Hunting high and low

So SC has me playing the "free" web-based Flash game "Card Hunter" (www.cardhunter.com). It roughly equates to old-school "Dungeons & Dragons" meets "Advance Wars" by way of "Magic: The Gathering", i.e. dungeoneering rendered as 3D-ish turn-based combat where the available actions are the cards in your hand (from each character's deck). Don't worry, it works - after an intimidating intro, you're allowed to assemble a party from scratch and the clever control method soon becomes second nature. In the past few hours, my band of elves (all named after types of moss) have been rapidly clearing lairs, filling in the world map, blinging out their adventuring gear and upping stats. The looming question is how far I'll be able to progress without investing real money - and whether, when I reach that point, doing so will seem like a fair deal. "Card Hunter" gets a tentative 7/10 for now. It's definitely worth a look, for the retro art and deliberately dweeby humour alone.