Berserk (card game)

Berserk is a Russian collectible card game of fantasy combat, created by Ivan Popov and Maksim Istomin after they were inspired by Magic: The Gathering, and first released in November 2003 as the earliest domestically produced collectible card game to reach the Russian market. Two players build decks of thirty to fifty cards, with no more than three copies of any single card allowed, and take on the roles of dueling wizards called Ungars who command armies of creatures across a six by five grid battlefield. Combat combines dice rolls with basic strikes, special abilities and careful positioning of pieces on the grid, and a player wins by destroying every creature in the opponent's army. Published by Hobby World, the game reached a peak of more than forty thousand active players during 2008 and 2009 and was stocked in more than three hundred stores by 2005. The original line was discontinued in 2015 and succeeded by Berserk: Heroes, before the core game was relaunched in April 2023 with revised rules and card backs incompatible with the earlier edition; by early 2026 the rebooted version had grown to seven expansion sets.