Tabletop
Scratching the Magic Itch
Chasing high-stakes card combos doesn't have to mean obliterating your wallet on rare singles when modern board games can deliver a similar degree of satisfaction right out of the box.
In my early years of exploring modern board games, one of the weird itches I was trying to address was missing collectible card games like Magic: the Gathering. I had last played MTG in high school and had only loosely followed the game’s progress over the years since it was pretty costly to keep up. Naturally, certain board games, or at least types of board games, brought me a similar degree of satisfaction in a different way.
The first game that felt like Magic to me was Smash Up (Adlerac Entertainment Group 2012) with its core “shufflebuilding” mechanic. It almost felt like a “solution” to the expensive nature of CCGs since players are constrained to working with 2 factions with 20-card decks to create a single 40-card one. The game limits you to playing 1 minion and 1 action per turn instead of bringing in a mana system, but beyond that, it checked a lot of the right boxes for me. Naturally, each faction had an implied strategy that players would have to discover for themselves, like how the Pirates tend to move across bases, or how zombies have the ability to come back from the discard pile. It wasn’t quite Magic’s 5-color system, but it had a lot of the same vibes.
The game has been around for a while, and they’ve released a ridiculous number of expansions that have added many different factions. I’ve lost track of which faction does what, and often end up with potentially less optimal faction pairings when we do dig up our massive Smash Up collection. It’s still quite fun, and the game definitely hews closer to the head-to-head nature of Magic.
My first true deckbuilding game was Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game (Upper Deck Entertainment 2014), which isn’t even the first Legendary game. The fact that it was connected to the Alien franchise is what drew us in initially, but this game really blew us away. Beyond how it really captured the story beats of the 4 main Alien movies (at the time), it also made me fall in love with deckbuilding as a game mechanic. Not only did it give the satisfaction of playing unique cards and trying to execute clever combos just like in Magic, but it also helped to scratch the deckbuilding itch, even if you’re limited to doing it during the game itself.
I had already been playing modern board games with my partners for a few years at this point, but for one reason or another, I had never gotten to play other deckbuilding games. Yes, I hadn’t even experienced playing Dominion. But this is the game that set us on this particular avenue of board games, including pretty much every other release in the Legendary line. The bulk of our collection now consists of the expansions for Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game (Upper Deck Entertainment 2012), but we have enjoyed the various side quests of sorts for their one-offs like The Matrix and Game of Thrones.
While Legendary also resulted in various side adventures with other deckbuilding systems, it wasn’t until Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure (Dire Wolf/Renegade Game Studios 2016) that we found ourselves enjoying a novel use of the mechanic. Instead of just focusing on fighting enemies with the cards in your steadily developing deck, they created a dungeon crawler. And that simple twist made a world of difference, and resulted in a lot of silly adventures where our various thieves do their best to escape with their treasures - or die in the depths due to their greed. It truly is a great game series, and we have pretty much every expansion, including their legacy spin-offs.
Beyond the initial medieval fantasy setting, they never ventured to the stars with Clank! In! Space! (Dire Wolf/Renegade Game Studios 2017). That iteration shook things up with a modular board, and some excellent science fiction references brought to life as cards. I’m totally the target market for geeky content like this, even when the game feels a little more challenging than the original game. There’s also Clank! Catacombs (Dire Wolf/Renegade Game Studios 2022), that went back to the original setting but gave it a tile-based, modular board system with an exploration game mechanic.
At present, the peak deckbuilding experience for me is the Dune: Imperium (Dire Wolf 2020) line. I already said that I’m a science fiction geek, but I’m also quite the Dune geek, and this game was of particular interest even if it seemingly flew under the radar when it came out before the 2021 movie. This wasn’t a Clank! Spin-off, but it did have similar vibes because of how Dire Wolf produces cards. But beyond deckbuilding, the game is also a worker placement game, which is another beloved game mechanic that drew me into modern board games. And how you juggle the cards you add to your deck to determine what actions you’ll take is a brilliant gaming puzzle.
I REALLY love this game, both in terms of how it plays and the richness of the theme. The expansions have done a great job of celebrating different aspects of the franchise - not just the recent live-action movies. I never expected to have cards for Tleilaxu creations like slugs and chairdogs until the Immortality (2022) expansion came around. But even as a franchise game, it has been well-received by friends who never read the books or really got into the movies. That just speaks to the quality of the game as a whole - it’s solid, good fun.
Funnily enough, I’ve fallen back into Magic in recent years, especially with the increase in Universes Beyond content. It was the Doctor Who Commander precon decks that lured me back, and now I’m trying to find ways to play the game digitally just to avoid spending too much on the cards again, like in my much younger years. But at the very least, we still play a lot of these other deckbuilding games, and that keeps that part of my hobbyist brain (mostly) satisfied.
