Clutchtime: Basketball Deckbuilder review for PC

Pretty much everything you need to know about Clutchtime: Basketball Deckbuilder is literally right in its name: it’s a deckbuilder, but rather grinding your way through dungeons you’re playing basketball. It’s hard to think of a better description for the game than the one developer Bigosaur put in the title.

In other words, you know exactly what you’re getting with Clutchtime even before you play it…sort of. Because even if you have the “what”, the other question is “how” – as in, how does basketball translate to cards? And the answer to that question is “surprisingly well.”

Or maybe it’s not all that surprising. After all, as a certain variety of sports nerd could probably tell you, tabletop baseball and basketball games have existed for decades. So all that Clutchtime does, really, is take that very old formula of rolling dice and assigning actions to the outcomes and update it for a post-Slay The Spire/Balatro world.

Even if the idea isn’t new, it’s still impressive how Clutchtime works so well. As you’d expect from a basketball deckbuilder, you have all the actions you could imagine in a game – from three-pointers to defensive strategies to shot clock violations to crowd roar boosts – and it’s up to you to figure out how to chain them together while also respecting a game clock that ticks down with every move you make (unless you play, say, timeout, and freeze the clock to get more stamina). Like any good deckbuilder, you also have to defeat enemies, except in this case it’s not robbers or ogres, but opposing teams. While it’s not quite a one-to-one comparison, it still translates very well.

And once you start playing, Clutchtime also eventually gives you plenty of different options for how much you want to play, ranging from a quick tournament to a full season, with a wide range of difficulties for each. Annoyingly, you need to unlock each new difficulty level by starting at the bottom and working your way up, but there’s a wide enough range of outcomes in every match and every tournament that you’ll never feel like you’re playing the same game over and over.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Clutchtime, though, is that you don’t need to be a basketball fan to enjoy the game. I’m sure that would help, but really, as long as you like deckbuilders, you should definitely give this one a chance to see how broad and varied the genre can be.

Bigosaur provided us with a Clutchtime: Basketball Deckbuilder PC code for review purposes.