I recently picked up the Penny Arcade UFS boxed set. The UFS family of games is slated to hit later this year, featuring Street Fighter and Soulcalibur, and for some crazy reason they decided to debut the game with a learn-to-play 1 on 1 set featuring Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade. I liked the presentation - two custom deck boxes, one for your Gabe deck and one for your Tycho deck - but I think $30 is a bit much. Most games sell one-player starters at $10, or a two-player set with a pair of half-decks for a maybe a buck or two more. But two full decks at $30 is well beyond the curve, even if you add in those spiffy deck boxes. $25 probably would have been a fairer price, but I gather this is intended to be a low print run collectible.

Anyway, I sprung the game on my Lead Gaming Guinea Pig, Mike. Let's review the damn thing. I'll tell you right now that it is isn't unrepentantly awful like the InuYasha learn-to-play set, and I found it more interesting than when we played High Plains Drifter. Mike probably preferred High Plains Drifter, but then again, he's also never been to Penny Arcade Dot Com and doesn't have any license bias. I almost always have license bias. License bias will drag a lot of money out of my wallet.

This Penny Arcade set is merely a preview of how UFS works... I assume when the fullblown CCG hits, it will be more detailed. (And I already have a Chun Li sample deck from the upcoming Street Fighter release, which does have some subtle rules additions.) The system is set up to square one fighter (one deck) against another fighter (another deck.) Which I like. I like that I have one guy that I'm controlling, one major character. One of my beefs with DC/Marvel Vs. is that, no matter what faction you choose, you always have to field tons of obscure, crappy characters. In UFS, it's like pitting Superman vs. Darkseid without having to suffer through all the third tier characters cluttering up the table.

Layout and Design

Naturally, the PA guys take care of their own artwork, flavor text, and (I'm guessing) card titles. Gabe's art looks great. (But I'll bet he was sorely tested in his work for most of the Tycho cards, as Tycho's gimmick is all "my vast intellect" and "really big words"... and how do you come up with 20 interesting combat images based on that?) I'm sure this was a dream come true for them, a goddamn genuine card game based on their webcomic empire. Unfortunately, the card templates - which are generic for use in any UFS release - are horrible. Amateur work. Most people ought to have the Bevel effect permanently deleted from their copies of Photoshop, and after looking at these cards, I can think of a few other effects I would similarly nominate. But it's the bevels everywhere that truly junk up the layouts. Inner bevels, outer bevels, bevelled strokes. It's a mess.

We figured it was supposed to be badass-looking, because there's a general theme of "sharp pointy things" in the templates. The whole look, from the logo on down, has a kind of Pro Wrestling design vibe... which is not a compliment. It brings to mind those tribal tattoos that everybody was into a couple of years back... but even then, it's not even a particularly well-done tribal tattoo.

Then there's the iconography, which is the saddest looking aspect of the whole design... even sadder than the omnipresent bevels. Each card has three icons on it that define its "resource type" - typical stuff like chaos, water, justice, death. I don't actually know what they indicate because the PA set ignores them. My Chun Li deck does explain how they affect the cards you can play; it's just purposefully left out of the PA starter set. The thing is, the icon design is all over the map: different line weights, some are overly detailed and don't reproduce well at this small size, some may even be garden variety clip art. Check out that straight-from-1995-web-design skull icon. They lack a consistent, easy-to-understand presentation... as you find in, for example, the mana symbols in Magic.

It looks like a homebrew creation, and it would be mostly fine for a homebrew creation, but this is a nationally distributed professional product that is expected to sit alongside games that found the budget to create nice looking, visually pleasing, graphically uniform card templates.

Sorry, but lousy ass card templates really grind me.

Game Mechanics

You start with one card in play, your character card. As you would expect, it has special powers and keywords. It also tells you your life amount and hand size. It even mentions your dude's height, weight, gender and blood type... which I initially assumed was meaningless stat filler until I read that some cards will reference that. Say, an attack card that only works on characters who weigh under 130 pounds. That amuses me. I would enjoy having to ask my opponent "Hey, what's your blood type? No reason." Cute touch.

Keep in mind, this game is supposed to simulate fast-action video game combat. In that respect, I like the basic card playing mechanic. It's probably close to what the Dragon Ball Z CCG should have done, instead of the unintelligible muck that game went with instead.

Because, you can play as many cards as you like during your turn - achieving the wonderful fighter-game valhalla of being in the zone and delivering a flurry of punishing blows on your foe. You just have to pay an increasing cost - your "control" - to continue to play cards. Each card has a difficulty cost... each successive card played has that difficulty upped according to the number of cards that have gone before. If you fail paying that cost, you have lost control and your turn ends. (Of course, your opponent can stop your advance with a reversal or minimize the damage with a block.)

Paying that cost is weird, however. Every card in the game has a control value on it. You flip cards to reveal these control values in the same way you would roll a die... it's to generate a random number. So if I need a 4 to play a card, and I flip a card with a 3 on it, I have failed. The cards are balanced so that some jerky deckbuilder can't cobble up a deck where every card has a control value of 6 (the highest I've seen.) Generally, the higher the cost to play a card, the lower the control value on that card.

Attacks are played and discarded at the end of the turn, but assets and foundations (there's a martial arts buzzword for you) stay on the table. These cards will have interesting game effects on them... but they can also be used to help add to your control value pull. You just tap them, excuse me, you commit them. Sigh.

Which brings up a problem with the Gabe vs. Tycho decks. Tycho has an inordinate number of cards that cost 5 to get into play... 16 of them compared to Gabe's 2. Gabe's cards are split almost evenly between costs of 2, 3 or 4. Tycho has more 3s and 5s. And when it comes to those control values - the means by which you pay to get cards in play - Tycho has 19 2s, 8 3s, 18 4s and 10 5s. So a third of the time, Tycho is going to pull a 2. Gabe's deck has 12 2s, 20 3s, 8 4s and 14 5s... that's 14 5s that he doesn't even need, since he only has 2 5-cost cards to play (plus a couple of X cost cards, which pulling a 5 for those is like openly peeing into Tycho's face.) Gabe will only flip a 2 value 20% of the time. (I'm rounding.)

The idea is that Gabe is a faster player, while Tycho is stronger in the late-game. The issue being that, if Tycho doesn't get his low power cards onto the table to help pay for the bigger cards, he'll never be able to afford the costs of the higher attacks. It seems unbalanced. Gabe has cards he can easily play, while Tycho can get mana-screwed right off the bat.

My advice to you, in a stage whisper: pick the Gabe deck.

That doesn't mean this is a bad game, just a poorly balanced starter set. Mike and I didn't get to try it, but maybe a Gabe vs. Chun Li game would be a better match. As it turned out, Mike (as Tycho) just sat there getting pummelled because he couldn't play anything to stop my Gabe's fists of fury.

Combat

So you see how cards are played: flip for quasi-random control values to play cards of increasing difficulty. The attack cards add another layer of possibilities, because all attacks are defined as taking place in a high- mid- or low-zone. Like, kicking somebody in the head, punching somebody in the gut, or doing a leg sweep to knock them off their feet. Attacks can only be blocked by playing a block card with a matching (or nearby) zone. A high-zone attack can only be blocked by a high- or mid-zone block, and so on. The blocking player has to perform a control check as well (so Tycho gets screwed even when it isn't even his turn), and if the block goes through then the attack damage may be lessened or stopped entirely.

What is interesting is that there aren't really "block" cards, per se. Any kind of card can have a block symbol on it... and if so, you can play it as a block. It's the kind of dual-use cardplay that I like so much in Doomtown, 7th Sea, and my own TaleSpin.

But naturally, they let the art design team screw this up. The block symbol is overpoweringly large and sits in a highly obvious location: upper right. It's not even set off in any way, just blasted right overtop the artwork. Attack cards all have an attack symbol, which is mid-right, smaller than the block symbol! That's just backwards. Note that both of these are more than simple icons: they contain numbers and that whole zone thing. It is confusing to look at an attack card that also contains a block and try to immediately parse which number is attacking when you play it. Bad design makes the game harder to get into, folks. I bet that once you fully internalize the game's workings, it becomes second-nature... but you have to fight your intuition to get there. An attack card's primary function is to attack, and the attack's strength should have prime placement on the template.

Final Analysis

I like the increasing difficulty gimmick. There's this neat momentum engine that handily represents your character gaining the edge in the fight. The PA webcomic art has never looked better; it's nice to see cartoon-style artwork taken seriously, because most card games feel they have to use photo-realistic painted pieces. The custom boxes are great.

On the negative side: design, layout, design, design, design. And also layout. The icons are embarrassing, the whole frame work an amateur job. The timing trigger keywords are simplified to E:, R:, F:, which is ridiculous considering how easy (and much more legible) it would have been to just type out Enhance:, React: and Form:. As an introductory set, the decks come out of the box unbalanced. And it's a tad pricy.

When the Soulcalibur set hits (April), I'll pick up some and see how it feels.