The Transformers Deck-Building Game (review)

I grew up with the Transformers. In fact, Transformers and GI-Joe became the two toy brands that seemed to dominate our household as a child, with myself collecting Transformers while my younger brothers collected GI-Joes and other things respectively. I had toys, I read the Marvel comics, and of course watched the syndicated cartoon.

But there were no games. No board games that I came across, no role-playing games, and in the heyday of Transformers no video games. It always felt strange that such a popular property never found its way onto Nintendo or Hasbro board games, but I guess part of this is just living in North America: Japan got a lot more content than us when it came to Transformers - see this James Rolfe AVGN video for a glimpse into some of the Transformers content we didn't get (and naturally, content warning for any AVGN videos).

Fast forward to the modern day. We have dozens of good Transformers games, and now at last both an RPG and some board games. The game I want to focus in on is my favourite: the deck builder. Published by Renegade Studios, this deck builder is interesting and thematic in a way many of the other deck builders I play lack – specifically, you are playing a character.

Your Character

You select an oversized character card and its matching standee as your chosen Autobot or Decepticon for the game. The core set is Autobot characters, the second core set (A Rising Darkness) is Decepticons. In the game, you aren't an amorphous player building a good deck to win the match - you are that Autobot (or Decepticon), moving around a "board" to recruit allies, defeat adversaries, and try and topple schemes and bring down the three bosses in the main deck.

This extra dimension helps make the game more interactive, and gives you a different feel based on the character you select. Your deckbuilding is going to have some different strategies based on the character you've chosen, and there is the added tactical layer of having to move your character around on the "board". It also helps you feel the story a little more.

To compare and contrast, our favourite deck-builder around the house is the the DC Deckbuilding Game. Here you have specific characters, but all that character really does is give you one or two abilities that work in tandem with the cards you've gained. You have no character piece on a board, and there are many games where your choice of character matters little to the outcome of the total game. One expansion that Cryptozoic brought out was the DC Rebirth deckbuilder, which introduced standees and moving around the board, and here you get a bit more into the action – but there's still a disconnect because you are playing cards for recuit/battle power, and those cards are for the most part other heroes / equipment / powers.

Transformers cards focus more on your character. If you purchase Maneuver cards, you are performing that action. Technology is being wielded by your Autobot. Allies are helping your character, and other Autobots recruited from the board are assisting you with backup firepower and support. The core concept transfer better into the narrative of play than, for example, Superman charging in with Batman's Utility Belt + a Kick to knock out Poison Ivy.

Oh, and of course you can Transform. Each character has their `Bot mode and an Alt mode. Typically the Alt mode has more movement, but is weaker in a fight. The Bot mode is for combat. It costs Energon to transform back and forth between forms, but some cards will also give this ability for free. And this adds another nuance to the game; you're not just moving and recruiting/battling, you also have to think of how to manage your current form to achieve the results you want.

Making the transformation sound as you flip your card isn't mandatory, but it should be.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

So I've mentioned a board a few times, right? There's no actual board. Instead, you lay out Main Deck cards face down in a grid pattern. A 2 player game has 3 rows of 4 cards, for example. Each face down card is a space, and you have to Search (costing a point of move) to flip the card face up. Only when a card is face up can you recruit of battle it. Here is another interesting mechanic: the card could be an Adversary (a Decepticon), and if so revealing it while cause the card to Ambush you, which could inflict Damage or hurt your deck. But you have to Search to reveal cards to recruit, so the game keeps a tension ongoing at all times.

Mixed in the Main Deck, in constructed stages are Boss cards. There are three Bosses in the game, of increased difficulty as the game progresses. These Boss Decepticons must be defeated to win the game, and if the Main Deck runs out - the game is over. Each turn where a space has been cleared, its replaced from the Main Deck. If no cards were cleared that turn, the top card of the Main Deck is destroyed (unless its a Boss, and then a card on the board is cleared in place, and the Boss is put down). This keeps the ticking clock aspect of the better deck builders present, and pushes the player to risk Searches to uncover the Boss before the time runs out.

And there are plenty of nuances. Schemes which impact the entire board. Relics which can be banked for victory points, or used in play at risk of missing out on their points. Allies aid continually, but are often discarded due to enemy actions. Many Bosses, Schemes, and locations (Sites) will have abilities that are Ongoing or Start of Turn abilities - and the game set includes helpful chits to put down to remind you of these.

As well, the game has several modes of play. The default game is playing competitively (with some limited co-operation available), trying to score Victory Points and defeat the Bosses. You can play that as Autobots or Decepticons. But you can also play a Team vs Team - 2 players could play 2 Autobots, and 2 could play Decepticons who are competing and even attacking other players to slow them down! You can play a One vs. Many game - One player gets a larger hand size, and a team co-operates to try and stop them. There is also a good co-operative mode, which adds in some extra Co-ops Schemes. In Co-op, Victory Points are replaced with Energon points, so all of the cards which have "scoring" mechanisms remain relevant.

I mentioned the tokens in the game are good. The best are Energon points; they're little pink cubes you use to activate special abilities and to transform between your `Bot mode and Alt modes. These evoke the energon cubes of the cartoon so well, and if you happen to play the RPG are useful there to track your energon as well!

All of this works great.

The Main Deck construction is where the game hits its first major hurdle. If you have the Core Set, you play with the cards that came with the game. As you buy expansions, you can substitute cards into the main set, keeping substituted cards at equal cost and type. But in the 5 rule-books I have, do you think anywhere it tells you what the core composition of the Main Deck is? No. A serious oversight in expansion sets down the road. This is easily solved by looking at commentary in play, or just doing the analysis yourself, but this should be in the rule-book and its not.

When setting up a game, you take the 80 card Main Deck and populate the game board (the Matrix as they call it). In a solo or 2 player game, this is 12 cards down out of the gate. You then make 3 stacks of 7 cards, and a final stack of 5 cards. Into the first three stacks, the three Decepticon Boss cards are inserted.

By my math, this is 38 cards + the 3 Bosses, which aren't "part" of the Main Deck. The other 42 cards are then put aside – they won't show up in this game. And here is where the random nature of the game hurts this good idea hard. We have a fixed Main Deck size to keep the timer function, but the core rules then bury over 50% of the Main Deck away and out of play.

Not following yet?

A Main Deck is composed of:

• 6 Relic cards (high cost, best VP; 3 x 7 cost cards, 3 x 8 cost cards)
• 7 Sites (non-recruitable, stay on board to be used while your character is on them)
• 6 Allies (ongoing cards in your control area once recruited)
• 12 Autobots (power cards to Autobots, adversaries to Decepticons; 3 x 2 cost, 3 x 3 cost, 3 x 4 cost, 3 x 5 cost)
• 16 Manoeuvres (power and/or game effects; 4 x 2 cost, 4 x 3 cost, 4 x 4 cost, 4 x 5 cost)
• 16 Technology (power and/or game effects; 4 x 2 cost, 4 x 3 cost, 4 x 4 cost, 4 x 5 cost)
• 12 Decepticons (adversary cards to Autobots, power cards to Decepticons; 3 x 2 cost, 3 x 3 cost, 3 x 4 cost, 3 x 5 cost)
• 5 Schemes (nuisance stuff that impacts play, can be defeated for points)

This is all shuffled together. But this means in a 2 player game, you could have a giant block of Relics, Sites, and Schemes with few Autobots. Or you never see more than one Autobot come into play. And it can seriously change the dynamic of play, and the effectiveness of your character. Wheeljack, for example, works with Technology cards. If few of these come out, he is far less useful. A character like Grimlock, which works with recruiting other Dinobots, or Soundwave recruiting his mini-cassettes, can feel empty when your cards never enter play at all – or worse, do and are snatched by another player.

Likewise, if mostly high cost cards come out, the game slows down and the difficulty is suddenly increased arbitrarily. This quirk is meant to make the game something of a crap shoot – you really don't know what's going to come into play for recruitment. The downside is that if you get too many Sites and Relics, the game can become plain boring or actively un-fun. I think the way the game is balanced works best for about the 4 player mark; at 4 players you are going to have 73 out of the 80 cards in the Main Deck (the game board is made bigger, and the 3 stacks are also larger).

Now we get onto the worst part of the game in the early stages of play. If you're dedicated to the game because you love Transformers (guilty as charged), this problem begins to go away. But for a more casual player of the game? This is bad design: Main Deck Composition.

As mentioned before, the lack of a list on how to construct a Main Deck is problematic. If I'm being kind, this is an oversight out of an assumption that as a buyer gradually builds up their collection, they will organically understand what's in the deck and be able to do quick swaps in and out of content. But what happens if you put this on the shelf for six months? What happens if you separate cards by type in a binder? Sure, you can easily reassemble a core deck, then begin swapping cards in and out one by one, but having the core "this must go in the deck" like I've shown above is key.

Why?

Simple. As you buy more expansions, you get a lot of extra stuff. And what you put in your Main Deck must be curated for both the players (what characters do they tend to play), and for the Bosses. My wife loves the Dinobots, and Grimlock in particular. Grimlock can still be useful if you have no Dinobots, but his core abilities don't function quite as well. If someone wants to play Soundwave, you have to make sure his mini-cassettes are in the deck. Devestator as a final boss is much easier to beat if you don't have Constructicons in the Main Deck. As you play more, it becomes easier and easier to know what to put in the Main Deck to work with certain cards, and to adjust the game difficulty. And frankly, this is a good thing in the long run. But to a more casual player, this is a problem! And here again, the rulebooks have no advice.

A small section in later expansions on general Main Deck design and philosophy would have been useful. I have an analytical mind (it's what I do for a living), and many gamers are naturally proficient at this kind of thing. But not all. My teenage self would not have grasped this at all, and the game would start feeling like a jumbled mess quite rapidly. This is also a fair amount of work for setup.

Contrast with my DC Deckbuilding game. I pull out a core set, villains, kicks, weaknesses, and starter cards. Ready to play after a bit of shuffling. With Transformers, I have to make a "base set" and keep it seperate and ready for play. This means either always defaulting to a core set, or (as I did) creating a curated set put aside and ready for play. And because the mix and type of cards needs to be somewhat customized if you want to include certain characters (and have that player enjoy themselves), this means that curated core set is going to feel the same over several games.

Sure, I can swap things in and out quickly. We played one game last night, the first in almost a year, and by this morning I'd already updated the core set to adapt to our preferred paradigm of characters and foes. But lets say this goes back on the shelf and we don't touch it for another 3-4 months. When I pull it out again, I have to remember what I did (or write notes). And maybe at this time, my wife won't want to play Dinobots.

"Okay honey, go watch a show while I retool the deck". I could probably do a quick retool in 5 minutes, a more comprehensive one in 15-20 minutes. And that's maintenance I could do without.

One other small nitpick. In the core set, when you want to transform between your alt and bot modes, the mechanic is called... Transform. Which makes sense. The Transformers transform between vehicles/objects and robots. Robots in Disguise is the motto. However, the legal sorts who own Transformers up the food chain discovered an obnoxious copyright issue: if Transformers Transform, and the thing that Transformers do is just a proper verb, it dilutes the brand protection of the product name "Transformers". I've read the argument on it, and I sympathize: back in the `80s when the Transformers were branded, no one really thought about Escalator and Kleenex effects on this toy line. But here is where we are in the copyright distopia we live in: Transformers "convert" forms.

From the first expansion onwards, the transform mechanic is called convert. It mentions that any previous cards that say "transform" mean convert. Mechanically, its fine. But no one, when they're grabbing their Optimus Prime toy and transforming it from truck to robot calls it "converting". Optimus' catchphrase is, after all, Autobots – Transform and roll out!

I understand why it had to be done. But it's genuinely galling to see. It reminds me of the height of the Peter Jackon Lord of the Rings films, and playing a game of it where you would have cards named "It's a Cave Troll™". I understand why that ™ has to appear - it still is irritating and banal to see. 

Some Other Awesome Stuff

So, with those honest criticisms out of the way, let me talk about a few other neat things. Expansions brought in the popular combiners Transformers: Devestator, the Arialbots, Predacons, etc. And these are tons of fun! Your Bot form in this case is the Combined robots: you stomp around as Superion or Computron. Your Alt form is a group shot of the Transformers who comprise that combined form, and your default starting cards are replaced with one card for every Transformer who makes up the combined bot. That is just awesome design. I've played with them a few times and they're a lot of fun.

There are missions in the Infiltration Protocol expansion that allow you to play the game differently. Ruins can be added; now when you defeated an Adversary, ruins are left in the spot which you have to clear up before a Main Deck card can be added there. Personally I think the Ruins work better in 4+ player games (they just slowed a 2 player or solo game to a crawl), but they're an easy swap in and out.

Final Thoughts

I enjoy deck builders. They're probably my favourite "board game" to have around the house, and when playing with friends (and its not an RPG), a deck builder is usually the first to come out. They're about the right length of play, the art on the cards is usually evocative, and the game always feels like time well spent (in a good deckbuilder).

As I mentioned, our favourite around the house is the DC Deckbuilder game. We also play Marvel Legendary, the Star Trek deckbuilder, Dark Souls and Bloodborn, and a variety of other LCGs (Marvel Champions, Sentinels of the Multiverse). Transformers is better than both Star Trek, Dark Souls, and Bloodborn, and I think better than Marvel Legendary, but only when you've spent the time to master the game. 

As a game, I would give it a 4/5. I think the issues with the game can be resolved over time and for a genuine enthusiast. The cards have universally good art, and the majority of your favourite characters have appeared in print.

Oh, and as a final note. For a 1-2 player game, I recommend making a Main Deck where there are no discarded cards after the Main Deck is formed. I looked proportionally at the 38 cards that will hit the table out of the 80 that form a standard Main Deck, and came up with this:

• 2 Relic cards (1 x 7 cost, 1 x 8 cost)
• 3 Sites 
• 3 Allies (vary the costs between low to high)
• 6 Autobots (make an even mix of costs between the 2-5)
• 8 Manoeuvres (2 x 2 cost, 2 x 3 cost, 2 x 4 cost, 2 x 5 cost)
• 8 Technology (2 x 2 cost, 2 x 3 cost, 2 x 4 cost, 2 x 5 cost)
• 6 Decepticons (make an even mix of costs between the 2-5)
• 2 Schemes (be smart and pick the ones that work better for 2 player games)

Curate Autobots and Decpticons to work well with the typical characters selected and Bosses. Don't use Ruins in a 2 player game, but they are okay for a solo game if you want to take the time.