My kids are fans of The Last Kids on Earth, both in the franchise's book and Netflix animated series incarnations. We also spent a bit of time messing around with Outright Games' The Last Kids on Earth and the Staff of Doom dungeon crawler last year on Switch, but I figured that was pretty much a one-and-done effort for the Last Kids in video game form. So I was surprised to see that a new game, The Last Kids on Earth: Hit the Deck!, has been released on Steam. I was even more surprised to learn that this new game is a roguelike deck builder.
While still in early access, Hit the Deck! is surprisingly solid. I spent some time digging into the game today and was surprised to see that - while fairly forgiving - the game is built upon a pretty solid bedrock of strategy. Players can select their character, who comes with a few cards in their deck, and then add supplemental cards by equipping weapons and gear, each of which add mini-decks into your primary deck. When controlling two characters, each character has their own energy pool and decks to manage, with a few shared cards drawn during each round. Yeah, it's kind of easy going early on, but it seems as though it will ramp nicely in difficulty as the game goes on.
According to a recent PR email, there are over 60 unique cards per character in addition to all of the gear and consumables you can build up, showing that there is plenty of room for the game to accelerate in complexity. While I wouldn't just plop a kid down in front of this game and expect them to understand it, I do think that Hit the Deck! is probably a pretty good way to introduce younger kids to deck building mechanics. Just expect to guide them through it for a while, because the early access version of this game has a pretty steep on-ramp.
The Last Kids on Earth: Hit the Deck! is now available on Steam in Early Access for $14.99.
