As a child of the 90s, I have grown up with and experienced my fair share of trading card games, starting with the granddaddy of them all, Magic: The Gathering, starting in around 1994. I was there when the Pokemon craze was born (I actually enjoy playing the card game, not just collecting the cards!), my friends and I have sent one another to the Shadow Realm with Yu-Gi-Oh. Even to this day, I have fallen in love with the Digimon and Final Fantasy TCGs. It was thanks to these experiences that when I received a copy of Millenium Blades from Level 99 in the mail and took a look at it, I instantly knew that this game might just be the most meta board game of all time and 100% my jam.
To set the playing field real quick so you have a rough idea in your head, think of Millennium Blades as if Level 99 took Yu-Gi-Oh – the anime hijinx, artwork, and trading card game aspects – and made it a competitive board game… about playing a competitive card game. Think of it this way: instead of the primary focus being pitting your deck against someone else’s – slaying their creatures, casting spells to inhibit them (while there is still a bit of that) – you are trying to make a deck that will earn you the most points that represent how well you perform in various tournaments. Taking into account that rounds meta elements (in the universe reasoning being that these are basically whatever the popular type of card at the time of the tournament) to try and get a few more points along the way. Your placement will reward you with victory points, and whoever has the most victory points at the end of three tournaments wins the game.
For those who may be familiar with various board games, Millennium Blades could be thought of as a mix of a deck and tableau (i.e., a Euro-style) board game. The game is split up into two main phases: the deck-building and the tournament phases. The deck-building phase faithfully recreates that feeling of cracking packs in your favorite TCG – cards are “bought” using stacks of fake currency and are purchased while being faced down so you don’t know what you are getting until you “open” or flip the cards over. You aren’t stuck with the cards you have, however, and are able to sell them to an aftermarket available to everyone, trade with a player for cards and friendship cards which grant additional Victory Points at the end of the game, or “fuse” them into stronger cards by discarding them.
Another unique gameplay element to this phase, and one that I haven’t encountered before, is the timing element associated with this. This phase is handled in real-time instead of players taking turns buying or selling cards. When deck building begins, a timer starts, and you have 20 minutes to complete. I found that this added countdown was a creative solution that helped keep things really moving and prevents analysis paralysis. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s also a feature I wouldn’t mind more games adopting. Once the 20 minutes are up, you will have a set of eight cards that will serve as your “deck” in the next main phase, the Tournament phase, and a set of cards that act as a special collection of cards (because any TCG player also has a bit of a collection of cards to also show off) to earn you some points.
In the Tournament phase, you and the other players take turns playing a card from your eight-card decks until each player’s table of six spots is filled. While each player may have access to eight cards, the extra two cards you have access to serve as a sort of sideboard to give you some flexibility to adjust your strategy if needed. Cards will play off of each other, triggering effects, earning you RP, and fighting other cards, among a variety of other things, and at the end of the tournament, whoever has accumulated the most RP wins the Tournament and nets the most Victory Points.
While I may have fun with the actual “playing” of Millenium Blades, the setup by default is far more daunting than the real-world timers of the game. The moment you crack open the box for the first time, you are greeted with over 600 glossy cards that need to be sorted and stacks of money that need to be put together using the included bundle stickers. Now, there isn’t much you can do about the stacks of cards you need to unwrap and organize, unfortunately (although I really wish that Level 99 included dividers of some sort to help keep track of where all the different cards are). Still, I did devise some tricks that I figured I would share that make it more alluring to table and play.
After about 44 minutes of taping stacks of fake anime money together, I realized that for as much as I may appreciate what the developer was going for – recreating that feeling of dropping big money on cards – with each stack I put together, the less interested I was becoming in the game. As someone with a 10 month old child that unfortunately doesn’t have the dexterity or attention to do this step for me, I opted to instead simply replace the paper money with Poker Chips from an old set I got back in High School. I even used the same colors for the monetary values in a 1-chip to 1-stack conversion. This method even freed up some extra space in the box, but I did keep the sticker rolls and the paper dollars in case I ever want to swap them back.
My next small piece of advice is to get an automatic card shuffler. Running you anywhere between 10 to 25-ish dollars (or upwards of $200 if you want something super fancy), this small device will save you so much time getting Millennium Blades ready to play. Each game utilizes some 400 cards out of the 600 that are included in the base game that all need to be shuffled , so having a gizmo that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you will be well worth the investment.
You may have picked up the casual mention of the “base game” a moment ago, and that’s because Millennium Blades also has a number of expansions that add additional cards to mix into the rotation but also new game modes for Solo and Cooperative play. Thanks to a recent successful Kickstarter, these previously discontinued expansions are coming back and are currently available on Level 99’s website for preorder.
The whole experience of Millenium Blades spoke to the TCG player inside me while providing the board game player with a strategic and complex game to enjoy. Millennium Blades is certainly not a light game, and those interested in the premise, puns, and visuals should be aware of that before jumping in. Millennium Blades can be bought on Level 99’s website (and preorder the expansions), Level 99’s Amazon page, and potentially at your local game store.
Thank you to Level 99 Games for providing us with a copy of Millennium Blades to check out!
