Developer Frosty Pop has been entertaining the masses on their mobile devices for many years now, and more recently they’ve been focused on providing a number of titles to the Apple Arcade gaming subscription service. For their next game though they’ll be releasing it the old-fashioned way, and just like the rest of Frosty Pop’s library, this one features a clean and colorful visual style combined with simplistic but interesting mechanics. It’s called Deck ‘Em! and it’s a boxing game mixed with a card battler. Get it? Deck ’em? The idea here is that you’re just some random Joe off the street who gets an opportunity to fight the heavyweight boxing Champ. Your goal isn’t really to win, because obviously you’re too inexperienced for such a thing, but simply to survive for 12 rounds against the Champ and get as high of a payout as you possibly can. Yes, this is very much inspired by the original Rocky movie! Check out the trailer for Deck ‘Em! below.
I’m not normally a big card battler fan, but I do enjoy the ones that can keep things relatively simple and breezy, and this is the goal of Deck ‘Em! as well. It’s meant to be an arcade-style card battler with a short core game loop, with matches typically only lasting a few minutes each depending on how much time you’re taking to strategize. Frosty Pop also states that the game was inspired by the likes of other noteworthy card-based mobile game developers like Zach Gage and Arnold Rauers, and I have to admit it definitely gives me a bit of a Card Crawl/Thief vibe but with a ’70s era boxing motif. Though Frosty Pop does note that compared to those other devs, there’s probably “not as much depth I suspect" in Deck ‘Em! since “those guys are way smarter than me." Don’t sell yourself short, Frosty! I very much look forward to checking out Deck ‘Em! when it releases on September 3rd for free, and in the meantime the pre-order for the game is live on the App Store right now.
