Last but not least, Dead Finger Dice
store.steampowered.com/app/3715330/...

Very weird Ballatro-like with cool pixel art and weird gonzo setting! The tutorial was a bit simplistic and at times confusing (mainly UI) but shows a lot of potential. If nothing only try it for some great weirdness.

Silver Blade of Gods' End
store.steampowered.com/app/2988490/_/

Japanese SRPG goodness, everything you want from a Fire Emblem-like SRPG is there. Including some 00's visuals and OST that rocks!

All Living Things! store.steampowered.com/app/3681340/...
Wow! One of the most visually stunning game I've seen lately. Simplistic puzzle game with inspiring poetic approach. Seems to be developed by Croatian studio <3

A must try!

Next one is Dragimon Dungeons store.steampowered.com/app/1330670/...

Interesting monster battler (has PVP), has some dice-based mechanics, elemental archetypes and I bet was inspired by good old Yu-Gi-Oh! Dungeon Dice Monsters. Demo was a bit buggy and tutorial could be better but overall good

Fun fact: I currently live in an apartment previously owned by him 🤣

His company in the 90s sold a lot of bootleg pirated copies of games from small central European developers (eurojank), some were even localized.
Here is the whole interview with the guy www.oldgames.sk/disc/rozhovo... (its in Slovak)

The founder was also an owner of a prominent local gaming magazine called Riki.
www.oldgames.sk/companies.ph...
One interesting fact is that the owner was the first person in Slovakia to be pardoned by the president for the conviction of piracy.

Oh and one more thing, there was a game called Fantasy Masters Arena - that was crowdfunded (thanks Google Translate), but seems like it didn't have a long lifespan.

All in all seems like the go-to point for anything related to Korean Fantasy Masters is this website fmlunatic.com
It even has the card Database! And apparently there are 15350 unique cards (this is reaching Yu-Gi-Oh! level), guess it includes also stuff from FanMade game.

There is also "the same game" or Fantasy Master-like called DestinyMaiden/DestinyMaiden 2 that is available on smartphones in Korea. Another spin on the OG formula.

Back to Fantasy Masters - of course the Korean community is keeping the game alive in some form. There is a so-called FAN-MADE Masters website that is a modern re-implementation of the original, it seems to have a lot of active players. Even the ongoing tournaments!

Similarly, the game CYBER ONE was an online TCG that used a combination of both physical and digital.

Naturally, my research led me to Japan and the arcade game Avalon no Kagi (The Key of Avalon) released by Sega. The game was played using physical cards placed on an arcade cabinet (similar to Data Carddass), and it supported multiple players. Later, it saw the Windows release (2010)

The latest entry into the Fantasy Masters series was Fantasy Masters 2, which was released for smartphones. I can't find any info about the game past 2012 (which I guess was the last year for the whole series and the company behind it)

The game was later licensed to the Japanese and changed the name to "Schmidt Diva"

There is very little information about the game on the modern internet, but the company behind the game (Zeonix) also presented a spin-off called Fantasy Masters Tactics in 2006 using the Culdacept TCG formula.

As my digging for TCG gems of the East continues. The rabbit hole led me to a Korean online digital TCG game, called Fantasy Masters, that ran from 2003-2008/9??? Which had an international release but was very popular in Korea with more than 1 million players and around 6k different cards!

Just another proof of how even the board gaming world is Western-oriented in the gaming news coverage. There are so many gems like this in the East. I always remind myself how DuelMasters is still big in Japan ❤️