The AmazingAmerican Circus Deeper Than I Thought

Based on the few trailers I saw for The Amazing American Circus, I thought I was going to be playing a weird card game about a circus. A good card game, mind you, but not one with monsters and fantasy warriors. Nope, just a regular circus troupe. But after getting into the game’s story, I realized it was so much more, for better or for worse. What do I think of this title – let’s dive in!

On the surface, The Amazing American Circus is a card game. You’ll use a deck of 15 cards to ‘attack’ those in the crowd, protect yourself, and much more. You are allowed to play so many cards per turn, based on your vitality level. After which, you end your turn, draw new cards, and see what type of damage the crowd is going to do to you. There are different types of crowd members and troupe members, all with different abilities and specific play styles. Having a good balance will allow you change up your troupe how ever you see fit. There are also side-shows you can incorporate in, as well as big finale performances, all of which manipulate the flow of the game.

And this card game works really, really well. I could wait to get back into the ring and ‘fight’ the crowd until I had obtained a good performance. But that’s not quite how it works. You also have a lot of management work to do as well. This ranges from typical card game things like buying or upgrading cards, but also extends further. You’ll need to setup your shows and wager how much you want to potentially make, offset by how much you can potentially lose. You have to feed your troupe between shows, deal with bad card effects, and so much more.

There is a lot going on between shows, and I feel it can slow down the experience just a bit. And these in-between performance tasks are vital to making sure your next performance is better than your last, and that money continues to flow in – so you can’t just ignore it all either.

Going into this one, you really need to know what to expect. It is a good game, and even the management aspects between performances is good…but it’s a lot to take in and could easily scare away those that don’t want to put in the time. If you are ready to make the investment, The Amazing American Circus will give you a ton of bang for buck.

Oh ya, one final thought – this is very much a handheld game. The text is incredibly small, so playing on a TV for myself was almost impossible. There are also times when the games musical score will drown out the voice acting, so beware of that too.