I first started playing KARDS: The World War II Card Game shortly after it launched, in the midst of the 2020 quarantine. I had been expecting a way to pass the time, and found one of the best-designed card games I’d ever played. It takes the classic Hearthstone formula, swaps out fantasy for history, and adds its own twists on gameplay to create something that’s familiar but unique.

Time and commitments pulled me away to other things, but KARDS was always in my Steam library, calling out to me to come back. When the folks at 1939 Games offered some packs of their newest set, Homefront, to review, that was all the incentive I needed to jump back in.

If, like me, you’ve been away from the game for a while, I can assure you that it’s like riding a bike. Get a few practice games in Casual to re-familiarize yourself with the unit types, and it will be like you never left. In fact, I was shocked at how seamlessly I was able to get back onto the Ranked ladder. That’s clearly by design – KARDS’ standard format only allows the base set plus the latest expansion, in this case Homefront, so new, returning, and F2P-only players are never at a huge disadvantage.

There’s also a Classic format that allows everything, so if you’ve been in it for the long haul you can still play with cards that have been sent to the Reserves.

In fact, Homefront feels practically built to make lapsed players like me feel… well, at home. Its focus is on reinforcing the existing themes and strategies of KARDS’ playable nations, as well as offering new and exciting ways to interact with the base set cards that have been staples since launch. Homefront doesn’t reinvent the wheel; Japan still relies on aggression and sacrificial units, the Soviets still love tanks and tokens, and Britain remains a defensive powerhouse. They’re all just better at doing the things they were already good at.

I ended up getting a surprising number of Elites (the highest rarity) for the good old USA in my packs, so after grinding out a few drafts I put together a deck to try out Uncle Sam’s shiny new toys, with some French allies to offer support. America in KARDS has always played a bit like green in Magic: The Gathering; they take a while to get going (they didn’t join the war until the end of 1941, after all) but thanks to their ramp and high-cost heavy hitters they can be practically unstoppable in the late game.

The USA’s theme in Homefront is buffing units while they’re still in your deck, making America’s later cards like the B-17 Flying Fortress even bigger or turning cheap aggro units like the M8 Greyhound into actual threats. There are even cards that let you put units from your hand back on top of your deck, potentially buffing them and then redrawing them. It’s both potent and fun to play, and it’s kept in check by the singular new Keyword introduced in Homefront: Bond.

Many of the most efficient units in Homefront – in the case of the USA, the Magnificent Seventh and the F6F-5 Hellcat – have Bond, which requires that you have a unit on the field from the same nation at the start of the turn in which you play them. If you don’t, you take Morale damage as though you’d tried to draw a card from an empty deck – one damage for the first offense, two for the second, and so on. Violating Bond once or twice isn’t so bad, but any more than that and you’ll start to run into trouble.

While Bond is purely restrictive, it adds another layer to KARDS’ already-compelling deckbuilding. In the case of my own deck, I quickly found that my French allies were proving to be more of a hindrance than a help. As fun as it was to flood the board with Expeditionary Corps and fill my opponent’s deck with dead cards, it held my American units back and didn’t serve the deck’s main purpose of bringing big guns to bear. I ended up limiting my French allies to just the 2e RMT, a beefy Guard unit that would buff the Americans every turn it stayed in play, and that worked out quite well in conjunction with everything else.

KARDS might have a niche theme that isn’t for everybody – I personally grew out of my Hearts of Iron phase years ago – but it’s a welcome departure from the standard fantasy fare of most card games. More importantly, its rock-solid gameplay and set design is still some of the best I’ve seen, even ten expansions and nearly six years later. You don’t have to be a WWII dad to enjoy KARDS; if you want a fast-playing, free-to-play card game with fair monetization, it doesn’t get much better than this.

It also helps that the community is active, at all skill levels. It rarely takes more than 20 seconds to get a match no matter where you are on the Ranked ladder.

The launch of Homefront marks a great time for new and returning players to ready themselves for war. I’ll see you out there.

Disclosure: a free copy of this product was recieved for review.