D&D card games? What exactly are these guys playing at?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Every weekend when I visit the local Shopping Centre (it’s a Mall, people) I pass a bunch of around 20 teenagers***** sitting in a quiet corner playing some esoteric game with collector-cards (substitute the correct description here). No dice or playing-boards are used and many of the cards don’t seem to be dealt as such but stay in their protective booklets until needed. Some of the games seem to be interesting enough to draw an audience.

What is it these people are up to? They all look pretty engrossed.
***** Mostly but not entirely chaps. Dress tends towards sub-goth (well, not reall goth at all compared to some of the the MM lookalikes you see, however…) or a general geek/couldn’t-care-less look.

2

You sure it was D & D and not Magic? Not saying D & D card games don’t exist, but they’re not anything I’ve ever played and Magic is pretty popular.

Here’s a shot of some Magic cards
http://www.hbdgames.com/imgs/magic_cards.jpg

3

Not sure at all, they could be anything. I just thought (probably very wrongly) that D&D covered everything. There are certainly a lot of different cards, it’s not like a deck of 52 I’m guessing there could be hundreds.

I am totally clueless about this whole scene, my main question is how a game based on these sorts of cards can work - surely whoever has the biggest/most powerfull(?) set of cards wins?

4

Collectible Card Games - I’m sure someone will be along with a better answer than mine while I’m typing this.

There are a number of them. They tend to have a lot of overlap in their player base with the people who play roleplaying games.

Yes, having the biggest selection of the best cards, and the most money to buy new cards can help quite a bit in many of them.

There are also non-collectible card games, though, where money’s not a factor.

5

While there are countless numbers of fantasy/sci-fi collectable card games on the market, my guess is that they were either playing Magic:the Gathering (favored by the ‘older’ folks as the first of all of the CCG) or Yu-Gi-Oh (preferred by kids).

The best way to figure out EXACTLY what game it was would be to identify the cards, either by the card names, what the backs looked like, what some of the text on the cards might have been, etc.

6

Magic: The Gathering is quite likely. Yu-Gi-Oh is pretty popular right now too. It tends towards a younger group that Magic, but there are quite a few teenagers and even people into their early twenties who play (At least, here were at the league I used to play at).

That said, there are a lot of possibilities. Every single anime you see one TV probably has it’s own card game, and there’s also some other lesser known games in the fold–stuff like Munchkins (which is the closest to a D&D card game as I’m aware of). But MTG and Yu-Gi-Oh are the most likely.

Don’t have to substitute anything. The correct terms for these types of games are CCG or TCG (for collecting card game or trading card game respectively). It can be an expensive hobby.

On to your later question–yes, having the best/most powerful cards is very helpful, but you also have to have a coherent deck. Lots of cards are made to work together in different ways. Sometimes a combination of weak single cards can be pretty powerful. And often powerful cards aren’t really that powerful if you have nothing to back them up with. For example, in MTG you could put a card in your deck which gives all rats fear. Very useful–creatures with fear can only be blocked by black and artifact creatures, meaning you can directly damage your opponents life points. Artifact creatures aren’t very common–a lot of decks may have a couple, but an artifact based deck is rare, and given that there’s five colours and multi-colour decks are generally more difficult to play, it’s a decent bet that your opponent won’t have a black deck. But put that card into a deck with only one or two rats and it’s pretty much worthless. So it’s not just about having the cards, but also in being able to play them well. Not to mention the good old luck factor–MTG is difficult to win without enough land cards, for example, so if you’re drawing mostly non-land cards, you’re generally screwed.

How can they work–um, well…I can’t answer that very well. Think of yourself as a general, and your deck is your army. You have creatures which you can attack and block with, and spells which you can either use to support your creatures, attack or defend. Some games also have cards which give you energy to use in summoning creatures and spells (MTG) or using attacks (Pokemon). There are other games which work differently–Munchkins, for example, works around giving yourself good gear and being stronger than the monster you draw to fight against.

I’m not sure if that answers your question or not. It’s kind of hard to describe without knowing which game we’re talking about.

7

You’ve received some good answers concerning CCGs/TCGs. I sell them in my bookstore, and I’m a Magic: the Gathering player myself. Magic tends to attract adults and teens. Yu-Gi-Oh! is popular with ages 10-15, Pokemon with younger kids. There’s also Neopets, Cyberpunk, Dot Hack, and many more.

Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, is an RPG (role-playing game). You could really call it the grand-daddy of its genre. I started playing it in 1976, and it had already been around a little while then. They tend to use dice, books, charts, miniatures, and lots of other props, too. There are many, many RPGs around now. The basic combat and movement system used in D&D has been codified and released as a generic platform called D20 (referring to a 20-sided die), which is the basis of a lot of different games.

To make things even more complex, there are computer and online versions of both CCGs and RPGs.

I think the easiest way to find out what game they’re playing is just to ask them. The majority of gamers I know would be thrilled to tell you all about their game of choice.

8

Having many cards in your deck is generally a disadvantage, not an advantage. If you have too many cards in your deck, then it becomes that much less likely that you’ll draw the one you want. One can end up drawing many cards which give the energy to cast spells, but few good spells to cast with them, or drawing powerful but expensive spells before you have enough energy. Or spells which can be useful and which you can afford, but which just aren’t useful at that particular moment. Smaller decks have less randomness in what you end up drawing, so this is less of a problem. Most games have a minimum allowed deck size (in Magic, it’s 60), and good players will generally try to stick to that minimum. You lose if you run out of cards, but this is almost never an issue: A game that goes through half the deck is a pretty long one.

If they were looking at cards in protective sleeves in folders, they weren’t involved in a game at the time. They might have been bragging about valuable cards they own, or they might have been discussing ways to use particular cards, or which cards to put into a new deck. Constructing a deck of cards which work well together is a major part of the game.

And there are some cards which are more useful or powerful than others, and these are typically more valuable as well. But this also depends on rarity: There are some cards which aren’t too useful, but are valuable because they’re rare, and there are some cards which are very useful but very common, and therefore cheap. Whenever you get a new pack of cards, you’re probably going to get a few rare or powerful ones, but you never know which ones, so you might get some that don’t work well with your other cards. Individual cards can also be bought, sold, or traded, like any collectible. There’s definitely an advantage to buying more or better cards to make your deck out of, but money is not a guaranteed win. I once saw a game where one of the players had obviously individually bought every single card in his deck, and had about $500 worth of cards in play alone, but who used them so clumsily that he ended up doing more damage to himself than to his opponent.

9

I used to play Vampire the Masquarade as a college student. I spent something like $12 +$20-the amount I should have paid for my share of Chinese food one evening to buy them. When I sold them a year and a half later, I got $15.10.

Yes, there are stories behind those prices. Neither set of prices has much to do with how much the cards were actually worth, especially individually. Some of my opponents spent much larger amounts of money, and won more frequently. Whether that was causal or not is hard to tell. Strategy is really not my thing. Plus, all my opponents started playing at least a year before they taught me. Even before I got “sucked in” I watched an occassional game. I’d usually take a book or something, and only pay attention some of the time, but the conversation that surrounded the games could be quite fun. I had silly friends.

In Vampire, you have a set of tokens that represent your life points. You can (and must) use some of them to bring cards representing vampires out of your crypt. You then use them to attack your prey, and defend against your predator. (Each player has one prey and one predator at any time. If you kill your prey, their prey becomes your prey). If there are 4 or more players, you are “allies” with anyone who is not your predator or your prey.

Imagine a group of six players,- ABCDEF. A’s prey is B, B’s prey is C,etc. If there is a vote over something which affects player B, players D and F will probably support B, and player E might. Players A and C will probably vote against B. (Enemy of my enemy is my friend–except when one player is too powerful, or things get more complicated. People sometimes hold grudges. ) If the next vote in the game is over something which affects C, E and A will probably support C, and player F might. B and D will probably vote against C. Thus, allies constantly shift. And that’s assuming no one scrambles the players.

I once had my predator get really mad at my prey, because I killed his most powerful vampire, and my prey wouldn’t support a bloodhunt. A bloodhunt would have killed my most powerful vampire. I only put it at risk because my prey had promised to support me in a bloodhunt.

Umm, I have a suspicion that the second half of this post only makes sense to people who are familiar with how CCG’s work- and even then there may be confusion. I’ve played Magic like twice, and did horrendously, because I didn’t understand the strategy, didn’t know what my cards did, and couldn’t get used to the fact that Magic has an entirely different structure than Vampire. (The whole predator, prey, tapping cards you’ve used thing works differently).

To a large extent, games like these are most fascinating to the players themselves, not to outsiders.

10

That right there is a big difference with Magic. A Magic game typically only has two players: It’s possible to play with more, but some aspects of the game become seriously broken, and some house rules have to be created to deal with various quirks. Diplomacy does, of course, become an important part of the game with more than two players, but there’s nothing in the rules that calls for a vote (since voting wouldn’t make sense in a standard 2-player game). The largest Magic game I’ve seen had five players, so if your twenty teenagers were all playing Magic, they were probably paired off into about ten separate games.

11

Thanks for the excellent replies people, it looks like they’re playing MTG. I suspected that there was a whole different world in there – and there were bound to be rules like

that’s got to be the whole fun of it.

Last word to Eureka

12

I never got those games until I played Munchkin Fu last Saturday. Admittedly it’s a parody of D&D, but it’s funny, and very addictive.

Any game with a CHEAT card (which lets you do anything you want to) has to be fun.

13

I agree. I wish I could find a grop to play with more often. I especially like the following rule–

(emphasis mine)

14

As others have said, the rules of CCGs can be very complicated, and a large part of the strategy in any CCG is finding “an Angle.” You figure out a set of cards that work really well together because the special powers of the cards exploit some feature of the rules in a really effective or (even better) unexpected way. When somebody’s discovered an Angle, then the other players try to find a way to “break” it. They might even design a deck that’s built specifically to defeat one other specific deck. A lot of the enjoyment of the game comes from this kind of give-and-take.

The CCGs turn out to be strangely social, even if the players sometimes seem to be communicating exclusively in grunts, hoots, and “yo mamma” jokes.

15

To re-answer another question, money helps a lot with MTG (and presumably the other CCG’s I haven’t played), and skill helps a lot (especially skill in deck-construction). Someone with both is largely unbeatable. Someone with neither is going to be screwed. But good play can beat someone who has spent a mint on his deck, especially since chance plays a large part in any given round of play.

The other thing is that there are rules to avoid this problem. Tournaments typically have house of standard variant rules disallowing certain powerful cards that would otherwise be legal or cards from older editions that have been determined to unbalance play.

–Cliffy

16

Another way of evening out the wealth is to play a tournament where you can’t bring your own cards, called a “sealed deck” tournament. These are common in the Magic world. Typically each player receives a “tournament pack” of 75 cards, and three “booster packs” of 15 cards each. The players sit in a circle, and each open a booster pack. They take a card and pass the remaining 14 to the left. This is repeated until all 15 cards have been taken. Then they open the next booster pack, take a card, and pass the remainder the other direction.

Now, each player has 120 cards: 75 that came in their tournament pack, and 45 that they selected in the booster draft. They build the best deck they can out of those cards and play. The playing field is completely level. The winner is the one with the best deck-building and game-playing skills, with a luck factor thrown in as well.

I’ve played multi-player Magic: the Gathering games, and I tend not to enjoy them as much. Everyone just gangs up on the player they perceive as the strongest. When that player is dead, they work on the next one.

17

It also could have been L5R (Legend of the Five Rings), which is pretty popular in my group of friends. I don’t really know that much about it, just throwing that out there as an idea.
And if it were D&D they would have had lots of dice and no cards.

I blame my boyfriend and gfloyd for the fact that I know this stuff.

18

Incessantly. :slight_smile:

(I keed, I keed. Sort of. Gamer for 20+ years, here…but hey, it is true… :slight_smile: )

19

I’m not entirely sure why I feel it is so important that you understand this detail properly, given the extremely low likelihood of your encountering a game of Vampire, but I can’t resist the opportunity to explain a little more.

Voting is almost never a straight one player- one vote situation. Political decks are more common in larger player games- partly due to cards that say things like “This card allows you to take 2X-1 blood from the player of your choice and give it to 2 or more players where X = the number of people playing”

But also, in VtM, a player controls the actions of several different vampires (2-4 being the most common, though players sometimes have more- usually smaller vampires or fewer- especially if they are not doing well). Some vampires, usually higher powered ones have votes. This means that anytime a vote is called, the player gets two votes for the Prince of Paris. Also, the card I described above which allows a player to call for a vote would be worth 2 votes, and sometimes other cards provide votes.

In the illustration where my predator wanted a bloodhunt on my vampire- part of the reason he got mad was because my prey had a card which allowed him three extra votes that he wasn’t playing (because the vote was going my way without it) but that he had promised me if I needed them (and he likely had more votes in his hand. That guy usually did.)

20

So you’re saying the big appeal of CCGs is the rampant munchkinism? :smiley: