The Energon Pub

Well, I'm going to start off by saying that I've been looking for a way to design a miniature game that only uses two figures and still have the strategy require enough thought for it to be interesting. This is the only reason I've been paying attention to the card game after seeing the fugly card cutouts. After much squinting, I believe I have the gist of how the game is played.

Basically, it works like this: red beats green, green beats blue, and blue beats red. Yes, the Transformers 3D Battle-Card Game is the world's most convoluted game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Why convoluted? Well, on each card, there's three text boxes. Each text box has two colored dots. The large color dots is the color you chose, and it has abilities that trigger when that choice is revealed. The smaller dot indicates how much damage you do to the opponent if they chose the color beaten by your color, and next to it are the abilities that trigger when you beat that color.

So on the one hand, you could look at all your abilities, look at all your opponent's abilities, and try to formulate an educated guess on which color is the best to choose for a round of combat. Or you could just choose them randomly and probably do just as good.

For example, Cliffjumper's robot mode has a blue ability called, "Let Me At 'Em!" which reads, "If you don't hit this round, take 10 damage." The attack does 50 if it hits, but if your opponent chooses blue, they tie the round and you take 10. Even worse, if the opponent chooses green, they'll hit you and you take an additional 10 damage. So choosing blue for Cliffjumper seems like a risky decision, and your opponent might assume that you are less likely to choose it. Supposing that you are going to choose red or green, the opponent's safest choice is to choose red, since red will either tie against your red or beat your green. However, the presumption means the opponent is choosing the color that is beaten by blue, meaning that blue is actually your best choice for beating the opponent! Again, the logic is convoluted and could simply be replaced by random choices.

The two most repeated abilities on the cards are "This figure may change form," and "This figure may move to long or short range." As far as I can tell, being at short or long range are the only two positions a robot can have, which is good considering you will have to occasionally remove the figure from the playing area to transform it and then remember where you took it from. For the most part, which form and what range you are at affect what damage bonuses you receive from special attacks. For example, Jetfire's robot mode has a red attack called, "Laser Razor." It deals a base damage of 20, but deals an additional 10 damage if at long range and an additional additional 20 damage if fighting against a robot form for a possible total of 50 damage.

One thing I haven't figured out is how the "Crit" abilities work. I would like to say that they are abilities that only trigger if the figure's health is equal to or less than the Crit value. This theory holds, except for Wreckage's Crit ability, which is also the most interesting: "First round the opponent fights, he can't choose green." I'm not sure if it means first round of the game, or first round after Wreckage becomes critical, but it would certainly be an advantage to play Rock-Paper-Scissors and tell your opponent they can't choose rock!

I'm not entirely certain of the multiplayer/multi-figure rules. If each player controls two figures, do they each have to choose different targets for their attacks or can they team up on someone? When a player chooses a color, does that color apply to all his figures, or does he choose a different one for each? If a figure is at short range to one figure and moves to long range, can that move also place him at short range of another figure? The answers to these questions might actually add some depth to the... well, card cutout game. However, I do not see myself investing a lot of money (any?) since I'll probably have all the movies toys for the figures I want to play and I can just print out the stat cards. Still, I might buy one pack to give it a try and support the brand.

Interesting to say the least. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Magic or even the Versus system.

I think injecting the Transformers, GI Joe, and various other Hasbro licenses into Versus might have rejuvenated it.

Word.

Well, Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, so it wouldn't make sense to go to a third party to produce a card game when they already own the creators of the number one trading card game in the world. Besides, the people designing Versus make a lot of amateur mistakes simply because they don't want to be like Magic, even though 90% of the gameplay is like Magic.

Way back when, there was a poll about whether Magic players would be interested in buying a Transformers collectible game, and the majority said no. Of course, it was probably already decided at that time that a game of some sort was going to be produced. The results of the poll was just an indication that they could not expect a lot of Magic players to crossover and play the Transformers game. So rather than waste their time trying to appeal to a demographic that wasn't interested, they deviated from Magic and made the, "3D Battle-Card Game," instead.

I have a lot of gaming friends, and nobody is interested in this game. They're simply turned off by the figures (even though they like Dreamblade, in which the figures look like random garbage to me). Besides that, they see it as a quick movie merchandise gimmick and a temporary thing just to give Pirates some competition. Even though I'm willing to give this game a try, it'll fail anywhere that it doesn't generate a healthy fanbase. I've tried to get into plenty of games that are a lot of fun, but with no one else interested in playing them, the games just die.