SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
There I am, sat in front of my opponent. Our eyes meet over our hand of cards, as he begins to take his turn. He calls out his house, “Dis,” which rattles in my ears like the toll of a bell.
We both have two keys forged and I am sitting on twelve Æmber; he is on five. How can he stop me from forging my final key on my next turn? Unfortunately, he has his Lash of Broken Dreams readied. I still have a chance though: I have three Æmber surplus so can still forge. He then plays Charette (“Play: capture 3 Æmber”). It's OK, I think to myself, I have five house Shadow cards and a house Brobnar card in my hand (this will be explained later). It may take another round to win, but that’s OK. He then plays Control the Weak and chooses house Logos. I have no Logos in my hand. I can't play any cards! I sigh, screaming inside, and remind myself that, as much as my inner rage is running riot at this point, it’s just a game. And standing up and punching a 10-year-old boy in the face is not socially acceptable. The game I am speaking of that holds my heart and twists my cajones is Keyforge. The Fen Orc has already blogged about this, but I would like to embellish on this a little more. For those that are unaware of the game, this is a collectable card game (CCG) of sorts but with one big difference. In traditional CCG games, players would either buy booster packs of cards or, in the living card game style (LCG), an expansion set. This would increase the cards they own and allow them to keep up-to-date with the game meta (meta is the current ruling and card text of the game). They would then build a deck with said cards and either play casually or travel, to their local gamestore or nationally, for competitions. Keyforge has turned the CCG/LCG style game on it’s head by being released as a stand alone game with unique decks. A unique game, bah, mummble, I hear you mutter. What 'unique' means is exactly this: each single pack of cards is sold as a constructed deck, which has been created by a computer algorithm to be, well, unique. The deck also has its own name, which is printed on every card, stopping players swapping cards in or out from other decks to construct their own deck (although on all forums and groups you will see a lot of CCG players who are trying to do exactly this). The starter set has two pre-generated decks for learning how to play the game. Funny story regarding the algorithm: the deck name is supposed to slightly relate to the houses you have in your unique deck. Unfortunately, at the start, the algorithm needed a little tweak, as some decks being created were named with slightly offensive and sometime racist words. These decks were quickly classed as illegal, although a side market for these has grown, but I digress. Each deck will contain twelve cards from three out of the seven 'houses' (there are 7 at the time of writing). The fire giants, goblins and monsters of Brobnar; the demons of Dis; the forest creatures and magic-users of the Untamed; the scientists and tech toys of Logos; the thieving pixies and elves of Shadows; and the Martians of, well, Mars (chances are a million to one, they said). Unlike other CCG and LCG games, instead of attacking a player, trying to reduce the opponent to a certain health level, each player is trying to forge three keys, which is done by obtaining Æmber. How is this mystical bug-sticking, dinosaur-DNA-holding juice created, I hear you say? Well sit back, sir, and enjoy your cocoa and I’ll begin. Æmber is produced by playing or using cards. In a round of Keyforge, a player will generally have a hand of six cards. The active player will start the round by announcing what house they will be playing. During their turn, they can either play cards, discard cards or use already played cards of that house only (although there are card effect and actions that counter this rule). To score Æmber, players can play cards that give Æmber, use cards (which are generally creatures) to either fight another creature (some creatues have effects to gain/remove Æmber when fighting), they can use a special abilities of creatures called actions or they can reap. When a creature reaps, they score one Æmber, although some effects can increase this. In your turn, if you reach six or more Æmber, you declare 'Check' to inform the other player that, at the beginning of your next turn, you will forge a key. If the other player cannot reduce your Æmber below six (or increase the key cost above the Æmber that you have), you must forge your key. The race is the first to three keys. That’s it! Well not quite! There are many more rules and many more keywords you will need to learn before playing your first game, but they can all be found here, along with erratas since the game was released. So why do you love this, you say? Well let me tell you a tale and the Hobbit-style walk that got me to where I am. My routes generally started in RPG games (Warhammer, Mage, Shadowrun, to name a few), but when some members of the party couldn’t make the session last minute, we would bust out a board game to fill the time. This lead to playing more and more board games. I had dabbled a little with Magic: the Gathering (MTG), but never really strayed from the original starter decks I purchased, being a poor student and also living in the middle of nowhere with few travel options. A few years later, a couple of my friends convinced both me to try a LCG called Doomtown Reloaded, where Cowboys, Indians, magic, steampunk and circus sideshow freaks all met. While playing this casually with a friend on a weekly basis, we found we would build decks that could beat each other's current deck of choice. After about a year of playing (as it wasn’t a bad game by any means), we both decided not to put anymore money into the game and call it quits. Move on a couple of years and another group of friends (you can see I buckle to peer pressure) convinced me to try Star Wars Destiny CCG. This turned out to be a great game and most enjoyable with an added bonus of dice to roll! I was even convinced to go to a local game store (Comic Culture and Games Store, Lincoln) and play Lo and behold, I didn’t do too bad with the deck I had built. All the people playing at the store were really friendly. I had seen a lot of vitriol and elitism from some of the MTG community (I hasten to say not all of them!) and I was worried that competitive players would be the same. So I kept attending the competitions and got to know a few faces, but learned quite soon that, unless you wanted to try your luck with boosters or pay through the nose for top tier cards on auction sites or Facebook groups, playing against people who did was quite difficult. The other side of the coin was the ability to use net decks. Net decks are decks that exist online on a card storage site and have been shared for people to try. Many of these are created by the top level players and will get notoriety by winning big competitions. People will then build a deck to match these and may tweak them slightly to suit their playing style. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but you see a lot of these decks at competitions, which can cause over-saturating. Two things became apparent to me from playing Destiny. One being: I am cheap and I don’t want to buy the expensive cards but instead I tried my luck on boosters to build my own decks. Two being: I suck at deck building. I mean, I’m really awful. I loved playing Destiny but if you were too cheap to copy other decks and had no talent at making good decks, you’re going to have a bad time. Then a whisper came on the air of a game where the deck would be constructed for you and the price of a deck would be less than £10. I was interested but also hesitant. I followed the reviews with interest and it all sounded too good to be true. Then the chance came to go and try the game in London at a pre-release show. The day of the ticket release came round and it was limited to sixty five seats and tickets were limited to two per person! I set my laptop up to try and get a ticket for myself and a friend. I logged in to the site, refreshed the page, but in less than a minute all the seats had all sold out. Luckily a few seconds later, my phone pinged with a message saying, “I got you a ticket chump”: the friend I was trying to buy the ticket for had also had been trying and had scored two tickets successfully. A victory dance commenced. Every day more and more people in the Keyforge event were posting the decks they had received from pre-release events all over the globe and all I could do is sit their and dream of what my first deck would contain. The event came round and I finally got to play the game. My first deck was called “Wretchfire, Cavern Slayer” and contained Brobnar, Sanctum and Untamed. I played my first game, heart pounding. I won and I fell in love. The game was vicious, it was chaotic, but overall it was ruddy good fun. How well did I do? Well thirty second out of sixty five: my deck wasn’t great, but it was fun, with some really big hitters in it. My first ever deck with its all-important bar code covered up. The circles are Common cards, the diamonds are Uncommon and this deck has 4 Rare cards with star symbols As soon as it came to the local gamestore, the tough choice came of whether to continue with Destiny or move to Keyforge and, unfortunately for Destiny, Keyforge had stolen my heart. So here I am nearly a six months on and I can’t get enough of playing the game: either casually with friends, in store competitions, online on third party non-affiliated websites. I now own twenty five decks in total, which I have obtained from buying them myself, some Christmas presents or purchased as part of a sealed event. Some of these decks are good and some of them not so much, but all of them are still fun and interesting to play. Twenty five decks to some players are just the tip of the iceberg... I have played all combinations of houses and I am still surprised of the variety of ingenious uses of cards and decks I have encountered. These can be combos such as using a Seeker Needle on your own Bad Penny to gain Æmber or using a combination of Bumpsy and Wardrummer to make your opponent lose Æmber. I have even played strong decks such as one that even contained three Hunting Witches!!! I would have to say the strongest house at the moment seems to be Shadows. They have the most Æmber stealing options that can allow a player to stay in the game longer but, that’s not to say this house does not have flaws as well. So what types of events do I attend? Well they are called Chainbound events. Don’t worry this isn’t some sort of S&M gaming experience; the 'chainbound' relates to a rule I have not mentioned. Within the game, a player can acquire 'chains'. What 'chains' do is limit a deck's draw ability; so, for instance, if you play a Dis card like Arise! you will gain one chain. This chain will mean the next time you go to draw your hand up to six cards, you would only draw it up to five. Once you have done this, you remove one chain. The chains accrued from cards are not permanent. This is not the only way for a deck to gain chains though. At a chainbound event, if your deck is repeatedly winning you can accrue chains. These chains are semi-permanent, as the table below will show, which is dependent on the amount of players at the event. Chains make Power Levels. The chains give you a handicap if your deck is too successful. So a 5-player tournament could add 2 chains to your deck for every 2 wins under your belt: beat 4 people and you have 4 chains and your deck is Power Level 1 In these events, you gain Æmber just for entering and every win will give you another Æmber as well. There are two main types of events: Archon and Sealed. Archon events allow you to take an already-owned deck (and each deck has its own bar code so it can be identified). You can play to gain more chains and with that a greater Power Level. Why have a greater Power Level? If you decide to sell your deck, it is proof of how good your deck is. The other type of chainbound event is the sealed event, where each player is given a deck as part of the entry and then has to play with that deck. This means you will be going in to the competition semi-blind (you just have time to review and sleeve your deck) but these are good competitions to test your knowledge on how you can utilise a deck. Although there is always the chance you pull a stinker of a deck. Alternatively it could be something as rare and glorious as a double Time Traveler deck! Doesn't look like much? Think again. Imagine two of them in your deck. As any CCG player knows, there is no greater wonder or excitement than opening a unknown booster pack, whether it is a deck like Keyforge or a set of cards like Magic. Reviewing what you have just opened and how you can use those cards to your advantage is near-on euphoric and addictive.
Recently, I booked my tickets to go to the UK Vault Tour, the big UK event at the UK Games Expo in June. Oh, and regarding that: every time you play a chainbound event (as mentioned above) or buy a deck and add it to the Master Vault app, you get Æmber assigned to your account. At the Vault Tour you can actually trade these in for prizes (queue audience “Woo” noise). Anyway I have rambled on enough, but I would like to leave you with this: if you want to try the game, it will cost you around £10. Just give it a go. If you don’t like it, great, it wasn’t for you. If you do, hello and welcome to the community. I look forward to our first game |
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