WARS TCG

Overall score:

WARS is the newest collectible card game from Decipher…sort of. While the art, characters, and game world are entirely new, the mechanics are borrowed from Decipher’s old Star Wars CCG. Diehard fans and lucky first-timers rejoice—one of the best CCGs ever designed is back.

Decipher debuted their Star Wars CCG back in 1995, making it one of the first CCGs ever designed (preceded only by Magic, Star Trek, and a handful of failed attempts that nobody remembers). In that environment virtually every new CCG was revolutionary, because the concept itself was new, but Star Wars took the concept of a card-based game to a level that has rarely been equaled before or since. Everything in the game is handled with cards—there are no tokens, no counters, no life points, and no dice—everything you need is handled elegantly by the cards, and by their movement through your deck, your hand, and your board. It’s an astonishingly well-designed system that was able to expand through many, many expansion sets while offering a wide variety of deep strategies.

When Lucasarts pulled their Star Wars license away from Decipher and sold it to Hasbro (specifically, Wizards of the Coast), Decipher not only had to stop creating new cards for the set, but had to stop supporting the existing cards with tournaments and strategy articles. Most games would die under these conditions, but not Star Wars—legions of loving fans took it on themselves to create their own events and tournaments, and websites such as decktech.net continue to support and cover the game as if it were new. Wouldn’t you like to play a game that inspires this kind of love and loyalty in its fans? Well now you can.

In WARS, Decipher has combined the classic Star Wars game engine with an all-new setting rich with background and personality. The setting was created in collaboration with science fiction author Michael Stackpole, and details the five-pointed war that takes place when human colonization of the solar system is interrupted by alien invaders/refugees. Nobody wants to stand in the shadow of a giant like Star Wars, but the WARS setting is actually ideal for gaming, and CCG gaming in particular; it allows for shifting alliances, space travel, planetary battles, and some fascinating strategy. One notable change to the game is that it no longer relies on the old Light Side/Dark Side system—all five factions are free to mix and match freely, so that any card can be in a deck with any other card. Unfortunately, despite this change the game system retains its binary nature and must have exactly two players. Certainly a bummer for those of us who love multiplayer, but almost impossible to do anything about without changing the game entirely.

The basic premise of the game engine is that each card represents energy; this energy is used to pay for units and game effects, and when it is gone you lose the game. Thus your deck, which must contain exactly 60 cards, serves as both your mana and your life total. You begin the game with one location in play, which is either a site (a planet or space station where you can play characters and vehicles) or a sector (the space surrounding a planet or space station, where you can play fighters and capitol ships). Each location, both yours and your opponents’, generates a certain amount of energy for you at the beginning of each turn. You pull that many cards from your deck (called your Reserve) to create an Active pile. Each card you play costs a certain amount of energy, which you count off one by one from your Active pile into your Used pile. Initiating battle, using weapons, and moving from location to location also requires energy. If you have any energy left in your Active pile at the end of your turn you can draw it into your hand (this is the only way to get new cards, as there is no traditional “draw step”), or just save it for future turns, or a combination of both; at the end of your turn you cycle your used cards back onto the bottom of your deck. Playing more locations gives you more energy at the risk of giving your opponent more as well, and saving energy over successive turns allows you to keep a constant stream of units or build up for a massive assault.

Using your deck for so many resources at once creates a delicate balance, but it doesn’t stop there. All “damage” in the game results in a loss of energy, which can come from your hand, board, Active pile, or Reserve. Let’s say for example that you’re fighting a space battle in the Luna sector: you have a ship with three power and three defense, and your opponent has a ship with two power and two defense. You spend one energy from your Active pile to initiate battle, and then compare your total power present at the site; since you win by one, your opponent has to lose one energy. He can do this by discarding one card from his hand, Active pile or Reserve and placing it in his Lost pile. He could also choose to “lose” his ship, which counts for energy equal to its defense value (two, in this case). Depending on the board and your opponent’s plans, this might be a bad idea (because he’s losing more force than he has to) or a good idea (maybe he knows that you’re about to move several more characters to that sector, and he doesn’t want to risk another battle that will force him to lose far more than one extra energy).

It is often a very good idea to abandon a location altogether, rather than try to defend it poorly—a battle vs. overwhelming odds can be devastating, whereas your opponent can’t even attack you if you’re not there. Giving up control of a site leaves you open for an energy drain, however—at the beginning of your opponent’s turn, at every site where he has units and you don’t he can cause you to lose energy equal to the amount of energy that site generates for you. For example, the Luna sector generates one energy for each player, so if your opponent had control of the site he could drain you for one. This may not sound like much, but add it up over multiple turns and several different locations and it can get very deadly.

As if that weren’t enough, many of the “spells” in the game (i.e., one-shot cards called Interrupts that have an effect and are immediately discarded) come in two types: lost, which go to your Lost piled after they’re played, and used, which go to your used pile and thus re-enter your energy pool. Some Interrupts even give you the choice of being used for one effect, or lost for a much bigger effect. Also, every card in the game has a destiny number in the upper right corner that works as a randomizing system—many cards and battles call for random numbers, so you simply reveal the top card of your Reserve, note the destiny number, and place the card in your used pile. With so many different ways to use, move, lose, and even stack your cards and energy, WARS becomes a game of resource management that’s simple enough to learn in a few minutes, but deep enough that it can take you much longer to master its nuances. That combination of accessibility and depth is very nearly the highest praise I can think of for a strategy game.

But the game is more than just resource management—you have to fight to win, and you have to do it by balancing a space fleet and a ground force in the same deck. You want to spread out and drain your opponent wherever possible, but you also want to keep your forces strong enough to defend themselves from attack. Each of the five factions has its own specialty to help it do this: for example, the Mavericks (human pirates in the asteroid belt) are very good at stacking and manipulating destiny numbers, while the Quay (vicious alien warriors) excel at recycling damaged units and retrieving lost energy. Combining multiple factions in the same deck can give you a big advantage, helping you play each faction’s strengths while lessening its weaknesses, but it requires a much more careful batch of locations to make sure you get enough of the right support icons.

I could go on and on about the strategies and balances in the game, and probably will in future articles, but for the purposes of this review I need only assure you that the game is very fun, the rules system very smooth, and that the whole thing has been tried and tested by years of play in Star Wars—you know the game will work, and that it will expand well, because it already has. In updating the system for WARS they have kept all of the good while streamlining a few rules like attrition and weapons. They have also given it a fascinating backstory that I really hope people will get into (go here for a detailed look at the timeline and factions)—a sci-fi card game is rare enough already, but one that meshes plot with mechanics to give you a vibrant sense of battlefield strategy is something special.

The art is about what you’d expect from other illustrated games such as Legend of the Five Rings—occasionally bad, occasionally excellent—and the card design itself is quite good. The reliance on original art rather than movie stills means that the images aren’t as consistently good as those for Decipher’s other games (Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, etc.), but on the other hand you have the blessed freedom of not being tied to a licensed property—the game designers can do whatever they want with the game without any pressure from outside studios or established canon. The only real complaint I can summon is the name—call a game store and ask for WARS and you’re liable to get a confused silence on the end of the line, because that word could be applied to virtually half of their stock in one way or another. A more flavorful, less generic name would have been a big help.

In short, I can’t think of a single reason not to play WARS (though it might be a little too complex for very young players). It’s fun, it’s deep, and it has a pedigree you can’t match anywhere. Expect it to be well-supported by Decipher and well-played by fans once it catches on (by which I mean, once they get over the fact that it’s not Star Wars anymore). A+, five stars, six clocks—whatever your form of measurement, WARS is a winner.

Written by Fellfrosch on December 08th, 2004