Crystal Clans

Designers: Andrea Mezzotero, Colby Dauch, and J. Arthur Ellis

Artists: Martin Abel (illustration); David Richards and Kendall Wilkerson (graphic design); Samuel J. Vega and Isaac Vega (art direction)

Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
BGG Rating: 7.6

TL;DR

1) Fantastic artwork engages players in a color narrative.

2) Prebuilt decks get the game up and running in no time at all.

3) The initiative tracker, while not innovative, is one of my favorite mechanics in a two player game ever.

4) The combat system, which at first seems clever, just creates confusion for new players and leaves experienced players with a bad taste of randomness.

5) New players will have a difficult time against someone who has played the game even one time.

6) Holding back a core feature of the game (deck building) until enough expansions have launched is not okay with us.

7) Tons of replay with the core box including six different clans, more clans having been announced, and the promise of deck building rules in the future.

In Crystal Clans, two players will take control of a clan and battle over territories in an attempt to gain control of specific zones which in-turn allow them to purchase crystals, crystals that bestow upon their owner an ability and a victory point. Deploy units, combine those units into squads or send them out like lone wolves, engage in a tug-of-war with the initiative tracker, and push against your enemy’s forces in this dudes-on-a-map-that-is-really-cards-in-an-arena game. Personally, I’m a huge fan of dudes-on-a-map games; but, would this card variant of the genre be able to hold its own against its more formidable and plastic minis laden cousins?

Crystal Clans follows a style of gameplay found in another of Plaid Hat Games lineup, Summoner Wars. Unlike Summoner Wars, Crystal Clans features more colorful artwork, a board with fewer grid spaces, and no dice. These last two changes, the smaller play space and the removal of dice, are both welcomed adjustments. With fewer spaces on the board, players are forced towards each other more quickly, so much so that it can feel like the mad rush one sees in a rugby match. Removing the need for dice is fantastic as the randomness one encounters when using dice can quickly wear out its welcome in a tactical/strategy game.

A few of the Crystal, Skull Clan, and Player Reference cards.

When sitting down with Crystal Clans for the first time players are greeted by no less than six decks of cards, each deck representing a clan. These decks of cards are colorful with fantastic illustrations and easy to read graphics. Starting off in any card game that utilizes custom asymmetrical decks to pit players against each other can seem intimidating. The designers have worked around this common worry by giving you prebuilt decks which allows players to just grab a clan deck and begin playing. There are future plans to release more decks and allow players to create custom decks by combining two decks that share clan symbols, but the developers have left those rules out of the base game, preferring that players focus on the base content first and worry about adding complexity later.

Complexity is not a word I would generally associate with Crystal Clans. The rules are fairly simple, the rulebook well written and contains plenty of references and examples, and once learned games can be played fairly quickly (60+ minutes your first game, about 40 minutes in later plays). There were several times during our first playthrough that questions arose just to be quickly answered by the rules reference, and most those questions were because we were trying to make the game more complicated than it really is. All this is really great and lends itself to the games staying power.

How a game of Crystal Clan may look. The Initiative Tracker is on the right.

What really captured me about Crystal Clans, however, was not the artwork or well-designed decks, but the initiative tracker. Crystal Clans’ initiative tracker is divided into halves with each player having the potential for 20 initiative points, but only if their opponent pushes the blue crystal tracker that far down their side of the track. Every action and most cards have an initiative cost associated with them. Whenever a player does an action they move that blue crystal further towards their opponent’s side of the track and inevitably tipping over the halfway mark, ending their turn and establishing how many points their opponent has on their turn. This brilliant system lets players dictate how much their opponents are allowed to do on their turn. How many points you give your opponent each round is a balancing act; do you make a big play, spending a lot of initiative and thus giving your opponent more choices on their turn, or do you engage in smaller plays and give your opponent as few points as possible, limiting their actions or forcing them to give you more points on their turn if they want to make a big play. It is a fantastic system of risk versus reward that keeps the game balanced and players engaged. Crystal Clans has other clever systems that it utilizes but clever doesn’t always equal good.

The bottom section of these cards are what matters in combat.
In this example, the Sentinels will gain a +2 to attack power
and the Aarock Riders will gain a +5 to attack power.

Combat in Crystal Clans is modeled off a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic or in this case blunt-guarded-tricky (bull head, turtle shell, and fox tail icons respectively). There are many instances of games using this style of resolution mechanic to varying degrees of effect. Crystal Clans makes an attempt to be clever with it here but ends up with something that is confusing. When players engage in combat they play a card from their hand (or the top deck of their draw pile if they do not have cards in their hand) face down, revealing them simultaneously. The only information on the cards players care about at this point is in the very bottom section, a grey bar with the icons for blunt, guarded, and tricky and what resulting benefits you get for playing that card. Here is the thing, the benefit you get is determined by your opponent’s choice, whether they played a blunt, guarded, or tricky card; and yes, I said benefit because all these cards give you a tactical advantage of some kind. When deciding what card to play in combat, you are trying to guess what card your opponent will play so that you can get the result you want that is listed on the bottom of your card. You are also trying to decide how much you want to help your opponent because the card you play determines their benefit, but you cannot accurately make that choice even if you expertly know your opponent’s deck due to the randomness of card draws and player choice. If you are new to Crystal Clans this can be confusing (“I played a blunt card so I get the blunt bonus on my card? No? I get the bonus listed in the tricky section of my card because you played a tricky card. What?”) and if you are experienced you just accept it and move on.

Experience is key when playing Crystal Clans. When someone is introduced to a new game it is usually done by a person who has played that game at least one or two times. During its introduction a player is faced with a deck of cards, all new to them and thus they will have to pour over each card before playing. It is not too bad as the decks here only have twenty-seven cards. But then add in rules to form squads, how initiative works, the many actions you can take, and combat and the eyes of new players may begin to glaze over. This is not to mention that if this is your first game and your opponent has a few games under their belt then chances are you will lose. If someone was to hand me a game with decks of cards and tell me I had to study them before we played I would consider that an acceptable appetizer and hope the main course to follow pairs nicely. Players who don’t share this feeling may not enjoy their first play of Crystal Clans and the chance of them trying it again drops off a cliff. This would be unfortunate because the more you play this game the more you will enjoy it.

When Plaid Hat Games launched Crystal Clans they said you would be able to combine clans to build custom decks. This is exciting because if a game allows deck building it creates variability in the game. However, the rules for deck building would be put off until later, after players had spent time with the core box and learned all the decks included in that. At the time of this writing only the core box has been released with two rounds of expansions planned but only one announced. The first round will include four new clan decks but this comes months after the core game hit store shelves. Players will then need to wait a few more months before the second wave of clans are released. By announcing, then forcing players to wait until they can use what is a core feature of a game until a set number of expansions has been released, with months between each wave of expansions, Plaid Hat is betting that players will stick with Crystal Clans, a bet I’m not sure will pay out. Perhaps the hope is that each wave of expansions will re-enthus players, igniting interest; but, to deny a core feature of the game until you say players can use that feature, delaying it by several months, puts a sour taste in our mouths. I understand the intentions, I just don’t agree with them.

At the beginning of this review I asked whether-or-not Crystal Clans, which simulates a dudes-on-a-map style game, can stand up to similar games that use miniatures. My verdict on this is yes, eventually. I am very excited about picking up the new decks and seeing how each clan plays. Recommending Crystal Clans is not easy; you need to find at least one other person who enjoys competitive card games and convince them to play it consistently with you, doesn’t mind the few quirks the game has, and both of you need to be patient enough to wait for expansion decks to get the most out of the game. This, along with quirky combat and leaving out the ability to use what I see as a core feature of the game, prevents me from being able to openly recommend Crystal Clans, a game that I thoroughly enjoy playing and find myself wanting to play more.