Zoon is a non collectible card game from French firm I’ve never heard of.
The general concept of the game is that it simulates two tribes of “Zoons”
(cuddly little animals with humanoid characteristics and only
semi-pronounceable names) battling it out to capture each other’s “Emblem”
or tribal totem. The game is played out on a grid-like space on your
kitchen table (or desk at work& ahem). The tribes maintain their icon on
their sides “backfield” as it were, and deploy troops to protect the emblem
as well as capture the opposing emblem. Astute readers with an elementary
school background might be noticing the game “capture the flag” right now–
and you’d be right, that’s exactly what Zoon is. Where it diverges from
the playground, however, is where Zoon becomes interesting, and worth the
paltry amount being charged for it (and yes, it is worth the money).

HOW IT PLAYS: Each card represents one element of the limited Zoon universe.
A card can be a Chief, a Priest, a Monster, an Elite, a Soldier, an Emblem,
or a Trump. Most cards are Soldiers or Elites (which are better soldiers
that might have some special abilities). Monsters are usually very tough
soldiers with some nifty abilities tacked on, like flight, or a specialized
attack. Priests, Chiefs and Emblems are one-of-a-kind types with very
specialized abilities. Each card has a “touch score”& a number or star
icon on each corner of the card, with a picture in the middle, and a movement
grid demonstrating how the card moves, and an icon showing what classification
of Zoon it is. Trumps are special case, usually one-shot items that can be played
to effect combat or movement.

PLAY SEQUENCE: The play sequence is dirt simple:

1. Choose a side (tribe).
   
2. Decides who goes first.
   
3. Deploy your Zoons face DOWN in the backfield.
   
4. Alternating between players, either:
   
5. Move a Zoon into an empty grid location;
   
6. Move a Zoon into an occupied grid location (and have combat);
   
7. Play a Trump.
   
8. That’s it. Play until one side captures the other’s Emblem.
   

Movement: Movement is handled in an interesting manner. As mentioned above, each Zoon card has a little diagram printed on it that depicts exactly how that Zoon will move on the grid. Some Zoons can only go forward, some can go forward and backward, some can only go sideways. The overall effect is very chess like.

Combat: Combat is very bizarre and very amusing– really worth the price of admission in itself. I get the feeling that the designers built the rest of the game around this idea. Combat is initiated by one card moving into an enemy card’s space, as mentioned above. Keep in mind both sides are still face-down. Before combat, each player can rotate their cards 180 degrees in any direction. The player then touches any corner of the opponent Zoon’s face-down card. Each corner has a touch score, remember? The numbers, which equate to combat strength, are compared. The larger number wins, and eliminates the opposing card. In case of ties, the attacker retreats back a square and the defender stands fast. If the opposing player choose a corner with a star on it, he has to consult the special tribal information card each Zoon tribe gets to find out what happens. Personally, I find this combat system to be design elegance personified. Combat takes advantage of the card format perfectly and establishes a true “fog of war” situation where you never can figure out what’s going to happen until it happens.

Trumps: Trumps add a little spice to the game. Regular trumps represent a wide a variety of actions, some of which effect movement, and some of which effect combat. Missile trumps are played just like combat troops, only with a special X symbol on one corner. If the X symbol is picked during combat, the opposing Zoon is eliminated.

The Verdict

The artwork is silly, almost juvenile. The combat system is something Koko, the sign language-enabled gorilla, could probably pick up& yet.. Zoon has something indefinable. Zoon is funny, fast, and well designed for the card medium. I feel that the game’s artwork might detract from the “crusty old gamer” crowd, but it has potential for being a hit with the extremely young (hey, look at Pokemon). My only beef with the production values was the translation from Zoon’s original French. This leaves something to be desired. Even this was a pretty minor problem– most points are adequately conveyed, though lacking in a detailed explanation. For instance, the notion of retreat from a draw in combat& did they mean go back ONE square, or TWO? What if the Zoon can’t move backwards? Still, for the amount Zoon costs you really can’t go wrong trying it, if you like this sort of thing.

“Bang, you’re dead.” “Nope, you missed me.” “No, I didn’t.”

That’s the classic example of why we put rules in our games - to settle disputes and to give everyone a level playing field. But it’s also an example of the story affecting the ‘rules’ of the game.

The person being shot at could have responded all sorts of ways to justify his continued existence - “Bounced off my Titanium Armor”, or “You can’t see me, I’m invisible” or even “The bullet goes right through this holographic simulation of me.” The point is that the background story of the game can and should dictate how the rules work within the story.

Now, it’s possible to have a game without benefit of story (Chess, for example), and stories can be told without a game behind them. By far, however, the standard in the adventure gaming industry is to combine them; mechanics are set based on the story, and story pulls together all of the mechanics. Even the name “Adventure gaming” combines the two elements of story and mechanics.

Two of the big styles of games right now are Collectible Card Games (CCGs), and Role-Playing Games (RPGs). There really isn’t anyone out there that would argue that they represent the two sides of that spectrum between stories and game mechanics. Certainly, RPGs focus more heavily on the world and background as the players work together to create an interesting story. In RPGs, winning tends to be a fairly nebulous concept, and character development (and thus story development) is truly the primary goal. CCGs, however, have a much greater focus on winning. Because of that focus, the mechanics which keep the playing-field level are much more important than they are in an RPG.

However, neither mechanics nor story works best without the other. The best games have a interesting and absorbing world that draws in the players and a set of rules that enhance rather than distract from that world, while still providing the balance of a good set of mechanics.

But what happens when a CCG becomes and RPG? What happens when an RPG becomes a CCG? I’ve been fortunate enough to have been the lead designer on two CCGs - Legend of the Five Rings and Deadlands: Doomtown. For those that are unfamiliar with these two worlds, Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) is set in the empire of Rokugan - a fantasy version of feudal Japan, and Deadlands is set just after the civil war in the U.S. except that magic, mad scientists, and zombies fight for control and the ‘wild west’ has become the ‘weird west’.

When we began the design of L5R, we knew that we had to be different somehow. The CCG market had peaked and was beginning it’s descent. Games were starting fail where before any CCG that came along was making money hand-over-fist. One of our first goals was to build the world along with the cards. Rather than a game where the players had nebulous goals, we wanted our players to be able to answer the basic “Ws” of Journalism while they played their games. “Who am I”? “Why am I fighting this person”? “Where are we”? “What are we fighting about”? If the players had those questions in mind while they were playing, then the story of the game would answer itself, but if even one of those questions couldn’t be answered, then the game would be as abstract as moving pieces around the board in Risk or Monopoly.

To answer all of those questions, there had to be some large back-story within which all of the “mini-conflicts” that the players would be playing would make sense. Even in the beginning of development of the CCG, we knew that we would need to do as much world development on the CCG as companies typically spend on their RPGs. So, that’s where we started. We actually spent the first month of development of the CCG without any mechanics or cards; we only worked on the world of Rokugan and the people in it. So, when we were ready to work on the actual card game, we already had a detailed and (hopefully) interesting world to set it in.

Then, over the next couple of years, as we continued to develop the card game, the world got more and more detail added to it. Three years later, when we finally began developing the L5R RPG, we actually had more detailed story information than we could possibly fit into a core rulebook. It was simply a matter of deciding on which information to pass along in the first book, and what to save for future books. After that, we chose a set of mechanics that we thought fit the style and flavor of Rokugan, and sent the book to press. Possibly the easiest core RPG that anyone has ever written, just because we had spent 3 years getting ready to write it.

Just a little while later, we got the contract to design a CCG set in the Deadlands world. This was an entirely different design problem than the L5R CCG had been. This time, we were playing in someone else’s sandbox. Also, their sandbox had a whole bunch of rules we weren’t allowed to break. Now, those rules made the sandbox very cool, but they presented two very distinct issues.

First of all, unlike the L5R CCG, we didn’t have complete control over the world - the rules had already been written in Deadlands and we couldn’t just do whatever we wanted to. One example of this was that originally, we were designing spells to work like action cards - you play the card using a spell-caster, but then it goes to the discard pile. When the guys at Pinnacle (the owners and original developers of the Deadlands RPG and world) saw that, they gave us a call and we had to change it - spells would attach to the spell caster so that they could use them over and over again.

On the other side of the same coin, however, is that all of the rules and the world that Pinnacle had developed were so cool and interesting that it also made our job easier. We didn’t have to decide why magic worked, or how zombies were walking around, or what people would be fighting for in the CCG - Pinnacle’s world had already created the “Who, what, where and why” that would put players smack into the middle of an exciting story when they sat down to play the card game. It became our job simply to make the rules that would keep the CCG fun to play.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to have mechanics that immediately gave over the feel of the old west. The initial design work on the game was done by Matt Wilson and Matt Staroscik before they left to follow some new opportunities for them. They left a terribly sound foundation that we built on both in story and mechanics. It had been decided that we would be working within one little boomtown in the corner of the Deadlands world. While the ‘rules’ of Deadlands were in place there, we could basically do whatever we wanted within the tiny town of Gomorra. It was a good arrangement, giving us a degree of freedom without risking any of the stories that Pinnacle was developing outside of northern California.

Because the back story was a Boomtown, the obvious “why” was answered - lots and lots of money (money in this case being the mysterious ‘ghost rock’ fuel that makes the world of Deadlands go). The “what” gave us our winning condition - control of the town. Once we knew we wanted control of the town to be the focus, we had to find a way to gain control of the town. Besides just influence, this being the old west, we had to have gunfights all the time and they had to be fun.

Fortunately, just about everyone out there has played Poker, so we were able to get away with a combat mechanic that is actually relatively complex, but is really easy to teach people - they already know it! Everything after that was details, and incorporating the long-term story into the characters and events of the game. In the end, we were very happy with the results and Pinnacle was pleased with our handling of their ‘baby’ - everybody won.

Both of these worlds, Legend of the Five Rings and Deadlands, are entire properties at this point - they each have a Collectible Card Game, Role Playing Game, and Miniatures Game line going strong and each of them is developing into other areas as well. Each of those games has to fit together for the story to stay cohesive. A duel is a duel. A gunfight is a gunfight. When the story and the mechanics enhance each other, you’ve got a game that’s really fun to play. When they don’t, it’s time to go back to “Bang, I gotcha”.

-David Williams is the driving force behind the Legend of the Five Rings CCG and RPG, and the Doomtown CCG. Just don’t call him out for a shootout at High Noon.

In the summer of 1993, Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering. Two years later, the CCG market was flooded, as everyone and his dog sought to cash in with their own game. A lot of these games didn’t catch on, and the companies stopped making them. You’ve seen these “dead games” gathering dust on dealers’ shelves, or sitting around in online auctions, and not given them another thought. Many of them probably deserved to go, but better games may have slipped through the cracks before they had the chance to build a following. This article is about finding the better games, and giving them a second chance.

You might say, “Even if I do find a decent game, it’s not being supported anymore, so why bother?” One reason is financial. For the price of two or three starter decks of Magic, you can buy a whole BOX of cards. If a few friends go in with you, the cost becomes negligible. You’ll have enough cards at your disposal to keep you going for some time. If you find that you don’t like the game, it’s only a small loss. If you do like it, any additional cards you buy are just as affordable.

What about the lack of support? Expansion sets are fun because they offer new possibilities to play with, but let’s not forget that the vast majority of games are non-collectible. Monopoly is still thriving, even though Parker Brothers hasn’t released new Chance cards every six months. If a CCG is good, a continuous flow of new cards shouldn’t be vital to enjoying it. Some games did manage to release at least one expansion, so new possibilities may already be available.

Recently, I’ve taken a second look at On The Edge by Atlas Games, which is based on their terrific RPG, Over The Edge. It’s a game of conspiracies, violence and major-league weirdness. How weird? Aliens, mutants and sorcery are only the tip of the iceberg. The game mechanics include elements of Magic: The Gathering and INWO. Three expansion sets were released: Cloaks (focusing on intrigue), Arcana (focusing on magic) and The Cut-Ups Project (focusing on reality-bending wackiness). I was at a game convention in Sept ‘99, where I played in an On The Edge tournament. At least 25 players showed up; not bad for a “dead” CCG. It seems I’m not the only one who finds merit in this whole idea.

So let’s say you decide to take me up on my suggestion, and try one of these games. How do you know which ones are worth playing? Gaming magazines have columns for reviews; try looking for some back issues. Some reviews are archived on the Web, and there are even fan sites with more info. Lots of demonstrations have been run at conventions. Perhaps some gamers you know played in these demos, and could give you their opinions. If all else fails, you could choose a game that looks interesting, and take a chance.

There are gamers who avoid CCGs altogether. Continuously spending gobs of money, and keeping up with new releases, isn’t their idea of fun. A “dead” game doesn’t have these pressures. It combines the best features of CCGs and more traditional games, which could broaden its appeal for all gamers.