Transformers: My Favorite Mechanism

Hey, I'm Jamie from Stonemire Games and today I'm going to talk about my favorite mechanism in the Transformers deck building game, which looks like this. This is a deck building game. You're you're drawing five cards, you're playing as many of those cards as you can, you're discarding them, and then you're drawing five more cards.

That is standard, but it adds a really neat twist that I don't think I've seen in another deck building game. Although, I did something slightly similar in my game, Expeditions, which isn't a deck building game. Um, but it is a hand management game with a card flow similar to deck building. In Transformers, you start out with this big grid of cards.

Depends on your player count. Uh, I believe we were playing in a with a 4x4 grid as shown in this photo. And all the cards are face down. So, there's a sense of exploration. You don't know what cards are out there. And the primary way that you gain and interact with cards in Transformers is that you must move your token.

You can see one right here is the token. You must move your token around using a resource, a move resource. You must move it around to a card to uh reveal that card and then decide how you want to interact with it. Some cards are bad guys, so you need to like fight those bad guys to remove those cards from the game.

Some of them or many of them are cards that you want to gain to your deck. So unlike other deck building games where there's a uh kind of an abstract card row where you gain cards from, in Transformers, you have to go to the card that you want to add to your deck or interact with it all and be on that card and and then you can interact with that card.

Of course, there are exceptions to that, like there's a way to fight from range, so you can fight from adjacent cards. I think there are also some cards that allow you to acquire cards from a range distance, but for the most part, you are moving around to be on the car that you want to interact with.

And I think this relates to the transformers theme well, and it ties to one of the things that you can do in the game, which is that you can transform from a car or a vehicle to a transformer. When you're when you're in vehicle form, it's easier for you to race around this board and get to a specific card.

Um, but uh in in transformer form, you have a better chance of interacting with the cards. Um, also there are certain locations, I believe this is one of the locations, this military base, they come out onto the table when they're revealed and they just stay there on the board. They are locations that don't change.

So, you can't really do anything with those cards, but they permanently impact the game. And sometimes they're bases. I believe that you uh I believe this is a base. I know that we had a base in our game where if you started your turn on that base, you got a certain benefit. So, a lot of really cool card interactions related to this spatial grid.

Also, the grid is a timer for the game. So, whenever there's an empty space in the grid, you have to refill it at the end of your turn from the deck. Uh, and you refill it the card uh face down. And so, this also becomes a timer for the game where you this helps you determine how long the game will be and how how basically you need to discover certain cards, three different bosses over the course of the game.

And so, you are putting them in the grid. don't know where they are or when you've put a boss out, but you know that you need to inter interact with cards to move through the deck. And so the grid itself, interacting with the grid itself, becomes the game's timer so that you can get to those boss cards.

Really neat spatial system for a deck building game. And if you can think of another deck building game that uses a spatial system like this, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. I think maybe one of the expansions for Ascension does it. A pirate themed one kind of comes to mind, but I don't really know.

Yeah, but let me know about that in terms of uh the spatial element of I think transformers did really really well here. Thanks.