It’s the biggest and the greatest game show the world has ever known! Contestants from all over the world are honored to work their way up the ranks, dueling in a ruthless hybrid card/board game for dominance in an attempt to go all the way, using every tactic, trick, and special ability they can insert into their deck to go head-to-head with the reigning champion of Battle Train. Even the Supreme President Conductor can lose and be replaced by a skilled contestant, and just because it hasn’t happened in thirty years doesn’t mean it’s impossible, no matter what he might say to the contrary.
Ain’t No Gamblers On This Train, This Train!
Battle Train was announced a couple of weeks back as the latest from Terrible Posture Games, which started out doing roguelike-FPSes before going in some unexpected directions with 3 out of 10 and the visual novel Atom Eve, teaming up with the experienced but sneaky-quiet developer Nerd Ninjas. The latest game is another change in genre, a board game played with cards set against the backdrop of a game show. While the full game is still a good ways off, there’s a Kickstarteron the wayand to help start it off on good footing a demo is now available. The reveal trailer gave an idea of the shape of the game but now that it’s playable a lot more specifics have come into focus.
Multi-Ton Death Locomotive, Come On Down! Game Show Deck-Builder Battle Train Announced
Battle Train is a train-based game show card battling animated adventure, which is a perfectly sane and normal thing for any game to be
The way Battle Train works is that each player has their own deck and are dealt a fresh hand from it with every new turn. Each card has a cost in crystals to play, starting at one point and going up from there, and while in the demo the maximum amount of crystals you can hold at a time is eight, screenshots of the full game show significantly more. You start each new game with two crystals per turn, though, and have to earn more as you play. Meanwhile, the board is a grid with two stations on each side, and a depot or two per player that their opponent needs to destroy by ramming trains into it. There are also mines, which grant more crystals at the start of the turn, plus crystal squares you can claim for a one-off bonus.
Most cards are tracks, from the standard one-square straight, to curves, to two-square lengths, and eventually crossroads, t-junctions, and more ornate track shapes. Regular track pieces once set down can’t be overlayed by anything other than a super-track card, but they can and regularly will be destroyed. Bombs can be played on a square of your track to destroy it, mines played to an empty spot on the board will explode in a three by three blast, ramming a train into a depot will blow up everything around it as well, etc. The important thing, though, is that most cards can only be played on your track, which is defined as any piece of track that’s connected to one of your stations. You can’t put a piece of track on the opponent’s rail unless you’re connected to it as well, and while that can be useful it means both of you are getting the full benefit of all mines connected to the network. There’s strategies to figure out that are going to take more than the couple hours the demo has been available to learn.
The Battle Train demo isavailable on Steam. There aren’t a lot of card games where you get to slam trains into things, so this is a perfect chance to lay down some track and make some depots explode.
