two actions (playing a card, using an ability, or passing) or play one combo card. These cards are fueled by energy similar to Pokemon and Magic's lands. Unlike those games, every card is a potential source of energy. This comes up when you play a combo card, which essentially requires you to sacrifice other cards with the appropriate combination of energy to fuel it. At the end of the turn you draw a card for every action (up to two) or one if you played a combo.

The factions are divided into Storm vs. Tech. Storm includes lightning, water and air elements. Tech includes explosives, mechanical, and time. There aren't really creatures per se other than heroes -- the players are damaging each other and their heroes.

On the one hand, Lightseekers has a more efficient card economy, because all cards pay for other cards. This keeps the game manageable despite the possiblity of unlimited cards on the table and unlimited players. On the other hand, the turning gets very unwieldy the more cards that are in play.

From an augmented reality perspective, the cards act as scannable objects that have a permanent place in the game. This makes the colorful art come to life, and in some ways makes text descriptions common to Magic unnecessary. This obviously has more meaning if you've got the toys affiliated with the appropriate faction.

Overall, the game is suprisingly self-contained. It's a fully-functional card game that saves the collectibility aspect for the digital space through its AR features, which means players only need to get the cards once (and can only scan them once), but given that my son constantly misplaces his Magic and Pokemon cards, that's just fine with me.

My wife and I really enjoyed this game; we were pleasantly surprised. It has great art, some relatively simple rules, and enough complexity and variety in the cards to keep games interesting. Add in the option to modify you deck's with booster packs and it's really great.

My shipment didn't come with a booster pack - everything else was included and it was in great condition. The cards were still wrapped in plastic and looked brand new.

I decided to try this out with a nephew of mine, and I personally thought this was a little more difficult than it had to be. That was somewhat surprising considering the fact that I have Magic experience and my nephew has Pokémon experience, and we both did get the hang of it quickly enough. Looking at it as a novice would, however, this seemed to be something I would deduct a star or so from.

My product also arrived mashed and messed up in transit, so that was a huge disappointment. I could not imagine being a player and collecting cards, only to have them damaged before they arrive. Interestingly, I could not tell if this was the provider that damaged them or delivery - the package was somewhat messed up, but the packaging inside seemed more damaged than I would have expected to find inside.

The application was a disappointment with this, and I deducted for that as well. It did not offer a lot and there were issues with it, to the point that I found myself not really wanting to mess with that portion.

That is kind of sad, too, because this has a good amount of "beginner" items to offer a new player. to note what was included, you have:
2 Intro decks include 2 hero cards, 10 powerful combo cards, and 60 action cards
Booster Pack includes 1 hero, 1 rare, 2 uncommon, and 5 common cards