This is a review of the training wheels version of the game, which is the one whose instructions you get in your box. There is also a “comprehensive” version of the game which will be the source of a future review.
* Veritas’ advertising states that the game is “customizable” but not “collectible”. I don’t agree with their terminology, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. The game comes in fixed starting decks, of which they are currently two, “Cyberdata” and “Cyberforce”. There are also “draft packs” of 14 cards each which are randomized. The only real difference between this and a standard collectible card game is that the cards are collated in such a way to guarantee that each display case of (24) draft packs contains a complete set. However if you buy individual boosters, you’ll get entirely random cards.
Personally my definition of “customizable but not collectible” extends only to this games with no randomization of cards, such as Reiner Knizia’s Blue Moon, but your mileage may vary.
The Components
As noted, Powerstorm is sold in 50-card fixed starter decks and 14-card draft (booster) packs.
The Cards: The cards for Powerstorm are all medium-weight and printed on glossy stock. They feature as their centerpieces Top Cow artwork. These first sets of cards are based on Marc Silvestri’s Cyberforce comic and presumably much of the artwork is drawn from there. Most of the artwork is well chosen and reproduces well at this size. Some small percentage—less than one in ten—unfortunately ended up a little murky. The artwork was nicely chosen to not only include individuals, but also some team shots, which really helps draw the whole set together.
The game is pretty complex, as described later, but a good job has been done in iconifying most of the information in usable ways and laying it all out well. Most cards include combat stats along the left and icons related to timing, range, and a few other things on the right. There are attributes and special power text below that, plus a really short synopsis of the cards’ results at the very bottom.
A few elements aren’t used much in the basic game including card color (of which there are about a half-dozen) and some arcane formulas that I presume have to do with deck construction.
Although there’s a lot of info here, you’ll be able to figure most of it out pretty quickly.
My only real complaint with the cards is that in some cases the print gets really small and is hard to read. (Perhaps I’m just getting too old to play CCGs.)
The Rules: A 64-page rulebook that covers the “training wheels version” of the game. I found some of the rules a little obtuse, and I had to read over the whole thing 2 or 3 times before I really felt comfortable enough to play. I think this has something to do with the terminology and something to do with the writing, because once you’re playing the (basic) game it’s not that terribly complex … though as we’ll see it’s pretty unusual for a CCG.
Overall I found Powerstorm an attractive and fairly easy-to-use CCG … once I got to the actual game itself. As such I’ve given it a “4” out of “5” for Style: quite good.
The Gameplay
Powerstorm is a game of superhero combat where the object is to either beat your opponent’s superhero team into submission, or else earn enough victory points to win anyway.
The Card: The cards in Powerstorm are divided into three broad types: character cards, combat cards, and news cards.
Character Cards. These are superheroes (or villains) like Killshot or Plasmus. Each character is largely defined by four attributes: Bashing, Accuracy, IQ, and Will. They tend to vary from 2 to 8. Many of the characters also have special text which defines unique powers, but these don’t tend to apply in the basic game.
Combat Cards. These are the cards that you play to attack other characters. Many of them have an attribute and a value, such as Accuracy 4. This defines who can use the card: in order for a character to use a combat card with a value, their appropriate attribute must be the value shown on the combat card or higher. This value also defines the amount of damage that is done. Some combat cards also have special text (again, largely unused in the basic game), and some are restricted to only being usable to attack or to block.
Some combat cards are more unusual. They may only be playable by a certain character, they may be playable as a “fast action”, or they may have other special powers. Some allow a flat out “dodge” of an attack, some influence other attacks, etc.
News Cards. These are cards that affect both players based on events like “Costly Medical Care” or “Take One for the Team”. They each have a value (which relates to when they come out) and special text. Some just say “Slow News Day”.
Setup: In the basic game each player begins by separating his cards. He lays four characters out to form his team, he shuffles his news stories to form his news deck, he sets aside several cards to form a special guest star deck, and he shuffles the rest of his cards (minus a few that are omitted from the basic game) to form a draw deck.
Each player should also have a 6-sided die and a 12-sided die, the first to record bids, the second to record victory points.
Before the first round, one player is randomly determined to have the initiative.
Order of Play: The game is played in rounds, each of which includes the following phases:
- Draw
- News
- Saving
- Betting
- Retreat Option
- Fight
- End of Round
Draw: Each player starts the round with no cards in their hand and draws up to a hand of eight.
News: Each player flips the top card of their news deck. The news story with the higher number takes effect, while the other is returned to the top of that players’ news pile (which gives players the opportunity to plan ahead for a news story which may come up soon).
News stories have various effects on all players, such as given bonuses if a character is KOed, making certain cards have better effects, etc.
Saving: Now, starting with the player with the initiative, and going back and forth, players have the option to save cards under their characters one at a time. To save a card under a character it must be usable by that character, the character must have no more than two cards total, and each card must have a different color (where color generally refers to the type of card it is, but doesn’t have any other effect in this basic game). Saved cards are placed face up under the character so that everyone can see what the card is.
The advantage of saving a card is you’ll be able to use it on a future round, where otherwise you might have to discard it. In addition, you can try and bluff your opponent into thinking your hand is weak because you’re saving things.
The disadvantage of saving a card is that your opponent now knows some of your capabilities, and those capabilities have been pinned down to a single character.
Betting: Now, based on the cards in their hand, the cards saved under their characters, the assumptions they’ve made about the cards in their opponent’s hand, and the cards saved under their opponent’s characters, each player starts bidding victory points to determine what the “pot” will be for winning this round of fighting.
(It should be noted that when players bid points they’re really bidding the bank’s points, as it were, not their own supplies. Though the strategy of the game does end up feeling a lot like Poker, as I discuss more in The Game Design, the use of Poker terms like “bet”, “call”, and “check” unfortunately obfuscates things a bit, because they’re not entirely accurate.)
This is done as follows:
First the initiave player antes 1 or 2 points, then the other player antes 1 or 2 points. Then actual bidding begins.
If there’s no bid increase on the table, as is the case for the first bid (which again begins with the player with initiative), the active player can “add” or “check”. Add means that he increases his bid by 1. Check means that he doesn’t do anything.
If there is a bid increase on the table, which means that the other player has done an “add”, then his opponent must either “check” or “call”. A “check” means that he does not increase the value of his bid; in addition, he gets to draw a card. A “call” means that he does increase the value of his bid by 1; in addition, he gets to draw, then discard a card.
(A few other things to comment on here: most notably, players may not have the same value bids, based on different antes and/or checks made in response to adds. Second, whenever a player increases the bid, he is also taking the chance that he’s going to make his opponent’s hand better, which makes it quite a dangerous proposition.)
No player may bid more than 5 total for the round. Bidding ends after both players check in sequence.
Retreat Option: Now each player, beginning with the player with initiative has the option to call a retreat. If someone retreats the round immediately ends with the retreating player losing. However, his heroes didn’t get thumped.
Fight Phase: Assuming there wasn’t a retreat, the players can now fight. The standard mechanism is pretty easy. Players go back and forth beginning the active player in initiative order. On his turn the active player can have one of his characters play a legal combat card as an attack on an opponent’s character. Then the opponent has an opportunity to block it, by either having the defending character play a legal combat card of any type that’s of equal to or higher value than the attack made on him, or else by having that character play a dodge card.
The advantage of hitting a character is that the combat card’s value counts toward KOing that character and this value also counts as “tally” points for the attacker--which count toward winning the round.
There are complications to this.
KOs. Each character has 20 life points. When he takes this much value in damage he’s KOed, meaning he’s out of the game. There’s also a method for a character to be KOed by getting hit by a large number of smaller damage. Basically if the number of wounds a character has taken plus the number of different types of wounds they are (e.g., bashing, accuracy, IQ, or will—the four attributes) equals seven, a character is KOed.
Fast Actions. Some actions, marked with a lightning bolt can be played as fast actions. Each of the attacker and the defender can play fast actions before or after their combat card (meaning the offensive card for the attacker or the blocking card for the defender).
In addition (and more notably) guest stars can be played as fast actions. Guest stars are character cards that you have in your hand. When you play a guest star you place it near your team, and then you get to take a combat card keyed to him from your special pile of guest star cards and put it into your hand.
A guest star acts just like a member of your team, except he goes away when he’s hit or at the start of your next fight phase.
Intercepts. For the most part a character has to defend himself, as noted above. However there are some special cards that allow one character to intercept an attack for another. Guest stars always get “free” intercepts. This means that you can use one of them to block an attack as long as they don’t actually take damage (meaning they have to either dodge or play a blocking combat card.) This is probably the biggest use of guest stars because you can play one, take a card to block from the special guest star deck and then immediately use it, all after you’re attacked.
Besides just fighting, there are a few other possible actions to take during the fight phase:
Fight Defensively. At any point when he’s an attacker a player can declare that he’s going to “fight defensively”. This means that he’s done playing attacks and he’s just going to defend (and maybe play fast actions) until the combat is over. It’s his way of saying that he thinks he’s scored enough tally to win the round and he’s just going to wait his opponent out.
Retreat. At any point when he’s an attacker a player can declare that he’s retreating. This takes him out of the fight, though his opponent can still play fast actions that don’t affect the retreated player.
Ending Combat. There’s an unnecessarily complex formulation for when the fight phase ends, but it basically amounts to—when both players are done. This is measured through some combination of fighting defensively, retreating, and/or passing.
End of Round Phase: Finally, the round of play ends.
First the players each count up their “tally”. This is largely based on the number of points of damage they did to their opponents’ characters over the round, though there are also some cards that can be spent that explicitly increase tally and some news stories which can increase tally for certain situations.
Whoever has the higher tally (or the player who didn’t retreat if someone did) wins the round and adds all the bids for the round to his victory point total.
Winning the Game: The game ends when someone scores a total of 12 victory points.
Relationships to Other Games
The Powerstorm rulebook leads off with the statement that it has “much of the thrill of the popular poker game Texas Hold ‘em.” When reading through the rules I thought the statement was overdone, but when I actually sat down and played the game I came to the conclusion that it was surprisingly accurate. The core of Powerstorm is really bluffing and bidding, with the play of the cards being a lot less important in the big picture than what hand you got and how you assessed it.
Despite statements to the contrary, Powerstorm is also a CCG. It’s got a slightly lower buy-in point than some do, but it’s also a lot higher than a standard game. However with that you have all the standard advantages you’d expect from a CCG: colorful individual cards, great theming, and the ability to customize individual decks (though the latter doesn’t show up in the basic game described herein).
The Game Design
Powerstorm is a tough, complex game, even in this “training wheels” format. I actually left out a few game systems, one of which allows you to cycle some cards out of your hand, and another of which differentiates between discards you can retrieve and ones you can’t, because they weren’t that important for the big picture of the game.
I think that some of the complexity was unnecessary, and could have benefited from a good outside developer and a good technical writer for the rulebook. There’s always a balance in games between whether increasingly complex systems actually benefit a game in excess of the complexity they add. Indie games too often go the way of complexity (and Powerstorm is far, far from the first game to do so).
Given the complexity of the game the “training wheels” version is a godsend, and it’s entirely understandable why the game is distributed with this version of the rules. I haven’t actually read through the advanced version of the game yet, because I wanted to first try out the game as it goes out to consumers. (The “training wheels” game comes in the box, then the advanced set of rules is available from their web site.) But, if the comprehensive rules add to the current complexity—and given the comparative length of the two rules, they do—it would be just about impossible to learn the full version of the game from scratch.
However it should also be noted that the “training wheels” game is somewhat awkward. You’re instructed to just ignore card text that references things that are from the advanced game, but there’s no good delineation, so you’re constantly reading text that makes no sense.
I did have some concerns about whether “training wheel” game would be a full game. After playing it I can definitively say it is. This is a complete game with plenty of strategic complexity to keep play interesting.
And generally, except for some sharp edges that could have been smoothed out by an outside developer, the gameplay of Powerstorm is quite interesting, particularly so, I think, because it’s very different from most CCGs out there. As I noted, the gameplay is really about bluffing and bidding. This centers on the “saving” and “betting” phases; in the first you may well save cards (or not) in such a way as to mask your intentions and the strengths of your hand, while in the later phase you’ll then try and make the best bet for the assessed value of your hand and that of your opponent.
The fight phase, which takes up the most time, is interesting, but it’s largely a resolution to see whether the hand assessments were right or not (though you also have to make on-the-fly resource allocation decisions about whether to expend saved resources or not).
This all results in gameplay that’s interesting and quite unique, though a lot of it is going to be very hard for a beginner to fathom because he won’t have good ideas about how to assess the cards he’s drawn.
Overall I’ve given Powerstorm a Substance rating of a high “3” out of “5”, slightly above average, with the caveat that it could rise to a “4” with additional play, once I better understand the depth of strategy that’s possible in the bidding and bluffing.
I’ll be rating the gameplay of the advanced version of the game in several weeks time.
Conclusion
Powerstorm is a superhero based CCG with initial releases based on the Top Cow comic Cyberforce. It’s an indie design that’s relatively complex—even in this “starter” version of the game—and has some sharp corners, but it also has some very original gameplay that centers on bidding and bluffing … much like Texas Hold ‘em.
