*Advertising disclosure* - After this review was posted, Black Shell Media became an advertising partner.  This review is not influenced by this relationship.

Thank you Black Shell Media for sending us the review code.

On a rainy day at work, I was looking through my list of games to review for one that would be relaxing, not embarrassing to be caught playing, and able to run on my work laptop. Didgery met all three of these requirements and made its way onto my personal desktop and laptop systems as well.

Like many card games, the rules and concept is easy to learn, but hard to master. Your goal is to form descending chains of cards from the same suit. Aces are treated as ones and have the lowest value. Switching suits is only possible if the card is the same value.

Points are awarded for completed chains and the more cards in a chain, the higher score you’ll earn along with a nice explosion that clears away a portion of the game board. Chains can be as few as two cards, but you won’t earn many points for those.

Although the game keeps track of how many times the deck is shuffled, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many cards you can go through. There are two game modes, Zen and Nightmare. Nightmare is locked at first and requires spending time in Zen mode beforehand. Zen mode is relaxing and you can take your time and Nightmare mode is the opposite.

As you play though Zen mode, some cards with chains around them will appear on the game board. These cards can only be unlocked through significant chains of six or more cards, which is easier said than done. Sometimes the cards will reveal some lore which ties into the religious feel to the game. Most of the unlocked cards add gameplay enhancers like the Joker card which can act like a wild card at the end of a chain. Another handy card is the bridge one which will cross a gap to connect two cards to keep the chain going.

The better the chain, the bigger the bang; if you hear loud explosions, you’re on the right track. Though the sound effects are fitting, they’re rather generic and I’m sure I’ve heard them before. The background music is relaxing and perfect for this style of game.

By default, Didgery runs in a windowed 1280X720 resolution. However, these settings can be changed in the options menu though.

If you enjoy unlocking Steam achievements, this title has fifteen of them. Unfortunately, the Steam community is inactive with only a handful of forum posts with the majority of them unanswered. Since this is a single-player game, an active community isn't that important.

The gameplay is pretty clean as it merely consists of chaining cards together. There is some religious lore with parchments written by Axia that talk about Didgery the omnipotent.

If you enjoy calm (Zen) and frantic (Nightmare) card games, Didgery offers both for the reasonable asking price of $1.99. Since I have loaded this game on multiple computers, I appreciate the Steam Cloud saves that carry over my unlocked cards across all of my systems. As great as this game is for lunch breaks, it’s captivating enough to make you lose time playing so be careful!