A Slow Start That Ramps Up | Luxuriant Preview

There is an upcoming card game that takes a unique approach to combat. With a massive number of cards, you will send cards of royals to defend the regions from enemy invasions. Citizen cards can provide buffs, and weapon cards can deal extra damage.

We will be taking a look at Luxuriant, but instead of it being a full review, it will be a preview. Since the game will be launching into 1.0 in early March, certain aspects are bound to change. But until that happens, we will be covering the core gameplay mechanics that make Luxuriant a good game. 

Battles

You possess a deck of cards and are tasked with protecting your kingdom. Move to defeat minions and get to the big district boss. 

Let’s start with the easiest aspect of the game. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder. You start in a battle, and once that is finished, you have three stacks of cards to draw from for your next stage. These are Battles, Shops, and Bosses.

Battles are always the same format. You have your deck, filled with Royals, Villagers, coins, and points. Coin cards add money to your wallet, and points are added to your meter. This meter is how you win the stage, and each new battle stage will increase this amount. 

For the actual battle, you can move the villager cards into the “reserves” space. This will activate the passive effect. The royals can sit in that zone, but cannot attack. For that, they need to move to the “Promotes” zone. Each round, you can “buy” three cards for the “reserves” and can attack with one royal. One bonus is that time passes after each turn. If you win the battle before nightfall, you will get some more goodies. 

There is one more type of card, and that is weapon cards. These special cards can be used from the hand or either of the two zones. They tend to do more damage than royal cards, but decrease the points you have earned. A few of these cards also increase armor that, instead of hurting enemies, heal your royals. These cards can be used before attacking with a royal, and they will not end your turn. 

Wrapping up the battle section, note that when you attack with a royal, the cards go head-to-head and attack each other like many other card games. If the enemy had a higher attack power than your royal's health, your royal will die. Play your cards with care. 

You will find over thirty-five types of enemies that have over ten effects. The one that you will see most often is the rage meter. The meter will fill with each turn. Once the meter is filled, the enemy becomes enraged and will double their attack damage. 

Shops

If you have earned enough coins during battles, you can pick a shop card. This will take you to one of many different types of shops. 

The Tavern allows you to spend money to increase stats for your royals. Increase attack power, health, multipliers for points, and the point value itself. This seems to be one of the more crucial shops because you can regain health that your royals have lost in battle. 

The Chapel is where you can enchant a card with a random enchantment or debuff. A fifty-fifty coin flip can get extra coins for promoting a royal, or poisoning them instead. But don’t worry, if you accidentally give a royal a death sentence, you can pay to purify them. If you don’t want to risk your royals, you can look towards your weapons. You can enhance all Weapon cards to have damage dealers hit all enemies, and all health regenerations affect all promoted allies. 

The Blacksmith is where you can improve the strength of weapons and increase the amount of money and ten-point cards in your deck.

The Stockpile will need keys. Each key you have can open one of ten chests. If you find a pair of matching cards, they will get added to your deck for this run. Any new card you find here will not be permanently unlocked. 

The CrawlBox is the random chance final boss. Spend five coins to spin a slot machine and win more gems, a new card, or be forced to remove a card from your deck. Luckily, the removal of a card seems to be the only negative payout.

Bosses

When you are ready to take on the district boss, you will be facing one large card. The first one has no minions, but that can’t be said for bosses further down the line. You will not have the two zones from the battle stages; you will have your hand and one space to store a card. Once a hand is done, the cards will be sorted into three piles on the right-hand side of the screen. You can pay to bring back up to two cards for the graveyard each turn, so if you need to bring back a royal or a weapon, you can do that. This feature is also available in normal battle stages, but since that isn’t a super big deal there, it felt smarter to include this tip in the boss section of the episode. 

Bosses can be defeated in two ways. The first is the typical fill-the-points meter way, and the second is my defeating the card and banishing it. Just like the battle stages, when a card’s health drops to zero, it is banished. 

Bosses do not present a super hard jump in difficulty; you still have to initiate attacks. Since you can kill the boss and win, you can swing with weapons and win. The main issue arises if too many of your royals die and you can’t pull the remaining ones or weapon cards. Each turn, the boss will increase their attack power by one. This is an ability that all enemies have, and we will touch more on in the enemies section. So, if you have to sit there and pass turns, you run the very real and sadly common issue of running out of cards and losing by decking out. 

Card Packs

I mentioned that cards need to be unlocked. There are over twenty-five royal and villager cards, respectively. For those who care about the weapon, there are over twenty of those helpful cards. While in a run, you might add a new card to your deck, but it won’t be permanently unlocked and available for you unless you open it in a card pack. 

Every time you complete a run, you get gems for your hard work. These gems can buy three types of packs. Each has increasing costs and odds of getting a card for your collection.

If you pull a copy of a royal card, one of its stats will increase, but all other cards will be refunded for 100 gems. This means that even if you have all cards unlocked, it’s still worth it to pull packs to increase your royal card’s base strength.

2026 Roadmap

At the time of writing, we are in the 0.9 pre-release phase. Cards still have placeholder art, and a few concepts have yet to be added to the game.

The March 6th 1.0 update seems to be the only thing with a date in the roadmap. After the game’s launch, we can expect a 1.1 update bringing economy updates. What does this mean? Not sure, there are no extra details for any of these updates. I assume maybe something to do with the in-run money you get to spend in shops, or the amount of gems it costs to buy packs. 1.2 will bring a more advanced tutorial. I will say, this is a good plan. The original tutorial is a bit lackluster, and the battle mechanics in general left me confused and figuring stuff out on my own, so I’m glad they will help guide new players better. 1.3 is a hit or miss; they will be adding controller support. If you are playing on PC, this probably doesn’t matter, but if you are playing on SteamDeck, this obviously is a benefit. 1.4 will bring more localizations. At the moment, the game only supports the English language; the roadmap doesn’t say what new languages will be added. And the last update shows a teaser for a mobile port of the game. I do think this would play well on tablets and phones, but I do worry about the screen size to amount of stuff on the screen causing issues with seeing things clearly. You have to click on the cards, and it gives you a pop-up of what ability they have, so it might not be terrible on smaller screens, but I’m curious about how well it will translate to small devices. 

Final thoughts

This game has good potential. When I first tried it out, I will admit that it was rough. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I had a few cards to pick from, and I died quickly in each run. It wasn’t until I earned a bunch of gems and started ripping packs that I got a better chance. I started understanding the shops, I learned how battles actually work, and eventually, I really started to enjoy myself. 

I’m happy to say that I see potential. I still think that there are some things in the beginning that can be changed to help players get into the loop, because if many had my beginning experience, I can see them dropping the game and not coming back. 

I give this a 3.5 out of 5 stars. I see potential, but I can’t give it a high score at the moment.