Chaos: The Card Game has the most entertainingly written Kickstarter campaign I’ve seen in a while. It’s also a neat-looking and rather silly—chaotic, even—little game.
The game’s premise is: ‘A mad, chaotic world. Ruled by a divine cat. Four factions locked in a ridiculous yet glorious war. Psycho elves. Alluring sirens. Bureaucratic demons. Thirsty vampires. And this is only the beginning. Lead your army. Crush your friends. Claim the Forbidden Fruit. Become the King of Chaos!’
Pretty uninformative, but sets the tone for the campaign, and the game, and I’m going to litter this article with quotations from the campaign pages and rulebook.
In this 2–4 player game, designed by Andrea Chiarvesio and gorgeously illustrated by Giovanni Meroni, you play as 1 of 4 factions, taking the associated deck of 26 cards. On each turn, you deal 3 cards from a hand of 5 and attempt to beat the others’ scoring values until any player wins 3 battles on the trot or has fewer than 3 cards left. The winner is the person with the Forbidden Fruit, which moves between players in a complex way, in front of them. ‘Everyone wants the Forbidden Fruit. First, because it’s forbidden (and that’s cool). Second, because whoever eats is supposedly rules the Universe. Sounds legit.’
Factions
One of the joys of this game is the set of factions: The Depths, Emerged Lands, Tartarus, and Blackness. ‘Every faction has tactics. Some just involve running straight at things while screaming.’ The Depths’ card powers are based on list and gluttony—such as sirens confusing the enemy, preventing them from using their powers, or piranhas consuming enemy cards. The Emerged Lands ‘run on pure violence’—with powers that, e.g., increase your own strength or decrease your opponent’s. Tartarus is based on ‘utterly chaotic bureaucracy and rules, made up at random by the King… or “President,” as he prefers. Rigidly hierarchical and run by fools throwing darts blindfolded, and yet everyone pretends it makes sense.’ (Is it just me, or does that remind you of anyone in particular?) Their powers are a grab bag of randomness. The Blackness, the vampire faction, favours trickery, and has powers such as switching cards around during play.
Playing the Game
As mentioned, each player takes a shuffled deck of cards for their chosen faction and draws 5 cards. The Forbidden Fruit is placed nearby, ‘picked’ side up.
A turn consists of 5 phases:
· deployment—each player places 3 cards face down in a row front of them, and if any player doesn’t have enough cards, the game ends;
· reveal—players reveal their cards, activating any abilities (the text at the bottom of the cards) marked with the reveal symbol, which could cause the elimination of rival cards before battle;
· battle—the winner of each column is the card with the higher of the values at the top left of clashing cards (see later for a fuller explanation), and note that effects marked with the battle symbol can take effect here;
· resolution—if a player wins both left and right column battles, they swap from the normal strength of the card to the ‘chaos value’ at the top right, and redo that battle, and again, relevant effects take place; and
· recruitment—after resolving effects marked with the recruitment symbol and discarding all played cards, each player draws back to 5, or as close as possible, but if anyone has fewer than 3 available cards, the game ends.
The interesting (or do I mean chaotic?) aspect of battles is that your 3 cards can be battling different people (well, apart from in a 2-player game, naturally). Your left column card competes against the right column card of the person to your left, and your right column clashes with the leftmost card of your right neighbour. Your central card competes against all other players, and it’s this central clash that determines the overall winner—the 2 side ones are used for their triggered effects and to determine if the chaos value is used, nothing more.
Now we come to the Forbidden Fruit… If it’s showing the ‘picked’ side, the winner takes it; in the case that the winner already had it, it’s turned to the ‘tasted’ side. If it’s on the ‘tasted’ side and in front of the clash winner, the game ends and that player is the overall winner, otherwise it’s flipped back to the ‘picked’ side. If the game ends due to cards running out, whoever has the Forbidden Fruit is declared the winner, regardless of which face is up. Note that this movement can be repeated during a turn, happening first as a result of a normal battle and subsequently if the chaos resolution stage occurs.
There are a few other wrinkles and additions. First, in 3- or 4-player games, the effects on the central cards are ignored. When there’s no opposing card (because it was removed as the result of some action), the battle is won by default.
The game comes with Chaos Cat and Goddess cards which can optionally be shuffled into each deck. If a single Chaos Cat is drawn, it affects all players in the subsequent turn (2 or more cancel each other out and do nothing). An effect can be that players have to choose their cards randomly and unseen—it’s not called a chaos cat for nothing. The Goddess, on the other hand, will allow players (if they decide to keep it) to maintain a hand of 6 rather than 5 cards, but with, e.g., lower strength in battles.
The rulebook (available via the campaign page also describes a 2v2 mode in which players act in pairs, sharing a deck composed of 2 different factions.
Wrap Up
This is a gloriously silly game, with a delightful campaign to match. It’s not astronomically expensive, but I gather that the final product will be shipped from the USA so the (currently unspecified) delivery charges could be rather high, possibly more than the game itself.
The campaign includes a bunch of somewhat odd and intriguing add-ons, such as decks standard playing cards. The game’s artist is better known as the creator of many attractive card decks, including the very nicely blinged-up Chaos Maelström cards shown above. You can even pay an extra several hundred quid to get a claimed $900 worth of various ‘rare’ decks. I’m certain I wouldn’t want to pay that much for playing cards, but they certainly are pretty—works of art.
But back to the game: it unashamedly wears its name proudly, with chaos pervading the entire game. The artwork is appealing and fits well. I’d be signing up for this one if only delivery wasn’t going to be so expensive.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
