Floppy Knights Builds a Tactical Deck of Cartoon Nostalgia

ign.com:

With Advance Wars Re-Boot Camp indefinitely delayed and a new Fire Emblem tactical game nowhere in sight for now, lovers of cartoonish tactics games would do well to pay some attention to Floppy Knights. It’s inspired heavily by both aforementioned tactics franchises, but is still wholly itself thanks to a whimsical aesthetic and the addition of a deck-building mechanic that throws in an element of strategic randomness to reckon with on top of the usual unit moving and attacking and objective completion.

Floppy Knights takes place in a mish-mash world of fantasy and 90s-era technology, and follows a teenager named Phoebe and her sentient robot arm Carlton. Phoebe’s ready to move out from her parents’ house and build a life of her own, but she’s also uninterested in most jobs and would rather spend her time doing cool science. So she creates a digital army of “Floppy Knights” named for the floppy discs they’re stored on, intending to use them for typical odd jobs. But she quickly winds up commanding them to fight off little armies of goblins and slimes causing problems for her neighbors instead.

On its face, Floppy Knights is a perfectly competent tactics game with an interesting spread of units, some challenging maps and enemies, and plenty of additional objectives for those whose strategic brains want a bit more. But what really elevates it is the way the deck building element interfaces with all the rest. Unlike Fire Emblem, there’s no dumping a pile of units on the field with built-in movement from the start. You need to make sure your deck is equipped with enough units to draw what you need when you need it, and you’ll have to stock it with movement cards too if you ever want them to get anywhere.

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