A late night walk conversation got me thinking about this topic, so you get another journal post about card games. Skip if this isn’t interesting to you.

I was thinking that there’s roughly three types of card games, at least that are based on licensed properties. (We’re going to ignore games that have original properties, such as what Magic used to be, or the WARS or L5R or Force of Will games.)

The first is a card game that is designed for (and around) a specific property, and the mechanics and gameplay are so tightly integrated with that property that there’s no way you could separate them. Star Trek (particularly 1E) is probably the best example of this: You can’t slap something like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica on the engine and have it actually feel correct (because the primary goal in those games would be combat, not exploration of planets on a spaceline).

The Austin Powers card game is another good example, because it’s the right blend of absurdity and comedy on top of a spy theme that you couldn’t put on top of James Bond (for example). The original DBZ CCG probably also belongs in this group because, while the idea of controlling a character and playing cards to attack your opponents isn’t hyper-specific, mechanics such as powering up and gaining anger to level up are very much drawn directly from the IP and are critical to the game. These mechanics wouldn’t make particular sense with anything else. (And, of course, collect 7 dragon balls as the alternate win condition.)

The second is card game “systems”, such as VS System, QuickStrike, MetaX, or UFS/Universus. (Or, yes, what Magic has become.) Even if these engines start out as somewhat specialized, that specialization often gives way (probably thanks to financial pressures or incentives) to pulling in fairly unrelated properties. (And, of course, engines like Union Arena are just designed to combine whatever the heck they want, together.)

VS System and MetaX both started as superhero games. VS’ mechanics were somewhat superhero themed, but the general idea of “fighting other characters in formation” and “playing cards to surprise your opponents” were so general that they were able (in VS 2PGCG) to slap on arbitrary other properties such as X-Files, Alien, and even pro wrestling. MetaX had an Attack on Titan set that worked with the mechanics just as well as Superman or Batman did.

Universus is probably the most interesting example of this (and one that’s particularly near and dear to my heart, because it’s one of my favorite card games), because it started out very much with a fighting game theme. The attacks were fighting game moves (and special moves). Foundations were training the characters went through. Keywords such as “combo” and “reversal” were very much fighting attack mechanics. But the engine was so good that they soon started slapping just about every property onto it, such as Yu Yu Hakusho, Godzilla, TMNT, My Hero Academia, Critical Role, and Star Trek Lower Decks. The last one, in particular, is such a skin-deep layer on top of the gameplay that it’s funny to think about, but… that doesn’t matter. The game is great. People come for the game. The theme is secondary.

The third type of game is where (the majority of) the game mechanics are designed first, and then a property is slapped on top later. I don’t know of any direct examples of this, but there are enough games with fairly generic mechanics that I’m sure there were plenty of game designers with mechanics sketched out, which just needed some slight refining and theming when a company came along with an IP for them.

I would speculate that things like World of Warcraft and Bleach fall into this category. While I’m sure these games were ultimately fleshed out specifically for the properties, there’s nothing in the gameplay that ties them to those properties. “Control a hero and recruit allies to fight another hero, with a type of card providing energy to play other cards” is the basis of both games, and that description could easily work with so many other IPs.

In any case… I dumped a big update to my defunct TCG website today, and posted an unboxing video on YouTube. More videos (including an actual episode, with actual information about a card game) will be coming soon as well.

All of this has recently been supported by “Alan is playing lots of card games, including defunct card games, with bblum”. I’m so glad to have been able to get back into UFS/Universus, and I’ve been getting a good introduction (and exposure to) Netrunner, and generally there are so many card games happening right now, in the best possible way.

Go go gadget hyperfixate.

Life is amazing.

I’ve gotten pretty deep into the world of defunct card games. The number of writeups on the website grows by the day (yet still covers probably less than 1/3 of the games in my collection), and I’ve also started a YouTube channel to present the games more directly.

But in doing so, there’s a couple things I want to talk about here in slightly more depth. (With apologies to people who don’t care about defunct card games.)

First, I’d previously written about the change in starter deck configurations over the years. There does seem to be a general trend from “starters are fully randomized” for the 90s games, to “starters are fairly fixed” (around Decipher’s golden age), to “starters have randomized parts” (like which character is included) or are blind packed. And seeing all of this across games (and being able to write about it) has been fun. Especially writing about what this does to rare pulls from boosters, and how collectors (trying to get one of everything) would be impacted.

But I hadn’t realized how bad the 24 TCG had screwed this up until I sat down to actually write about the game… they combine the worst of blind packing with a randomized set of cards, utterly destroying the game for collectors. I’m still not over how much I hate their choice of product configuration. And I’m still not over how much the game got screwed over by the decisions of the marketing team. It’s actually a good game that deserved more love that it got.

I was also surprised how much the Panini version of the DBZ TCG felt good to me (from the standpoint of collecting), but was objectively not great. All starter deck cards were starter-only rarity? Great! (Especially after being bitten by Score’s DBZ TCG’s starter decks which yielded 12 copies of a single rare card.) But it only felt that way to me because I could buy an entire box of starter decks, guaranteeing all 6 different blind-packed starters. (I’ve also become very familiar with “the coupon collector’s problem”, which gives a way to calculate how many blind-packed decks you’d need to have greater than a 50% chance at collecting every deck. (For 5 different decks, it’s 12, and for 6 it’s 15. There is of course significant variance on that.)

Second (and speaking of DBZ), I’ve run into two sets of games now that have basically “revised” themselves into an entirely new (and significantly simpler) game: Star Trek 1E to 2E, and Score’s Dragon Ball Z CCG to their Dragon Ball Z TCG.

This is honestly something I’m personally familiar with. When I created the PPA Trading Card Game in high school, I did basically no playtesting, and threw cards out there with no regard for their impact on the game (which people did actually play, after school!). It was more just a fun thing where students could collect cards with their photos on them, and maybe on the side it was also a game experience.

This is how Star Trek’s 1E and Score’s DBZ CCG feel to me. They both seem like a product geared more toward “look at these great characters and ships or moves that you know!” that just so happens to have a game around them. Both games feel like they took a significant amount of time to find their footing and try and establish actual game rules. Both saw (against all odds, as far as I can tell) serious competitive and tournament scenes. Both had serious serious flaws, and overly complicated rules, and cards that are arguably well overpowered. But both also had a ton of love from players because they felt really “true” to their source material. 1E literally felt like being in an episode of Star Trek, with game rules drawn directly from how the Star Trek universe functioned. The DBZ CCG felt like playing a DBZ character, gaining anger throughout a (fairly haphazard and improvised) fight, powering up as allies gradually joined the cause and banded together.

After the PPA TCG died (because I graduated from high school), I had a few attempts to redo the game, prioritizing the gameplay first and foremost. A few attempts were too mechanics-focused (Student Wars had a primary trait that controlled everything about the character, and was confusing to players), but I landed on what I feel like is a reasonable balance with People Wars. It lost a lot of the flavor of the original game (you’re no longer raising your GPA to get a 4.0, and you’re no longer encountering all the little weird school-specific things), but it’s much more balanced as a game. And this is what it feels like Star Trek and DBZ did with their second versions (Star Trek 2E and the DBZ TCG.)

The remakes of both of these games (Star Trek 2E and Score’s DBZ TCG) are, in my opinion, significantly better than the originals. Like, there’s absolutely no competition. Both were clearly designed first and foremost as games, with well-thought-out card types (No more 20 card types in 1E! Separate ally cards in DBZ!) and rules and faction divisions (or lack thereof). Both had balance in mind when cards were being made. Both sought to minimize rule exceptions or special rules (such as around affiliation battling for 2E, or around critical hit effects for DBZ). I enjoy playing both of these games, 2E more than 1E and the DBZ TCG more than Panini’s (later) version (which carries over a lot of what made the original feel like DBZ).

And it seems like both were fairly universally hated by players.

No, seriously. I was trying to find players who preferred the remakes (like I did). The best I could find was questions from non-players asking about the differences. There are a number of videos from players describing why the remake is “bad”, and none of their points are objectively valid. (“They got rid of anger, which ruined the game!”… one mechanic does not a game make. “In what world is this easier to understand than this?”… it’s a much more concise representation of game mechanics that I greatly prefer over a verbose statement saying the same thing, as a gamer, because fewer words on a card is better. “No more separate spacelines”… yes because that game mechanic was unnecessarily burdensome for no good reason.)

So the reaction was baffling to me until I stopped and thought about it some more. The biggest thing is that, in both games, the new games were fully incompatible with the old cards (which was, of course, a necessity if you’re completely redoing a card game’s rules). 1E and DBZ players were upset their existing collection of cards (and the real money investment that represented) became useless (and allowing some 2E cards to work with 1E didn’t help that concern). Both sets of players also felt like the new games no longer captured the “feeling” of the properties. It didn’t matter that they were better games. The players didn’t care about the actual gameplay as much as the community and “feel” of the game. And the players in both cases felt like the new games ruined that feeling. (Which, to be fair, they did, dropping the faithfulness to the source material in favor of being easier to learn and more balanced.)

In the case of DBZ, you also get insight into what happens when the company reverses course. The subsequent Panini (who’d purchased Score’s assets, and therefore rights to the original game) version of DBZ (also called a TCG, confusingly) says it’s compatible with the original CCG cards. It’s not, really (at least not without a set of hybrid rules and a bunch of special cases)… but that acknowledgement seems to have been enough. The remake seems to have done pretty well with players before Bandai took back the IP for their Dragon Ball Super card game and killed it for good.

But in general, this project has gotten me back into my old collection of games in a way that just feels really good. I love spending days digging through binders and boxes, and taking photos of things, and writing up thoughts on the history and starter deck compositions. It’s also meant I’m starting to play some of these older games again, which has been a lot of fun.

Another perk of my time being my own, rather than belong to a corporation, I guess. :)

Life is amazing.

Recently, my high school friend David said he was trying to play some TCGs to learn mechanics as inspiration to design a TCG. If you’ve followed my journal at all, you’ll know I collect and play a bunch of defunct TCGs.

The collection has grown since the last post:

In any case, this felt like a perfect opportunity, so I sent him some (lots) of game decks and rules and materials for his research.

The time I spent pulling together the decks (and, in some cases, building decks, as I didn’t have any handy) brought back my many-years-old desire to start some sort of blog about defunct card games. In particular, I’ve always been fascinated about the composition of starter decks for various games (Are they legal decks? Is a single product for 2 players? Do they include extras like booster packs? Are the cards in the deck randomized? Are the cards in the decks starter-exclusive? Are fixed decks identified on the pack or “blind” packed?), and it’s been interesting to see how the older TCGs mostly had random cards, and how that’s changed with more recent TCGs to include fixed (and often starter-only) cards.

In any case, I’ve started the blog here, on my TCGs site. It currently includes my favorite TCG (.hack//ENEMY) and one I know very little about (Super Heat), and I’ll be adding more from my collection over the next periodoftime.

At some point I might want to record some gameplay videos or such to add as well, but many of these games already have a good number of videos available on youtube, so that feels less critical.