WARS Trading Card Game

Infobox_Game | subject_name= WARS Trading Card Game
image_link=
image_caption=
designer=
publisher= Decipher
players= 2
ages= 12+
setup_time=
playing_time= Approx 1 hour
complexity=
strategy=
random_chance= Some
skills= Card playing
Arithmetic
Basic Reading Ability
footnotes=
bggid=12488The "WARS Trading Card Game" is a trading card game released by Decipher in October 2004 with science fiction themes, using game mechanics from the "Star Wars CCG".cite web| url=http://www.gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=103| title=A Weekend With Decipher - Lord of the Rings’ Future and The WARS TCG Cometh| last=Sivils| first=Dan| year=2004| month= June| publisher=GamingReport.com| accessdate=2007-10-11] After two releases, the game was officially "placed on hiatus" starting May 2005.

Background

This trading card game was significant for a number of reasons. It is Decipher's only card game that isn't based on a licensed property (the phrase 'proprietary science fiction property' was repeated over many news releases). It also partly aimed at a large, pre-existing target market by using game mechanics modified from the wildly popular "Star Wars CCG"--a game itself so popular it was the #2 selling trading card game, second only to the original collectible card game "", for much of the time between its release in late 1995 and the release of the "Pokémon Trading Card Game" in 1998.

Its development involved people of unusual prominence--Michael Stackpole had a hand in the game's backstory and wrote the first short stories that introduced the background to the public, John Howe conceived the Quay extraterrestrial race, and physicists were consulted to improve the scientific plausibility of the game's backdrop premises (but which were never fully revealed). Immediately before its release, an entire soundtrack was also composed for the game by Kieran Yanner.

Pre-release

Its existence was first hinted at in January 2002, shortly after Decipher revealed to the public that it was losing the Lucasfilm license for the "Star Wars CCG" ("SWCCG"). In late April 2004, the game was officially announced in a Radio Free Decipher webcast as the spiritual follow-up to "SWCCG", and the game immediately attracted massive attention from the hobby industry; for instance, at its public debut at Gencon 2005, an introductory tournament using free demo decks is still Decipher's best-attended event in its existence, numbering over 200 people. There are still open ended issues with the cash winners from that event never getting their prizes paid out to them.

Its official name was humorously in constant flux between April and August 2004. The game was originally called "WARS: The Mumon Rip", then "WARS: The Mumon Rift" following a player suggestion on Decipher's old Calder forums. The game then went through a logo change and was referred to officially as "The Mumon Rift WARS Trading Card Game" before undergoing a final logo change the day before Gencon 2005 and simplified to "WARS Trading Card Game". It is most commonly referred to as "Wars TCG" without the idiosyncratic capitalization of the entire first word; or, simply as "Wars" and less commonly as "wtcg".

Product information

The first release, "Incursion", came on October 6, 2004 and had 330 cards. The second set, "Nowhere to Hide", was released on January 7, 2005 and had 167 cards. Many more releases--3 more total, at least--were planned dependent on market conditions, but by April 2005 Decipher had determined that existing sales and preorders for set 3 did not justify continuing the game or even to justify publishing the 3rd set.

Further planned product releases as of December 2004 were to be called "Edge of a Sword" (May 2005), "Motion of Mind" (September 2005), and "Eye of Insight" (January 2006).

"Edge of a Sword" was actually very far into its development; most cards were already written and playtested to a degree and card art were chosen and cropped for more than 3/4 of the ~160 cards. The final version of the playtesting files have since been available on the internet. [ [http://www.thewarstore.org/Wars_TCG.html WARS TCG (Trading Card Game)] at The War Store]

"Wars TCG" cards contain striking original art from scores of professional freelance artists including John Howe, one of the world's best known fantasy illustrators. The images on the cards depicted the science fiction drama unfolding as each expansion followed the planned 10 year story arc. The final version of the playtest files for the Edge of a Sword expansion has since been made publicly available at least as early as July, 2007.

Premise

From Decipher's April 30, 2004 press release: 'It is Earth-year 2391. Through a vast tear in the fabric of the universe, alien warriors emerge to fight an already embattled humanity. The sky is burning. The Gateless Gate has opened. The cosmic rip meanders like a burning string across the galaxy and slices through the asteroid field near the orbit of Jupiter. The great opening becomes known as, "The Mumon Rift"...'

Humanity has split itself into three factions: Earthers, based around a future Earth administrated by corporations; Gongens, descendants of East Asians living on Mars (renamed Gongen) following a continent-wide nuclear disaster; Mavericks, anarchists in the 'Outer Rims' with penchants for cybernetic replacements. The two alien races are the Quay, a chitinous slave race with tribal tendencies and Mesoamerican- and Austronesian- (ie, commonly interpreted as southeast Asian/Hawaiian) styled proper nouns; and the Shi, advanced race of floating, psychic aliens with proper nouns styled after Indo-Aryan languages.

Meanwhile, among all the races, individuals with special abilities began appearing, and are called 'Kizen'. Thus far the Kizen are mostly used as a gameplay device, but there were originally plans to introduce an anti-Kizen conflict storyline as well as somehow tie them with wavefunction collapse quantum mechanics to explain connections between Shi and humans.

References