Gaming: Turtle Team-up Turns Magic: The Gathering Into A Chill Co-op Game...
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I used to play a lot of co-operative board games like Arkham Horror, Pandemic, and Space Alert, where it's you and your friends against the board. They're great, because instead of playing a board game for an hour or more and then having your friends be cross at you for thrashing them, the board wins and you all get to feel equally bad instead.
The board would usually win because we don't allow backseat driving, or quarterbacking—that's when the player with the most experience takes over for newbies, basically puppeteering them instead of letting them make their own mistakes. It's always a problem with co-op games, which can be super easy if you play at maximum efficiency but super hard if you just muddle through and react to situations as they happen.
Turtle Team-Up turns Magic: The Gathering's TMNT crossover into a co-op game. It's a box with four 60-card decks, one themed around each Ninja Teen, as well as a set of cards for bosses and events those two-to-four players using the Turtle decks will have to deal with. (While you can expand the Turtle decks with random cards you get from booster packs, the ones in the box will always be the same, designed for balance and synergy.)
It starts easy. As in a normal game of Magic, the players bring out land—the broccoli-pizza forest card was an instant favorite—and tap it to play cards representing a growing army of creatures. After one peaceful turn you flip the top boss of the boss deck and find out if you're up against Bebop or Leatherhead or whoever, each with their own debuff or special ability, then flip some event cards (the amount differs depending how many players you have). Those event cards might debuff players or make them discard, or they might bring out a Foot Clan ninja who will defend the boss on player turns.
The Turtles share a life total you track on shell-shaped tokens with pizza-slice counters, and the bosses have a life total as well. Deplete that by getting past the Foot Clan to defeat one boss and the next boss comes out—but this time you flip two of them, and then after that three at once. It's a natural ramping-up of difficulty, a videogame-feeling way of making subsequent levels harder. You thought it was easy fighting Rocksteady on his own? Here's Shredder and Krang.
Which is not to say Turtle Team-Up is particularly difficult. We were hit hard by an event that caused damage for ea
Source: PC Gamer
