Those of us who lived through the collectible card game boom of the 1990s approach our CCG derivatives with due suspicion.

Consider Worldbreakers: Advent of the Khanate, Elli Emir’s take on the genre. From one perspective, it’s the bastard child of Magic: The Gathering and Android: Netrunner, right down to the compulsive inclusion of a colon in its title. There’s nary a novel bone in the game’s body. Teaching it is as easy as confirming that your pupil also constructed decks in middle school. If anything, its slight differences from Magic — say, in the way attacks are resolved — are a sticking point for no other reason than because they’re so minor that they never wholly escape their daddy’s shadow.

On the other side of the coin, Worldbreakers is appealing for much the same reason. Amir has refined that august parentage into far more approachable offspring. It’s intuitive to teach, riffs on a few familiar chords, and crosses vivid new horizons. The result is that playing Worldbreakers is like exploring a hobby from adolescence for the first time.

Read the rest of this entry →