I.T. Kid

Monster Master is a two-player card battler from CrazyMonkeyGames, and the publisher's own description is a single sentence: "An addictive RPG card game. I wasted hours playing this!" The table is a board with a deck, a hand, a graveyard and a row of monsters on each side, and the deck is forty cards, built in the game's own Deck Creator -- it counts as you pick and will not let you out with fewer ("You must select 40 cards"), and it shows a deck strength so the two sides can be matched or deliberately mismatched. The cards are of two kinds. Some are monsters -- Dragon, Hydra, Golem, Cerberus, Vampire, Minotaur, Reaper, Death Knight, Ninja Rat and more, each with its own attack, defence, health and speciality (attacks twice a turn, steals life, kills anything it hits, takes no damage from a failed attack, immune to poison). The rest are utility cards, and the movie's own list of them runs from the plain (Fireball, Lightning, Ice Shield, Charge!, Heal) to the disruptive: Steal takes a card out of your opponent's hand, Forget makes them discard two, Black Hole destroys everything on the table, Necromancy empties the deck, hand and graveyard of every Skeleton at once, and Combine fuses two monsters that share a combiner symbol into a super monster. Monsters are not played and then used: a summoned creature stands on the table for a summoning time before it may attack, which is what turns the first turns of a match into a race to get something standing, and why Barriers and Shields are worth a card. The game carries a four-slide tutorial, a Player Setup screen that seats two humans at one keyboard or one human against the computer, and an adjustable thinking delay for the AI. Its own credits name the author: "Created by Matthew Stradwick".