Card Game Roundup: Trial by Trolly, Digimon CCG (2020)

Trial By Trolly

From the makers of “Joking Hazard” and, yes, “Cyanide & Happiness”, comes another card game that trollies trains you for the common and vital adulting task that is making decisions.

Each turn, a new player takes their turn being the conductor while the rest organize into two teams. The teams populate two trolly tracks with cards drawn from three decks: the Innocent, the Guilty and Modifiers. Once the competing consequences are set, the teams argue their utmost for the counter to send the trolly down the other team’s track, killing everyone on it.

Those on the dead side of history each receive a token as a grim trophy of their failure, and the player(s) with the fewest tokens once everyone has had a turn (or two) at being the conductor win(s).

While the illustrations and concepts on the cards of the would-be trolly victims are certainly entertaining, the real fun lies in trying to sell the conductor of how much the other track deserves a good trollyin’. As such, the fun factor pretty much depends on having a fair amount more people than the minimum (3) playing it.

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Digimon CCG (2020)

At this point, the Digimon collectable card game has been rebooted several times. But when it came time for Digimon Adventure itself to begin again, Bandai decided to say, “What the heck, let’s redo the card game, too.”

And while I certainly had mixed feelings about the show, I think they did a bang-up job with the new card game.

The game features a simple, but versatile lineup of card types. You of course have the Digimon, one-off effects known as Options and Tamer cards, which straddle that line. That’s it. The cards come in 7 different colors, which more or less exist just to provide theming.

The mechanics of the game, though, feature two genius moves that make Digimon’s 5th? 6th? card game a very fresh experience. First is memory. Memory is used to pay the cost of playing a card. However, memory is tracked across a 20-point continuum, from 10 on one side down to 0 in the center, and back up to 10 on the other side. Each side is associated with a player (the game is strictly two-player only as a result), and a player’s turn ends immediately if they spend enough memory to push the number past zero, with the end result their opponent’s budget for their turn. This frees the game from much of the CCG orthodoxy of turn phases, giving play a very dynamic structure. It also makes for an obvious and natural risk/reward structure for playing expensive cards. The memory mechanic presents a complex metagame in memory manipulation. Major strategies of the game involve gaining memory on your opponent’s turn to force it to end early, finding ways to reduce the cost to play your cards, and careful memory budgeting so your opponent starts with only 1 memory as often as possible.

The other such mechanic is the path to victory. At the beginning of the game, each player takes the top five cards from their deck and place them into what the game calls a security stack. When you attack another player, you generally aren’t fighting the Digimon they have in play (though there are times that you can); you fight your opponent’s security stack. Option and Tamer cards will have a special effect when encountered this way, and any Digimon that pop up are fought. But win or lose, that security stack has one fewer card. Attack when there’s nothing left in the pile and the game is won, no matter how much your Digimon may be overpowered or outnumbered. While strong decks do have an advantage, no weak deck is ever unwinnable.

Games move pretty swiftly, and newer card sets introduce more complex ways of evolving your Digimon and new ways for cards to interact with each other, but nothing is so meta-beaking that you are lost without it (yet). Honestly, it seems as though the primary purpose for them is to ix things up or just try to style on someone.