Hi, and welcome to the second post. After introducing myself last week, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce Combat Cards. That way, everyone has a quick primer on how Combat Cards plays – before I get too deeply into the gameplay, systems, miniatures, factions, lore and so on.
But first, I want to make it clear that this post is about the digital Combat Cards game, that we at Well Played Games are making. While I’ve played and enjoyed the physical Combat Cards game released by Games Workshop, I’m not in a position to go into detail on its design process or card selection or anything like that. Over time we plan to add more about Games Workshop’s Combat Cards game to this site, but this post is specifically about the digital game.
Changes
Second thing to clear up – this post is about how Combat Cards plays right now. By which I mean, games that are still in development often go through quite major changes – a topic so large I have a couple of future posts planned around it.
But it means the Combat Cards I describe here may not be the final one you actually get to play. We may find that an area of the game isn’t working very well, or – the more annoying version – a feature works but is too difficult to make intuitive and understandable by players.
So with all that out of the way, how does the (digital) Combat Cards play (right now)?
Finally
Let’s start with the basics:
- Combat Cards is (surprise!) a card game.
- Every card in the game features a Warhammer 40,000 miniature, painted by Games Workshop’s ‘Eavy Metal painting team.
- Each card has stats for that miniature, reflecting how well it fights in melee, ranged and psychic combat. These numbers aren’t the same as the miniature’s 8th edition 40K stats, but they capture the same ‘flavour’ of how they fight.
- Each card costs a certain amount of ‘points’ to include in your deck, meaning you have to choose between powerful but high-cost cards, or weaker, more numerous cards.
- Each deck has to include a single Warlord. This is ‘you’, and if the Warlord is defeated you lose the battle, irrespective of how many other cards you still have left.
So
All this means your high-level goal as a player is pretty straightforward – amass a collection of cards that lets you create a range of decks, then use those decks to battle other players. That will result in you earning more cards, and being able to upgrade those cards to increase their power.
However, even this simple goal has some decisions behind it. Will you try to collect every single card, or focus on the factions you love to play in ‘tabletop’ 40K? Or maybe you’ll only consider strategic play, and just collect cards that allow you to build – or counter – a certain style of deck?
We’re hoping to see a lively player community of players, all discussing which card or tactic is under-powered or totally broken, leading to an ever evolving metagame… but more on that in later posts.
Plus
The description above only covers the very basics of Combat Cards. I haven’t detailed the various different factions we include, the bonuses each Warlord gives you, how cards can choose not to attack to boost your team’s damage, how campaigns work, etc. etc.
I’ll dig into those areas in later posts, but hopefully you now have enough of an overview to understand the ‘shape’ of the game, if not the specifics.
That said, if you want to know more about an area mentioned above then let me know and I’ll write a post on it. You can get in touch via [email protected] or through the Combat Cards Facebook page.
Thanks,
Stu
Recent Comments