Hello and Happy New Year everyone. Welcome back to ZAM's bi-weekly column, The Free Agent. Our mission in 2014 is the very same as it was in 2013; to answer the question "Can gaming REALLY be free?"

We finished off the year by joining with the rest of the ZAM team to award the Free Agent Game of the Year. Check out Episode 18 if you missed it. Another big congratulations to our winner, The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot.

To kick off 2014 I decided to cover a Trading Card Game (TCG) that I picked up over the holidays. I was looking for something casual to play in between family get-togethers and the like, and Ubisoft's online TCG Might and Magic: Duel of Champions fit the bill rather nicely.

If you haven't heard of Cryptozoic Entertainment's new TCGMMO, HEX, I recommend right now that you go watch its video on its Kickstarter page.  HEX, Shards of Fate is the next step in making MMOs outside of the traditional avenues.  Cryptozoic asked itself why no one has combined the Trading Card Game and MMO genres before and answered its own question with a new game that it took to Kickstarter on May 8, 2013.  This title quickly hit the front page of Kickstarter, and many gaming news sites.  However, the excitement didn’t stop there, with HEX skyrocketing beyond its original goal of $300,000, to over $500,000 in just a week; the money continues to flow long past the asking price.