Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I don’t like trading card games (TCGs). I don’t generally like the gameplay, which I find joyless. I don’t like the business model, which is inherently and increasingly predatory (“It’s heroin for children,” a customer said to me just today). I don’t like that serious engagement with competitive play requires a significant and material financial investment. If you want to dedicate yourself to chess, you only need a chess board and a whole lot of time. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on pieces.
Though I am far from the only person with these misgivings, they are clearly irrelevant. Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, the two TCGs that have dominated and defined the space for the last three decades, are billion-dollar industries. They are the behemoths forming the top of the jungle canopy, but they are far from the only trees in the forest. Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Flesh & Blood all have solid—if comparatively minute—followings, and every year, sapling after sapling pops up, hoping to get even a sliver of whatever sunlight the canopy lets through.
2023 saw the release of Lorcana, which uses characters from throughout the Disney Animation cannon. Earlier this year, Star Wars: Unlimited came out. Whether either game becomes a staple remains to be seen. Initial sales for both were incredibly strong, but this kind of thing takes time. Whether they endure or not, they exist for the time being, and as the inventory manager for a board game café in Brooklyn, I have to deal with them. Between the constant churn of Pokémon product, the nine Magic sets Wizards of the Coast released in 2024, and those newer games, there’s simply too much. I’m burnt out, and I’m not even spending my own money on this stuff.
Into this ever-more saturated environment comes Altered, from publisher Equinox. No TCG—no game, really—is a safe bet, but Altered seems an even bigger swing than Lorcana or Unlimited. Not only does it not have an immediately recognizable IP to bolster initial interest—the closest to IP this game gets are public domain characters like Dorothy Gale and the Three Little Pigs—but the business model is rather unusual. We’ll get to that.
A Day in the Life
Unlike many TCGs, Altered is a race rather than a fight. Each player starts the game with two tokens at opposite ends of an eight-space track. The tokens represent each player’s Hero and that Hero’s Companion, out exploring the world. The corresponding Hero and Companion Expeditions, the two areas into which each player plays their cards, form the battleground. Think of each Expedition as, essentially, a three-pronged lane battler. Each Character card—most of the cards are Characters—has values in three different categories: Mountain, Forest, and Ocean. If you best your opponent in one or more of those three categories in a given Expedition, the corresponding token moves forward one space. The first player to unite their two tokens—regardless of where on the board that happens—is the winner. There’s certainly more to it than that, but that gives you the idea.
If you aren’t interested in the nitty-gritty of this game, skip down to “Morning, or, the Mana Problem”
Each round, a Day in the game’s parlance, is divided into five phases: Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Dusk, and Night. The bulk of the game takes place during the Afternoon, when players take turns playing cards. There are three card types in your deck: Characters, Landmarks, and Spells. If you play a Character, you play it to an Expedition. If you play a Landmark, permanent locations that grant ongoing benefits, it goes in the Landmarks area. Spells perform their effects instantly, then shuffle over to the Reserve, which is Altered’s most interesting design element. More on that in a few minutes.
Alternating card plays instantly makes Altered more interesting to me. Like Reiner Knizia’s Schotten Totten, every card play from your opponent tells you something. If my opponent plays a bruiser in the Hero Expedition, I can decide if it’s in my interest to try and match them there, or to skitter over to the Companion Expedition instead. Did my opponent just play a card to the same Expedition as me because they think they can beat me there, or is it a gambit to draw some of my resources, leaving the other Expedition vulnerable?
Play continues until both players pass, which makes exhausting your Mana a nervy experience. Putting all your resources into a single, massive card is a risk, since your opponent may have enough mana to play three or four cards in a row with what is now effectively perfect information. There’s always a tradeoff.
[Fleetwood Mac voice] Dusk!
Dusk is when you add up each player’s stats for the Expeditions and determine who gets to move. It is possible for both players to move, provided each exceeds the other in an applicable category. Not all three stats categories apply for every location on the Expeditions track, and every now and then that will trip a player up badly, in a way that makes good play feel rewarded.
Night
Night is when Altered starts to differentiate itself from the competition. By default, none of the Characters in your Expeditions stay there between rounds. You have to move everyone into the Reserve area, the place I mentioned Spells go immediately after playing. The Reserve can be thought of as a public extension of your hand. Cards can be played from the Reserve, often for a different cost and often with different effects than when they were played from your hand. There is no limit on capacity for the Reserve until Night, at which point you have to discard all but two of the cards you have there.
Not only do many cards have effects that only trigger when they are played from your Reserve, there are also a smattering of cards that have support abilities that can only be triggered if that card is in your Reserve during your turn. Some cards can be discarded to give a newly played card a stat boost, or to make a played spell cheaper, or to draw a card. The interplay between playing from your hand and from the Reserve makes Altered a game in which you often find yourself casting cards for what they’ll do for you in the future, rather than what they’re going to do for you now.
Like most well-designed games—and Altered is an extremely well-designed game—the interconnectedness of everything is part of what makes it such an interesting decision space. To describe one part without you already knowing about the others is to shortchange the whole. To circle back to the whole “You take turns playing cards, and that’s great” thing, there are cards that discard cards in the Reserve, which adds to the tension around a host of decisions.
Morning, or, The Mana Problem
Mana, a resource that refreshes every round, will be well familiar to anyone who’s played Magic. Roughly 20% of a Magic deck is usually made up of Lands, which can be exhausted each turn to provide Mana. Mana as conceived of in Magic is the currency you pay to play other cards. Some cards require specific Mana types to be played, while others are happy to be paid for by any Mana type you happen to have lying around. Mana is central to Magic, and it is also a major sticking point for people who don’t enjoy the game.
Because Mana and Lands are necessary to do anything, an unfortunate shuffle at the outset can have a significant impact on the results of a game of Magic. The cards I put in my deck and draw into my hand can’t help me if I can’t use them. Magic has a mulligan rule for times when you draw a bad starting hand, but even that has its limitations. If you don’t get Lands/Mana in the first few rounds, you may be well and truly “cooked,” as the kids say.
It’s too late for Magic to do anything about the Mana Problem. It’s baked into the hardware. Pokémon, with its reliance on Energy cards, has a similar issue, albeit less punishing. “Issue” is, of course, relative. Many people aren’t bothered by any of this, and it’s certainly true that drawing just the right Land or Energy card at just the right moment can make for some terrific drama, but it is a known stumbling block.
Altered presents an elegant solution to the Mana Problem, one that’s similar to the systems in Lorcana and Star Wars: Unlimited: every card in your deck can be turned into Mana. (I find it fascinating that all three games have independently come to the same solution, but we don’t have time for that.) At the end of every Morning, both players draw two cards, then have the option to add one face-down to their Mana pool. It’s a terrific mechanic. Your available energy pool will always be able to grow if you want it to. Instantly, luck has less of an impact on the outcome, and a source of near-universal frustration is eliminated. It also frequently creates a moment of pointed choice: which card from your hand do you add to the Mana pool? Is it better to keep both of them, at the cost of perpetually being a mana behind? I’ve spent the last two weeks tweaking a deck to the point where I almost always find that decision particularly satisfying.
Under Construction
I am a deep admirer and outright sucker for games with multiple pre-made faction decks. Summoner Wars is a personal favorite, and I don’t get to play Sakura Arms or Guilty Gear X as much as I would like. I enjoy exploring how different characters work, and seeing their personalities come out through the cards and the mechanics.
What I do not traditionally enjoy is deck building. It takes a lot of time, a lot of trial and error, and requires—within Magic, certainly—familiarity with an endless number of cards. That said, I know that building a great deck is one of the joys of any TCG. With hundreds or thousands of different cards and dozens or hundreds of different mechanics, a great deck becomes a uniquely personal expression of the player who made it. A TCG without good deck building is DOA.
Altered’s deck building rules are simple, effective, and illustrate the amount of thought that went into the whole of the design. You start with a Hero, who is always in play and gives you an ability to center your deck around. Each of Altered’s six factions have three available Heroes in this base set, giving you plenty of room to play around and find what suits you.
Once you’ve chosen your Hero, you build an accompanying deck of 39 cards in that Hero’s color. Though I’m sure it will happen one day, for the time being, multi-color decks aren’t an option. Honestly, I hope they never are. There’s something about the simplicity of these restrictions that keeps you focused. Building a deck is satisfying, but I’m not drawing from an infinite set of cards. The decision space is narrowed appreciably without ever becoming restrictive. A fine distinction.
Whither “Altered”
This brings us to Altered-as-product. Keyforge, god bless it, tried completely random decks, and nobody liked it. The majority of cards in Altered are standard issue, forming a base set like any other TCG. Within that base set, there are altered versions of cards, which may be cheaper to play, have an additional effect, or belong to an entirely different color. Beyond that, certain cards—one in every seven or eight packs—are out-and-out unique. One of a kind. 1/1.
When my friends and I started digging into Altered, we thought these cards broke the game as a competitive space. You would, theoretically, only be able to compete if you had a deck full of these altered and unique cards, and it would come down to who happens to have the best and most synergistic unique cards at that. Then there are the commercial implications. How does the secondary market even begin to value unique cards when they’re standard in the game? A strange idea. As it turns out, though, the unique cards aren’t particularly destabilizing to either play or the market for a handful of reasons.
- The deck building limitations mean the majority of your deck has to be standard game cards.
- The altered and unique cards are better, but they aren’t that much better.
- In a standard game of Altered, if you have the most aggressive card draw engine possible, you still won’t see much more than half your deck each game, so it’s difficult for any one card to completely skew the results.
- Financially speaking, the actual cards in Altered are effectively worthless, because:
“Who Bought That NFT Game?”
I’d like to start by clarifying, before I go into this, that Altered is not an NFT. It doesn’t use the block chain. As far as I can tell, we’re not killing the planet with this thing. Altered does, however, have significant digital integration. Every card has a unique QR code that can be scanned into the Altered app. Once you scan a card, you own it in perpetuity. There are plans to set up a system to order on-demand prints of decks and cards whenever you want. Altered has even integrated the digital app with Board Game Arena, enabling players to use their decks on the platform.
This is all very smart, and the financial implications are fascinating. A game littered with unique cards is asking to become a financial minefield. A game littered with unique cards that can be printed on demand is something else entirely. There is, theoretically, no supply limit for any given card. People could—and I’m sure will—profiteer off of Altered, but the game seems to be out in front of that possibility. As someone who finds “I made my money back” to be the most depressing of all possible routine responses to opening a pack of cards, the ways in which Altered potentially—potentially—divorces itself from the second hand market are good to see.
Do I love the QR codes on every card? No. Definitely not. I’d rather they weren’t there. But if this whole thing means Altered cards never sell for hundreds of dollars, I’m fine with it.
All Told
I’ve had a blast with Altered over the past month. Individual games are quick and full of quality decisions. The limitations on deck-building make it much more approachable. The art is inviting. Clever play is rewarded. It’s interactive without needing to resort to anything like the stack. The different Factions really do feel different, even at this early stage, giving players that sense of ownership and personal-investment that the best TCGs foster. The different status effects are straightforward, but rich in their implications.
The question, of course, is where does Altered go from here? New sets will inevitably introduce new mechanisms, new abilities, and new dynamics. As it stands, one of Altered’s strengths is its approachability, and it would be easy for that to get lost. At the same time, my mind is already full of different ways in which the game could potentially change that I find incredibly exciting. If Altered continues to grow and change in keeping with the promise of this first set, I could see myself setting out on these expeditions for a long time to come.
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