Bandai’s upcoming Gundam Trading Card game has a red hot IP – but does it have the chops to stand tall in the crowded TCG market? Team Wargamer managed to squeeze in a short test during the recent UK Games Expo – here’s what we think.
Fellow Wargamer writer Matt Bassil and I got a hands-on demo with the Gundam TCG on Saturday, which lasted just long enough to see all the systems in action, but was far too brief to assess what the game’s first set will be like. What we did play suggests it has strong bones – but we’re a long way from being able to judge if it can stand alongside the best trading card games, giants like Magic the Gathering, Pokémon TCG, or even its own older brother in Bandai’s catalogue, the One Piece TCG.
One thing that was readily apparent – and which you’ll soon pick up while reading this article – is that the Gundam TCG begs, borrows, and steals ideas from just about every TCG out there. Team Wargamer spends enough time tracking the best Pokémon cards and keeping up with MTG sets to know when we’ve seen something before, and boy howdie have we seen a lot of the ideas in this game before.
But there’s a lot to be said in favour of iteration – all the best board games are iterations on similar, simpler games. And so far, it seems like the Gundam TCG is bringing together a whole stack of time-tested ideas to create something interesting and new.
How to win
Your goal in the Gundam TCG is to wipe out your opponent – no surprises there. Each player has a single hitpoint, but starts the game protected by six shields and a basic base. The base is the first thing your opponent needs to destroy, while your shields can each withstand a single hit (of any strength).
Just like the Security Stack in the Digimon TCG, your shields are facedown cards from your deck. When they’re destroyed, you’ll flip them over – if the card has a ‘Burst’ effect, you’ll get to use it immediately.
While most of the Burst effects we saw in the demo were simply “add this card to your hand”, there’s lots of design space here for cards that function like traps in YuGiOh or Netrunner, or effects that are keyed off Bursts occurring.
Minimally, Burst gives a natural catch-up mechanic to a player who’s taken a hit, and it’s an easy place for the designers to bolt on marginal value to a card. But if the designers choose to support it, Burst could enable deck archetypes with particularly squirrelly control strategies.
Gundams, Pilots, and other cards.
The main units you’ll be playing are Gundams, which come with offensive and defensive stats that will be very familiar to anyone who’s played Magic the Gathering. As in Lorcana, units can’t be the target of an attack unless they’re ‘rested’ (tapped).
When two units fight, they deal damage to one another based on their attack power, dying when they receive damage equal to their health. Damage persists from round to round (so it’s more Star Wars Unlimited than Magic in that respect), letting you whittle away a large target over several turns.
Playing a pilot lets you “pair” it with a Gundam, granting a boost to the mech’s offensive and defensive stats. Gundams also have ‘link’ requirements that a pilot can meet by having specific keywords – usually sharing a faction keyword with the mech. The first benefit of linking is that the Gundam being piloted can attack right away instead of having to wait a turn, but it may trigger other abilities as well.
Slamming pilots into the cockpits of their Gundam is obviously a core part of the fantasy, but the “pair” and “link” systems do a lot of heavy lifting in the rules. The synergy between pilots and mechs serves as a soft deck building limitation, while pairing or linking a Gundam are common game events other than attacking or entering that other abilities can be triggered on, opening up lots of design space.
For the player, this creates interesting decision points about when to play out a pilot: should you pair a Gundam with the pilot in your hand to secure the increased stats, even though they’re mismatched, or is it worth leaving the machine unpiloted for now to try and claim that tasty link bonus in a later turn, or to use it to pilot a bigger and better mech later?
Command cards provide one-off effects that can have a variety of timing restrictions – think YuGiOh Spells, MTG Instants and Sorceries, Pokémon TCG Trainers, etc. You’ve used these cards before. What’s a little different is that you might see a way to use a Pilot as a Command Card, giving a few cards some greater modularity.
Bases are unusual. Playing a base puts it in front of your stack of shields where it can soak up damage, and may provide additional effects as long as it’s still alive. It’s most like a creature with an effect that forces your opponents to target it, like the Sentinel keyword in SWU, except that that keyword already exists in Gundam, ‘Blocker’.
Perhaps it’s best to conceptualise the role of Bases more like Stadiums in the Pokémon TCG or Enchantments in Magic the Gathering, persistent buffs that mostly hang around in their own zone – but with the key difference that they can be removed with regular sources of damage, rather than having distinct removal conditions.
Resources
The resource system in Gundam TCG is simple and effective. Each turn you’ll refresh your resources and then add a new one in front of you. Cards in Gundam have both a Resource cost and a Level. You need to have at least as many resources in play as a card’s Level, and ‘rest’ (tap) a number of resources equal to its Cost in order to play it.
It’s a brute force balancing tool, but I like it. It limits how far a ramp strategy can take you, and let the designers create cards that are cheap and powerful without having to worry about them creating explosive opening hands. A card effect that is game-breaking if played on the first turn can be a lot weaker once your opponent has established their board.
Presentation
The art on these cards is killer. Gundam just look cool, and the Gundam TCG cards devote plenty of space to art to really make the most of that fact. There’s loads of scope for simply incredible chase cards and foil treatments here – this is going to be a collector’s dream.
Promo shots have already emphasised how clean and restrained the design is on the cards, and playing with them revealed that a lot of thought has been put into usability. Level and Resource cost are in the top left corner, visible when you fan out your hand, while the card type is written vertically down the left hand side for the same reason.
The stats of Units appear on the bottom right of the cards, as do the stat bonuses that Pilots provide, so you can socket the Pilot card under the Gundam and still have all the relevant information visible. There’s good keywording, reinforced with colored borders around the keywords, which both saves text space and makes it easier to tell at a glance what abilities a unit has and what game events will trigger them.
While the layout of information of good, the density is quite packed. The text box on cards is small and the font size is tiny – we’re not into a YuGiOh nightmare scenario, exactly, but it’s much less legible than Magic: the Gathering or Star Wars: Unlimited. Faction keywords are important for pairing units, and they’re very small.
Cards also have very different effects depending on which zone they’re in. Anything under a Unit or Pilot’s name is in effect when it’s played out to the board – but if there’s a way to use the card as a Command, or if it has a Burst effect, it’ll appear above the name.
The same factors that make text efficient and easy to reference once you’ve got your head around it are going to pose a headache for onboarding newcomers, who will have to squint, digest, and decode each card until they’ve got a feel for the game.
Another weakness is the absence of a symbol representing the color of cards, which is only represented in the color of the card border, presenting a barrier for colorblind gamers. So far this only seems to be a factor in deck-building so it is at least not a problem that will come up during a game, but it could have been avoided by simply adding a unique icon to each color of card.
Final thoughts
What we’ve been able to see of the Gundam TCG so far is a very solid foundation. As evidenced by Lorcana’s successful landing in 2024, solid rules attached to a global IP can go a very long way. Bandai has managed that already once with the One Piece TCG, but has struggled with its other mega-brands, especially when badly balanced second and subsequent sets have created stagnant metagames for competitive players. It’s far too early to judge for Gundam TCG – but I’m excited to see what it’s like when it launches.
For an altogether more experimental and fresh TCG, check out our early access preview of Riftbound, the League of Legends TCG!
Are you a fan of the Gundam series, or an avid Gunpla builder? Have you demo’d the game as well? We’d love to hear what you think in the official Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
