Millennium Blades – First Thoughts

When I was at University I played a lot of Collectible Card Games: Doomtown, 7th Sea, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, Warhammer 40k, and Lord of the Rings to name but a few. I loved opening packs, arranging collections, building decks, and playing in tournaments.

Millennium Blades from Level 99 Games and designer D. Brad Dalton Jr. evokes those feelings for me in a game that is barely contained chaos. This is set in a world where the game ‘Millennium Blades’ has been around for thousands of years. You play card game players, playing that card game via the mechanisms of a card game. Clear?

During your first game of Millennium Blades will see you being given a starter deck, like you would buy for a collectible card game, and sends you straight into a tournament. It gets you straight into the action with a simple set of cards and allows you to understand what you are aiming for when the other side of the game appears.

The core of a tournament is playing cards into a row on your player board. As you play cards, they can affect all sorts of things, interacting with each other and sometimes other players. Playing a card gives you Ranking Points and where you place in points gives you victory points for the end of the game. This is the calm, strategy focused part of the game.

Of course after every tournament you think how you could have done better, change your decks, buy new cards, maybe even trade with other players. This part of the game is timed. You get 7 minutes, then a break, 7 minutes, a break, and finally 6 minutes. In each segment of time you can sell cards to the Aftermarket, where other players can buy them knowing what they are. You can buy cards from the store, not knowing what they are exactly. You can fuse cards together into powerful promos.

What you need to do though is get your deck ready for the next tournament. You are also putting a collection together that gets you points depending on how many cards it has when you trade in. This new deck you take into another tournament with bigger points and prize cards up for grabs. More trading, and another tournament sees you first game come to an end.

The tournaments are a pretty simple set of rules that crescendo into combination heaven. You can indulge your strategic mind and take a breather from the frantic card buying phase.

In the timed sections you try to balance your need for better cards, with the desire to build a collection, and the time you need to build a deck. There are loads of cards all with themes that take a wry look at different computer games, board games, and even real life collectible card games. Every card is meant to represent a rare card or better that you might pull from a booster pack.

You may buy the cards blind from the marketplace, but a clever system of symbols on the back of the cards gives you an idea of whether the card you are about to buy is likely to interact with the cards you already own. It’s a lot of fun seeing folk turn over their purchases and go ‘what?’ a lot as they absorb yet another weird card power they need to figure out how to exploit.

Your first game of Millennium Blades will feel chaotic, baffling, and overwhelming. You’ll either embrace that or feel like it is just too much. For myself I can’t wait to get back into that world and explore it further.

First Thought pieces are my impressions of a game after a single play. They do not represent a proper critical assessment of the game in question.