Dave's Transformers Game Rant

     Transformers Battling Card Game

     Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Artifacts/BattleCard

     "The fate of the universe...in your hands!" reads the copy under the
game name.  This is a two-deck dueling game from Milton Bradley, which should
be hitting stores soon, but I got impatient and bought it on Amazon.


CAPSULE

     Battling Card Game: Okay little duelling game, but not expandable.  Art
is lackluster, and the rules are divided up awkwardly.  Mildly recommended.
$7.99 at Amazon.com.


RANT

     Packaging: This comes in a two-deck cardboard box in movie trade dress,
showing Prime and Megatron fighting over a planetary orb that's starting to
come apart at the seams.  5" (13cm) by 4" (10cm) by 1" (2.5cm), you're likely
to find it either hanging from a peg (the usual Target means of displaying
smaller card games) or in a spring-fed rack (Wal-Mart, K-Mart).
     Inside, the two decks are cello-wrapped in standard deck of cards
fashion, and the instructions are a folded over booklet on top of them.  Each
deck has 63 cards, three of which are blank on both sides save for the word
"discard".  I guess their packing systems require working in chunks of 63.
The cards themselves are on the flimsy side, especially compared to the usual
CCG card stock.  Shuffling them makes me feel like I'm about to bend 'em in
half. 

     Appearance: Each of the 55 cards in the battle deck has a half of a
faction logo (left side of Autobot, right side of Decepticon) on it, so you
could lay two cards side by side and get a Sideways combined logo.  The backs
are red for Autobot and purple for Decepticon, so easy to avoid mixing up the
decks.  Each deck also has five "Victory Point" cards used for keeping
score.  These have different backs (whole, if small faction logo and "Victory
Point" printed on them) and numbers 1-5 on the fronts.
     The battle cards are split into two types.  The regular ones have a
number across the top, art (either hand drawn or a very good cel-shaded style
CG piece) of the attack in the middle, and the name of the attack at the
bottom.  There's a lot of 1's, many 2's, a few 3's, and very few 4's and
5's.  All cards with the same value have the same name and art.  The special
cards, only used in the "advanced game", have their names along the side
rather than bottom, and mostly don't do direct damage (except for the 6 point
Final Attack).  While names sometimes differ, both decks have the same cards
in a mechanical sense.  Cards that specify an opponent always talk about the
other deck, making it awkward to extend the game to add other characters (not
that MB is really big on expansion sets).
     Interestingly, the first card in each stack (a 1 point attack) has a
serial number on it.  11140781CD1 on Prime's, 1140781CD2 on Megatron's.  This
serial is not present on any other card in the decks.

     Rules: This is, at its root, a modified "War" cardgame, where high card
takes the hand.  Win two of three hands in a round and you get a victory
point, win all three and get two victory points.  You only have 7 cards to
get you through all three hands (barring some cards that let you draw up),
and have to lay down your initial cards for all three rounds at the start.
     In the basic game, all the special cards are removed, and you only play
additional cards from your hand in the event of a tie.  In the advanced game,
you can keep playing cards until you decide you've hand enough, or win the
hand.  Thus, it's possible to overcommit in winning the first hand, and lose
the other two.
     It's kinda hard to figure out the whole rules on first reading, because
the advanced rules don't include anything that's also in the basic rules, but
the basic rules have elements that aren't used in advanced (it's noted, but
it's hardly the smoothest read!).  One of the unclear things involves playing
of extra cards to try to win...it seems like you can only play a card if
you're behind (or tied), but can play as many as it takes to get ahead or
into a tie.
     Anyway, in the advanced game, there's one little filip that balances out
the extra power of the special cards: if both players have specials as their
starting cards, they negate each other (regardless of what their rules text
would have been) and count as zero, forcing players to play from their hand
to have a chance of winning the round.  So, dropping Final Attack (which
requirs discarding your entire hand) as a face-down card can be dangerous, as
it can be totally negated (at least you also don't have to discard!) by an
opponent playing a wimpy special.  Keep in mind, since Specials other than
Final Attack have no value, the only reasons to play any other Special are
specifically in the hopes of countering Final Attack, or playing attrition
(i.e. Block the opener, sacrifice a round to get to draw two cards, etc).
Also, in the event of a tie, players play cards simultaneously, and specials
can cancel out then too.
     The game is recommended for ages six and up, and once they figure out
the rules, I suspect kids'd enjoy it.  For adults it's a tad simplistic, but
has enough twists to be worth trying a few times.  Also good for a quick
"pull out and play between events" thing.

     AI Rules: Here's how I tried to run solo play.  Opponent plays their
face-down cards randomly from the hand, without you looking at the hand at
all.  You play your first three normally, before looking at opponent's hand.
Then, if at any time the opponent is behind, you look at their remaining
hand.  If one card can bring them into the lead, play it.  If not, concede
the hand.  Also, opponent will only play two cards total in the first or
second hand, but will then play everything on the last hand.  A "Vehicle
Escape" (concede) will be played as the second card if possible, and will
never be played on the third hand.  When an opponent has several good
options, shuffle those cards and pick one at random.

     Dave Van Domelen, played a game using AI, and it went okay.  AI lost,
but never got swept in a round, and did win one round.