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the-bonehoard · 4 years

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Wyvern CCG

So my second article. Here we go! I know I said my next article would be about Ophidian’s gameplay, but in trying to learn to play I found I actually didn’t know anyone who liked card games enough to try their best to learn this one... Wyvern though. I have things to say about Wyvern.

Wyvern was a CCG initially released in 1995, designed by Mike Fitzgerald and published by US Games Systems Inc. Now I think its safe to say Mike Fitzgerald isn’t exactly a household name in the gaming community, but surprisingly he did work on other games after Wyvern. Most notably a couple games for WOTC and Dragon Hunt (more on that shortly). He also helped design the starter decks for the early Pokemon TCG, which when I found out about I was genuinely in awe a little bit.

Allow me this small tangent, but this is someone who had a very small impact on all of our childhoods even if it was in an extremely minor way. A starter deck can really impact how you respond to a TCG, so this was obviously a really interesting job for someone to have and how he decided what cards to put in them is something I’d love to find out, or just generally how these things are decided and who actually designs these things.

Anyway, back to the article. US Games Systems Inc were largely a tarot and playing card publisher, and also a publisher of Wizard Trump cards (I’m guessing in the vein of Top Trumps, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how the game plays). And they still are. Wyvern didn’t put them under the same way other TCGs/CCGs buried their publishers. But again, more on that later.

So Wyvern. It was a game about dragons and dragon slayers, with a unique gameplay style I quite enjoyed (more on that in my gameplay article), with art that ranges from “Legitimately good” to “Comically Bad”, which is odd considering all the cards I’ve checked from the Limited Edition were illustrated by the same artist. It also has the coolest card back I’ve ever seen on a trading card. It has a real fantasy tome vibe, with a gold that really pops in person. There’s a reason I made it the icon for this blog. It would probably fit in well among CCGs today if it lasted. Alas, it did not.

Wyvern lasted two years (Ah the two year curse... Check out Kohdok’s Seven deadly Sins of TCGs for more on that), with five total releases; the Premiere Limited Edition, the limited edition, Phoenix, Chameleon and Kingdom. Limited edition largely consisted of Premiere edition reprints and a few added cards, while Phoenix and Chameleon both added 90 new cards each. Kingdom was similar to the limited edition, in that it was reprints from previous sets, but this set also errata’d several cards and fixed certain errors on others.

While I wasn’t able to find any information on Chameleon’s cancellation, my best guess it ended for the same reason so many card games are cancelled, it didn’t make a lot of money. And it didn’t make money because it wasn’t popular. While I do enjoy the game, the current score on BGG is 5.2, which is pretty bad even for a CCG. Besides that, you can generally get boxes or starter decks of Wyvern on ebay for ridiculously cheap prices. I got my box for £30. Thirty. Pounds. That’s almost the same price of buying each individual booster from when it was originally available, and that’s not accounting for inflation. If that’s not a sign that this game wasn’t popular I don’t know what is.

On a side note, Limited Edition does seem to be the most widely available and from what I can tell Chameleon and Kingdom seem to be a lot harder to track down. I wouldn’t be able to tell you why, but I can tell you that the Premiere edition is almost impossible to track down due to a printing error resulting in a lot of Magic the Gathering cards being printed on Wyvern backs in the premiere edition, resulting in them being extremely rare collectors items now.

So what happened after the game? Well there was one more Wyvern adjacent release. Dragon Hunt.

Dragon Hunt, from what I am able to tell, was a set deck game using Wyvern cards and the Wyvern ruleset, but simplified and more streamlined. The BoardGameGeek rating for this game is a 5.7 so maybe it was slightly better received at the time, but I can guarantee this isn’t an item you need to track down if you can find regular Wyvern product any easier.

So that was Wyvern. Sorry for the odd structure of this one. I might take another pass at the story of Wyvern one day, but for now, that’s the story of a card game that maybe didn’t stand a chance in the flooded CCG market of the 90s, especially with its wide range in art quality and less eye-catching product design.

I’ll see you soon with my gameplay review.

Until next time friends,

Kay, Keeper of the Bonehoard

#wyvern ccg #tcg history #ccg history #the bonehoard

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the-bonehoard · 4 years

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Bonehoard Summary: Ophidian 2350

For my first psuedo article, I thought I’d outline my process moving forward and my eventual hopes for this account.

I only really want to cover card games I am able to get a hold of here, which also unfortunately means a lot of smaller card games are going to go under the raydar since they don’t have eBay listings and/or a whole lot of information on them that I can find online. Ideally I’d like some access to Scrye or Dragon magazine, so I’ll be looking into if I can find scans online in future.

So my primary research method for Ophidian was, tragically, Wikipedia. And to add insult to injury, the sources sited by Wikipedia for information on this game now longer exist...

I was able to access a couple primary sources, namely most of the information from the game’s current publisher, Hack and Slash games, seems to explain the situation pretty well.

So here’s a brief run down of the game: Ophidian is a ccg set in a scifi future where a race of reptilian aliens (Ophidians) use gladiatorial arenas to pit combatants against eachother. Players control of teams of gladiators, typically teams of four, and here would be a good spot to talk about the game’s VC (Victory Condition) but there are three, so I’ll get into those when I delve more into the rules once I play some full games.

Ophidian was published by Fleer, which was actually a name I recognised because a while back I was trying to track down some regular Spider-man trading cards. Fleer were primarily a baseball card company, and so the game wasn’t designed in house. The game was actually designed by three college students (again, according to Wikipedia with no great sources), Shaun Mahar, Gregg Schwartz and Raffi Tasci. They also developed a story and lore around the game, like any good card game should have, with a professional writer being brought on by Fleer to write stories around the game.

The game actually got pretty decent reviews, apparently a 5 star rating from Scrye which, from what I can tell, was a pretty significant feat considering a lot of the scores quick cash in games would get. Trouble was, Fleer were a baseball card company. Those sales were failing and while Ophidian was doing fairly well, it wasn’t enough to carry the company on its own and Fleer seemingly divert their resources into their primary product, cancelling Ophidian just three months after the first edition release.

Its kind of sad honestly, while the art is kinda funny bad in some cases and the cards can seem a bit cluttered with symbols and abbreviations (the rules even more so) the game does look like it would play well. The flow system it utilises in lieu of turns is pretty unique for the time and I can’t wait to give a try. On top of that, the rules describe a 120 card expansion to be released later in 2003, that must have been in the design phases at least, but that never came to fruition due to its cancellation. It pains me we might not see what these cards were. Or maybe... we already know

See in 2013 the unsold stock of Ophidian was rediscovered, and selling online for absolutely dirt cheap. A guy called Robert Shofkom had kept in touch with some of the game’s developers and was invested in hopefully seeing an updated re-release of the game, and when he discovered that the game’s stock was being sold so cheap, he saw an opportunity. He made a deal for the game’s licence, bought up the existing stock and then, with a team he put together, launched a successful Kickstarter to not only launch an updated version of the game, but to release the unreleased expansion for the game. You can buy it now even, it actually delivered which, hey, not all Kickstarter games can say.

While it is cool to see this game get some love again, I have to confess I’m not a fan of the new updated designs. There’s a charm to older trading cards that I love too much, and seeing such a huge change happen all at once is a little jarring. Magic had over 25 years to subtly change its layout and frame, so what happened seemed like a natural evolution. Unfortunately Ophidian didn’t get the same, so the changes look like a genetically or cybernetically enhanced forced evolution of the old game. Which... kind of fits the game’s theme so maybe its actually badass?

Ophidian looks to be a kind of game that some people are going to really love, me included, but honestly I can kind of see why its not taken off as massively as other card games. It is slightly over-complicated, I can’t see myself playing it with someone not intimately familiar with games, like I would Magic or Keyforge or Pokemon. But Yugioh is slightly over the top complexity-wise now so maybe I’m wrong. If you’re interested, you can pick up the new Ophidian stuff on Hack and Slash games’ website, or if you live in the US... Well you can get every product originally released for the game (sealed and new, despite the age) for just $16. You have no idea how much it pains me I can’t get these due to my unfortunate location in the UK...

Next time I’ll be covering either the full gameplay of Ophidian or some history of the Spoils.

Until next time friends

Kay, keeper of the Bonehoard

#ophidian 2350 #ophidian #tcg history

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