By: Joseph Gil
There’s recently been some rise in downloads and even people who previously deleted it but now download it again due to its increasing popularity(including myself). What game am I talking about? Why is it so popular? How can you play it? Well you’re about to find out.
Clash Royale is a strategic game with medieval themed characters like the knight, the prince, princess, barbarians, royal ghost, golems, and for some reason characters related to electricity. This is not a: pick your character game. No, the way you pick your characters is they are actually cards, there’s 5 rarities of cards. Common, rare, epic, legendary and champion. And in those cards there’s different types of cards such as: troops, spells, buildings. The whole purpose of the game is you got three towers, the two princess towers and your king tower. The whole purpose of the game is to take down your enemy towers while you defend your own towers at the same time your enemy is doing the same thing. So not really that easy, you don’t have to take down all three towers but the way you keep up score is when the match starts and you have three minutes to take down a tower and get a crown (a crown represents the towers you’ve taken down) and if you outcrown your opponent you win. So if he takes your princess tower he has 1 crown now, but if you take both of his princess towers then you have 2 crowns, and you would win at the end of the match. If you take down the king tower then that’s an automatic 3 crown and you win the game. But getting to the king tower is not easy, the arena (the place where you play your cards) is divided by a lake and connected by 2 bridges one on each side of the arena. You can’t just put a powerful troop right on the enemy tower because there’s a border that blocks you from placing troops on the other side of the bridge. You gotta build a push or protect your win-condition. I forgot to mention that a win-condition is a card whose whole goal is to take down the tower, ignoring the other troops no matter if they deal damage to the win-condition the card is still gonna go to the tower. You can distract the win-condition of your opponent by placing a building such as a cannon or a tesla.
So now that you got the main idea of what clash royale is then it’s time to talk about their history. This game was launched March 2, 2016, globally this game really made the company supercell stand out for their innovative games such as brawl stars who was later released 2 years later. Clash Royale players didn’t really knew strategies at the beginning (not even the developers knew what they were doing playing cards randomly with no strategy whatsoever) but as time passed the game slowly started to add more cards, more mechanics, some changes, reworks and balance changes. You got the main idea of what this game is about.
Now this game was popular around the mid 2017 and early 2020 with the whole pandemic issue people found out about this game since they had nothing better to do. As the game progressed they sort of got a bit greedy and started implementing p2w (pay to win) offers. P2w means players who spent money on the game got an unfair advantage than the casual normal players. This was slowly taking over the mobile game industry. And for me I left the game in like 2021, I decided it was becoming too repetitive and didn’t find a reason to keep playing it, so that was the end of my era of clash royale (2017-2021). Once I moved to Iowa it was hard to know if people played Clash Royale without sounding creepy, so not really that many people to play it with. Fast forward Brawl stars was at its peak in summer 2023 getting collabs with godzilla, spongebob, toy story and now recently stranger things. But sadly as all good things in life, they have to end. You may have noticed how I said the peak of brawl stars WAS in 2023, well this is because from that point on brawl stars just fell down, lost a lot of players and content creators. Don’t get me wrong, the game is fun but I think maybe they override it with all the fun collabs and stuff that now they’re left with neutral stuff. Now back to clash royale, eventually a player realized. Hmmmmm now what else is a supercell game? And as if there was a sun shining right on top of the game, there it was Clash Royale. So the players who moved from clash royale to brawl stars, they now moved back again to clash royale. Now summarized players go on and off between clash royale and brawl stars. It’s all about what the cool kids play on their phones.