Ultimate Card Games: The Best Of The Worst?

Yet another mediocre Nintendo DS card game, I hear you think! That’s almost right. This time, I have some good news: it’s slightly better than mediocre, go fish—no wait, figure! It’ll be the last one, pinkie swear. Ultimate Card Games from Cosmigo GmbH looks like another bargain bin game, but by the time they got this out in 2011 (after first releasing a version on the GBA), I can finally but still a little hesitantly say that I like winning tricks on my DS.

Contrary to 18 Classic Card Games, this collection is organized more akin to Clubhouse Games and Hoyle Card Games: you have your “classics” (trick taking focus: Hearts, Spades, Euchre, Bridge et al.—sadly enough, no pleasant Klaverjassen surprises here), your “casino” games involving the usual betting strategies, and the “solitaire”/“patience” variants involving Klondiking/Spider Solitairing your way to history. That’s 9 classic + 11 casino + 22 solitaire games for you—how’s that for counts, 18 Classic? In addition to starting a game from scratch, the main menu, you can resume any session from any type at any time, and there’s some basic stats to behold.

Let’s talk about the coolest aspect of the game: the presentation and the way you play against your opponents. As you can see in the screenshots, the upper DS screen is used to portray a 3D view of the play area, including your opponents. You can even adjust the camera to zip around the table and enjoy the kitchen, beach, bar, casino, Swiss Alps, or whatever the backdrop might be, of which there are nine available.

Now, the coolest thing is the visualisation of the card play. As your opponents play a card, you can literally see them dropping a card on the table (and the suit/value is visible and correctly transposed relative to the camera). The same card also appears on lower screen in a typical top-down fashion to more easily make out what’s what and interact with the table. This is even cooler in solitaire mode when you can see and interact with your tableau: moving a card on the bottom screen from one stack to the other also moves it in 3D space on the top screen.

The low-poly 3D models of the weirdos willing to play along are goofy and inject a tiny bit of personality, even though they don’t blurt out unique one-liners and their head bopping movement is limited and identical. Let’s just say that compared to the other DS card games, this is a major step up. And it better be, as Ultimate Card Games was released in November 2011 while the 3DS saw the light in March earlier that year. That’s probably the reason why I can’t find any decent reviews or information about the game.

Unfortunately, while you can pick who you want to play with, these opponents come with their own difficulty level that’s set in stone. Carl, Missy, and Peter are always the ones you’ll have to face if you want to play on hard. I don’t understand this decision to tightly couple the difficulty with the personalities. On easy and normal difficulties, the AI makes laughably bad decisions which can be especially frustrating when trying to score tricks in teams. That means you’re forever doomed to play with Carl, Missy, and Peter, which is just stupid because I like Mona more, but I don’t want Mona on my team as she buys my trick by wasting trumps.

The game also comes with more options than you’d expect: card faces and backs can be configured, table backdrops and environment, and even the text font. It seems that the developers tried really hard to live up to the game’s name. What’s even more surprising is that there’s internet play (dead thanks to Nintendo’s Wi-Fi dongle thing) and DS Wireless Play that still works!

In 2007, the developers laid the foundation for the scene 3D rendering in another collection called Solitaire Overload which is superseded by Ultimate Card Games on all levels. There’s little reason to explore it as most essential solitaire variants are included in Ultimate and it completely lacks any trick taking games. In 2012, they upgraded and ported the basis of Ultimate to the new 3DS platform in the form of Classic Games Overload: Card & Puzzle Edition. The result feels lazy: the 3D models look uglier and stiffer, the music and layout is virtually identical, and I don’t care for the simple puzzle and Mahjong additions. You’re better off just getting the DS card and playing that on your 3DS XL instead.

I’d dare to call Ultimate Card Games the best of the worst. If only the difficulty was configurable separately. If only I could play Whist or Klaverjassen. I wish Hoyle ported their stuff to the (3)DS but that never happened.