Initial D is a street racing game based on a Japanese anime property that I've never seen, which allows me to form my own appreciation for the game's adapted storyline. The setup is simple: choose a car, add modifications to the car up to a predefined limit, choose a set of 3 race courses, and build a fifty-card deck of turn, speed and tactics maneuvers. The winner of each stage is the last player to play a card. The first player to lead pole to pole for two stages, or the player to win the last stage of the course, wins.
The core mechanic of Initial D is the boarding attack component of 7th Sea (same company and designer, so no surprise there), which makes for very quick games. Each maneuver has a cost (Power or Traction), a strength rating for each of the three stage types (Straight, Curve, Obstacle), and a counter rating for each of the three maneuver types (Speed, Turn, Tactic).
So, I play a Speed maneuver in a straightaway. The strength is 5. To counter my maneuver, my opponent must play a maneuver with a speed counter value of 5 or higher.
Or not. If you find yourself short on a requirement, you can discard cards from your hand to receive a temporary boost.
Of course, it's not that simple. The car, modifications, and courses all add or subtract from the different ratings under different conditions. A tricked-out steering wheel might give you +2 counter for turns in curve stages, for example. Certain maneuvers have additional requirements, such as "Team X only" or "Trailing Car only", or stay in play to provide penalties or bonuses. Finally, maneuvers with low strength and counter values often have special abilities.
A first shuffle through a booster box and set of starters suggests a great deal of tactical depth: you can play super-powerful cars and maneuvers; you can play resource-denial to reduce your opponent's Power and Traction, thereby increasing the number of discards required to make payments; you can play a hand-denial deck to the same effect; and you can play a specialist deck, where you maximize your effectiveness for a certain type of maneuver or stage.
But all these strategies, and the game, seems to boil down to one principle: card advantage. To win, you have to play the last card, and the most effective way to play that last card is to have more cards in hand than your opponent. If you can draw extra cards because you're the lead car, because you have the most Style points, or from the draw maneuvers, you're very likely to win. Not only can you withstand your opponent's specialization, you can survive discard and denial strategies, and you simply have more flexibility to impose your own strategy.
Nonetheless, I believe strongly that a card advantage deck can be beaten. I think that resource denial may be the way to go.
In terms of individual cards, some of the fixed cards appear to be overpowered. The onboard computer, which lets you increase the strength of a maneuver once per stage, and the passenger which lets you increase the counter value of any one maneuver by 4 once per stage, are essential for every deck. Why? Because the passenger gives a -1 power penalty which is compensated by the computer's +1 power bonus, and because the abilities can be used multiple times in the race. If the abilities were limited to once per race, that would be a different story.
The cards are also closely affiliated to the different factions and drivers, which again reinforces the similarities to 7th Sea. There are faction- and driver-only maneuvers, and a weird web of rules for using factions and drivers. To declare yourself part of a faction, you need that mod for your car. If you declare a faction, and you want a driver, you must have use a driver from that faction, and those drivers can only drive particular types of cars. Fair enough, but the downside is that these cards tend to be rare, and there's little more frustrating in the CCG hobby than drawing unplayable rares. I'm also not thrilled with the idea of booster boxes holding 24 packs instead of the usual 36, because the price decrease isn't proportional.
Distribution complaints aside, this is a fun game. I'll add some more cards to my collection, and head off to the races!
