An unusual night in last night, and one which didn't involve the PC at all, as I got a chance to try out the recent EVE Online Collectable Card Game, first hand, which has it's own website here.

What with all the first-time fumbling with rules on my part, and the fact that we played a three-player game, we only managed to get the one full game in, over perhaps about two hours or so. We played with decks built beforehand by one of my opponents, from the basic starter packs of cards, with some boosters I think, each deck based on one of the four races from EVE Online. I got Minmatar, and was pitted against the Gallente and Caldari.

It's an interesting game, the basic objective of which is to destroy everyone else's single home-region starbase, while preventing them doing the same to you first. This is mostly done with ship cards, each based on the ships from the MMO, all with various strengths and abilities. To acquire these ships, you have to earn money, largely by occupying outer region cards and accumulating rent from them, and associated location cards placed on them. Some of these cards also offer mineral points, which can be turned into money if you can get the right kinds of mining ship out to the various region cards in play. All this is subject to the usual vagaries of shuffling up the deck and starting with a hand of playable ships, locations, 'news' events and the like, and taking a new one from the deck ("Market") each turn.

The various regions seem to add a kind of board-game feel as play progresses - once one of your three pre-chosen regions is played onto the table, it only remains 'yours' if you can keep ships on it uncontested, and before long Molden Heath, Khanid Kingdom, Scalding Pass and others all formed a kind of mini galaxy map on the table, and the various cards clustered around them all takes up a fair sized dining-room table.

Play takes place in a number of distinct Phases, which, perhaps counter-intuitively, are shared by all players. Instead of, for example, Magic the Gathering, where Player 1 works through the list of stages of his turn in order, and then Player 2, etc, in the EVE CCG, everyone does many of the steps at the same time, with only the Management Phase (the bit where you spend your ISK to play cards from the hand) seeming to follow a more conventional Player 1, Player 2, Player 3 type of order. It's possible I misunderstood a bit though - games with complex multiple-stage turns do that to me quite often.

Something I was very pleased to see, was the conspicuous absence of 'in-joke' cards; '4TW', 'All Your Base..', 'Less QQ, More Pew Pew!', 'zOMG!1', and the like, and the whole set seems to be very in character, and very professionally done, and look like they'd be quite accessible to people who have never played the MMO at all, rather than just being something 'for the forum regulars'. The game seems to have no 'Character' type cards at all, in fact.

We got underway, and were soon plonking down regions and ships. It's nice to see the familiar screenshots of game models, and in many cases, the object featured on the card functioned in a very similar way to the one in the MMO; Industrials have a 'Trade' ability, Logistics Cruisers can heal other ships, and this even extended to racial themes too - many of my ships had an 'Ambush' mode, and a 'Kamakaze' ability, reflecting the sort of hit-and-run guerilla-type ethos of the Minmatar in general. I don't recall the exact details of the other two decks, but would imagine the other three races are similarly characterised as well, with global groups of special abilities designed to reflect the attitudes and ethos of their MMO counterparts.

One thing that threw me quite early on though, was making the mistake of making too literal comparisons between card point costs, and my hazy memories of the MMO version's online market price. "8 points for one of those!? You're kidding!", and it seems important to try and keep a bit of game-mechanic distance between the computer game item, and the matching card, in your mind at least. Cousins, rather than Twins, and far more important is a firm grasp of what the card is capable of, in it's own context - the defence score, the attack score, and any abilities it might have.

Another problem I had, was the concept of the 'Upgraded Starbase'. You can pay some ISK, and upgrade your home starbase. Figuring that this just meant 'make it more powerful', I did this very early on, when actually, it isn't really an 'upgrade' at all, and indeed, my upgraded base had the same defence score, but was now generating one less income! The starbase card is double-sided, and for the upgrade cost, you can flip it over, activating it's special effect, which you know beforehand, but which is hidden from the other players. A novel strategic option, somewhat reminiscent of Pontoon or one of those versions of Poker where some of the cards aren't the right way up. In some cases though, this effect only applies during the turn in which you flipped it, making it not necessarily a good thing to do right away. I know better now of course, but perhaps in the 2nd Edition, this ought to be called an "Activated Starbase" instead or something.

Gameplay progressed in a much more measured and slower pace than something like MtG, with all three of us settling into a kind of development stage, while we worked at getting enough ISK income to play the bigger cards, and of course, waiting for these bigger cards to come into our hands, and the whole had a very 'cold war' feel to it - regions popping up and gaining locations, and more and more Frigates being built and deployed to them.

My 'Card of the Match' turned out to be the 'Thrasher', a Minmatar Destroyer, which in the MMO, isn't really all that - a kind of half Frigate, half Cruiser, designed as a counter to Frigates, in a game where pretty much everything else can also counter Frigates quite happily. In the card game, it had 5 attack, 4 defence, and a special ability which let me do one damage to any Scout or Frigate in the same region, by paying an extra 2 ISK as many times as I liked, or could afford. By this point, the game was very Frigate heavy, and the deployment of a large number of regions and locations meant I had an awful lot of money to burn.

Think I went a bit mad at that point, and charged the Thrasher, unsupported, around the 'map' in the middle of the table, swatting Frigates in huge numbers, generally over-reaching my ability to hold the regions I'd swept clean, and eventually coming unstuck when it ran into a Gallente Cruiser - immune to the 'Just Throw Money At the Problem' effect, and leaving it to fight a battle on it's own attack and defence scores. Some deft use of 'News' event cards (a lot like 'Interrupts' from MtG) on the Gallente's part saw my Thrasher go down without really denting his Cruiser (A Celestis, I think), and leaving me over-stretched with only Bursts, Reapers and Rifters to hold the lot with - not powerful cards in themselves, but all with the 'Ambush' ability, which means they could do a surprising amount of damage if attacked, while they get to run away, making them hit somewhat above their weight, defensively.

Throughout all this galloping about, it soon became clear to me that something in the design of the play-ordering was definitely tending to favour whichever player went last in each phase (me in this case), mostly because the person who goes last, can react to the moves of the other player(s), but those players can't do anything about his own actions until next turn, by which point, everyone has been paid more ISK, and due to the way 'ship construction' works, everyone probably has fresh ships all of a sudden. Hard to explain, and quite possibly simply us getting the rules wrong, but going last really seemed to help, perhaps unfairly so.

Anyway, after my doomed charge left me somewhat toothless, the Caldari came at me with a Ferox, a startlingly powerful Battlecruiser card, and as it turns out, the largest ship we saw in play that game, supported by a Basilisk Logistics Crusier. He recaptured the gains I'd made off him and it was only the intervention of a few stacked up lucky News cards that blew the thing up before he could move on my Starbase with it.

I waited things out a few turns, hoping for another Thrasher to turn up in my hand, while the Caldari worked out the numbers and sent a huge Frigate and Cruiser fleet to gank the Gallente Starbase. The Gallente player seemed to have had some bad luck with playable cards in his hand, and by this point had a huge amount on ISK saved up, with not much to actually spend it on - a combination of unlucky shuffling, and some deck construction issues, I'd say. The Starbase went, eliminating the Gallente from the game. The Caldari zerged my starbase next, and despite inflicting a huge amount of Ambush damage on him from my substantial Frigate fleet, he had enough Cruisers in his fleet to finish the job perhaps two turns after the Gallente folded.

A fun game indeed, but it did feel a lot less polished and refined than the games of MtG that we played afterwards, which isn't surprising really...this is the first version, and MtG is on at least it's 10th by now, and I'm sure rules tweaks and refinements will be ongoing for some time - heh...a bit like the MMO version. It did score very highly in one aspect though - it lets individual players have the chance to play a kind of large scale RTS-style strategic EVE Online, that very few players of the MMO will ever get to experience. Mining is a damn sight easier to bear too!

I liked it, but I'm still not quite sure about going crazy and buying my own cards just yet. However, CCP/White Wolf have helpfully made a set of Demo Decks available to download, print and play with, letting folks have a feel for the basics without getting silly about 150-Booster Pack Trade Boxes and all that, and these can be found here:

EVE: The Second Genesis: Demo Decks

Not quite as plush or varied as the real ones, but worth a go!