reader, prepare thyself, this is lengthy
Elevator pitch number one: Codex: Card Time Strategy is a game that offers the strategic customization of CCGs through a finite card pool, allowing players the ability to compete at the top levels without having to continuously spend hundreds of dollars on new cards.
Elevator pitch number two: Codex: card Time Strategy is an RTS-themed s card game that's a hybrid between a CCG and a Deckbuilding game.
* How things work *: and what I think about them
You start with a Base that has 20 HP. You lose when your base is destroyed at 0 HP. You win when your opponent's Base is destroyed at 0 HP.
This would be a more honest name, if the Swedish Pop group hadn't taken it first
You start with one of seven different 10 card starter decks. The starter decks are sorted by color Brown (neutral), White, Green, Red, Blue, Purple, Black. That's an even more mockable set of colors than MtG, but it's merely a flavor concern, so it's not worth dwelling on. Each of the cards in a starter deck is either a "Tech 0 unit" or a "Spell".
You also start with (1 or) 3 Hero Cards which are in a zone that is not your deck. Each of the six "real" colors has Three heroes to choose from, while Neutral only has 2 - making for 20 total. In the game's learning mode, or playing with just the Starter Set, each player will only field one hero and use that's hero's color's associated starter deck. In the more standard game mode, you will field a team of 3 heroes and choose a starter deck associated with any one of their colors. You are allowed to mix and match heroes between different colors, although the game does have mild multicolor penalties such that you won't want to do so unless you are gaining some synergy. Current theorycrafting has a lot of argument over just how big such synergies need to be to make for competitive teams.
To play cards from your hand into play you need to spend Gold. Unlike MtG, the summoning resource is not partitioned by faction and all cards cost the same currency to play. This is good and allows for multicolor mix and match to be more straightforward than MtG. Gold is primarily acquired via workers. You start with either 4 (first player) or 5 workers (not first player) At the start of your turn, each worker produces one gold per turn. Unspent Gold is carried over from turn to turn I need to point out right here that this design decision adds turn-to-turn accounting to the usual CCG / Deckbuilder setup. You can gain up to one additional worker per turn by trashing a card from your hand and paying one gold. For the first three to five turns, you should always do this. This design decision means that the player decision is not whether to trash a card, but which card to trash.
You can summon your first hero from whereevertheheck they wait for a cost of two gold, at which point they enter your Command Zone, from which they will be able to attack, patrol (ie block) and use abilities. You can also summon units from your hand into your command zone for their printed gold cost. Units will also be able to Attack, Patrol and use Abilities. However, primarily for targeting reasons, there is a rule that "Heroes are not Units". I am unsure if the tactical depth such a rule adds is worth the complexity it adds. Much like MtG, Heroes and Units can neither attack nor do anything else that requires Exhausting (ie Tapping) their card on the turn they enter play unless, much like MtG, they have the specific ability which lets them do that. Unit and Heroes have Attack (Power in MtG terms) and Health (Toughness in MtG terms). Unlike MtG, Health does not reset each turn, and HP taken on a unit must be tracked turn to turn. This design decision is utter madness in a tabletop game. It is obviously supposed to reflect the attrition that units in RTS games suffer, and it allows weaker units to cumulatively chip away at tougher units - which are reasonable goals. However the amount of accounting it adds to the game is, to put it politely:
batshit insane.
Any unit with more than 1 starting health is likely to accumulate damage counters during most turns of most games.
Like MtG, there are a bunch of effects which grant units bonuses, penalties and additional abilities. So in addition to damage counters, you can have all the +1/+1 counters, or "has gained [ability]" markers on units.
Since that's all not enough accounting and tokens to pile up on cards, Heroes also have the ability to "level up". For each gold you spend, they gain a level. Hero cards have three bands of levels, each of which may have an ability. (although many Heroes have no abilities at their starting tier.) Heroes retain all abilities, so they retain their lower band abilities while also gaining the higher band abilities as the progress in level. This is thematic, but adds the accounting of putting level counters on your Heroes. Different Heroes have different abilities and different minimum levels needed to reach each band of abilities. Many (but not all) ability bands give their Hero increased Attack and Health stats when reached. In addition, each time a hero reaches a new band, all accumulated damage is healed away, thus making Heroes more durable than units (especially in the earlygame) and making the timing of leveling an important strategic consideration. I'm okay with all this, but it's still more accounting. Also I really dislike the phrasing and terminology. Instead of multiple levels at a cost of 1 gold per level being required to unlock the next band of abilities, I would much prefer if heroes all just had three levels. You could then preserve functionality by having varying costs in gold listed for each band of abilities. This is thematically cleaner. One more thing: when Heroes are killed, they don't die in the same way that units do.
A Codex hero
A slain hero loses all levels, damage, and accumulated tokens, has to sit out for a full turn, and may thereafter be resummoned at starting level. for 2 gold
Attacking and defending with Units/Heroes works quite a bit differently than MtG. The game is intentionally designed to allow for asynchronous play - you make all your choices on your turn, and cannot interrupt anything your opponent does on their turn. This is a laudable design goal, although it does lead to a few other difficulties, and current attempts at online play via webcam game boards or Steam's Tabletop Simulator have revealed that it was only 98% realized. The game includes a smattering of "opponent reveals their hand" abilities, which cannot be resolved asynchronously in online play without some type or rules-enforcing software., and there are a handful of other interactions such as "when this dies, sacrifice something else" which still require out-of-turn decision making. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but when Sirlin decides to charge 500% percent more than what with 80% similar component counts cost in order to support his design and playtesting costs ( Full Disclosure: I have playtest credits in two Sirlin games and received zilch for it ( not even free product nor discounts) - which isn't to say I'm sore, but is to say that his actual playtest costs are very likely zero. ) I feel compelled to point out even such small failures to hit stated design goals. If you are going to charge luxury premium prices for your design work, and claim ten years of playtesting as a cost when you stiff your playtesters, then I am not exactly big on forgiveness for missing the design goals you set yourself.
Anyways, attacks are one-on-one, in controller's choice of order. The attacker chooses a Unit or Hero, taps Exhausts it to make an attack ( unless it has the ability that lets it attack without tapping ) Exhausting, and the attacker also chooses an opposing Unit, Hero or Building for the attacker to attack. Then the attacker and the defender deal their ATK value in damage to each other's HP simultaneously (unless either has any abilities where things happen slightly differently). Note that buildings have no ATK, so an attacker can swing into buildings safely. Remember also that all HP damage is carried over turn to turn, even sacrificial Units/Heroes attacking or being attacked will usually inflict some attrition on the opposing Units/Heroes. The active player then repeats this process until they have made all the attacks they want, or all of their Units/Heroes eligible to make attacks have done so.
So Codex has not merely "chump blocking" to prevent damage at the cost of a card in play, but also adds the tactic of "chump attacking" to neutralize opposing cards in play at the cost of multiple cards.
So the bit here is that the active player has total control of attack order and attack targets - or rather they would if not for The Patrol Zone, which allows a defender to pre-emptively assign defenders. The way this works is that at the end of your turn, you may assign each of your untapped non-exhausted Units/Heroes to any empty slot in the Patrol Zone.
actual game component
Then, when your opponent attacks on their turn, they cannot choose to attack anything "behind" a Patroller (unless their attacker has one of several evasion-type abilities, (and the patrollers lack the appropriate negation ability for that type of evasion ability )). Furthermore, Patrollers "behind" another Patroller in the Squad Leader slot cannot be attacked (barring the aforementioned evasion delios). Thus when attacking, you must first eliminate your opponent's Squad Leader, then you get to choose which of your opponent's remaining Patrollers to eliminate, and only once you have eliminated all of your opponent's Patrollers do you get to freely choose targets to attack.
That's lets the defending player have up to 2 layers of defenses deployed to protect their Base and any other strategically critical infrastructure, but the game is kept from degenerating into impenetrable multi-tiered trench warfare by the fact that there is a 5-Patroller limit, and no hard limit on number of attackers. Also, carrying damage over turn-to-turn and giving the attacker the choice where to hit in the second line (non-Squad Leader Patrollers) serves to prevent turtling from ever becoming impenetrable. The cool part, is that each of the 5 Patrol Slots gives the defending unit a small bonus for being in that slot. The Squad Leader not only protects all other targets, but it also comes with a point of Armor (ie Temporary Hit Points), the next slot gives any defender in it +1 ATK, the following 2 slots give the defending player resource gains when a Patroller in those slots dies (adding materiel gains to chump blocking), while the final slot gives a Patroller Resist 1 (meaning an opponent must spend a gold to target it with Spells or abiltiies).
This is part is truly amazing game design. It allows for asynchronous play and yet allows the defender to make significant tactical decisions about whether and how to blocking and the attacker to make significant tactical decisions about whether and how to attack. It gives both attacker and defender advantages, but realizing those advantages is largely dependent upon other parts of the game state. If the rest of this game worked as well as this part, I would be every bit as effusive in begging people to shell out the crazy price tag of the Deluxe set as the Kool-Aid-Drinkers over on Fantasy Strike dot Com are. As it stands, I am merely uncomfortably paying that price myself and suggesting heavily that aspiring designers of other tactical combat type boardgames take a close look how this works.
But moving on, you may have noticed this game's first major terminology problem. I keep having to use the term Unit/Hero, because there are meaningful distinctions between them and it is an important rule that "Heroes are not Units."
There is no Game Term to refer to targets which can be either, so a bunch of cards have to say "Unit or Hero" on them, and with punctuation and conjunctions, that results in a fairly noticeable number of minor ambiguities -- which Sirlin characteristically insists are not in fact ambiguous. And which all could have been avoided by calling the set of "Heroes+Units" all "Creatures" or "Troops" or maybe replacing the current usage of "Units" with "Minions" and letting "Units" mean "Minion or Hero".
But that's not the biggest terminology issue here. The truly glaring problem is that Sirlin apparently inherited Gygax's thesaurus:
Lemme 'splain: any Units in your Starter Deck are Tech 0 Units, meaning that you can build them from your hand for their cost at any point during the game. It also means that they are generally the weakest and least efficient units. Each higher Tech level unlocks better and more efficient units. Once you have 6 workers, you can spend 1 gold to build your Tech 1 Building, which lets you build Tech 1 Units in the same way. Once you have 8 workers, you can spend 4 gold to build your Tech 2 building, which lets you build Tech 2 Units in the same way - except wait, it's not in the same way, when you build your Tech 2 building you have to choose a Spec from among the Heroes you started the game with, and you can only build Tech 2 Units of the chosen Spec. Once you have 10 workers, you can spend 5 gold to build your Tech 3 building, and you can build the Tech 3 unit associated with the Spec you chose back at Tech 2. But remember that you don't start with anything but Spells and Tech 0 units in your chosen starter deck. At the end of your turn you get a Tech Phase, where you rifle through your Codex (MtG style trade-binder) of all the cards associated with your chosen Hero(es) and add two of those cards to your discard pile to be cycled into your draws Deckbuilder style. Once you have ten or more Workers you can, and often should, choose to add less than two. The idea is that you will start out drafting Teching a mix of Tech I units across all of your heroes's Specs, then move to Tech II units in a specific hero's spec, and eventually to Tech III, while also drafting Teching a few spells specific for each of your heroes as needed in the matchup.
On paper, this terminology might not look so bad, as it is intuitive that you need a Tech X building to play a Tech X unit, and you can see how you are adding higher Tech units to your deck during the Tech phase. In person, it is nowhere near that clear, as players will say things like "2 damage to your Tech II" and have to point to clarify that they mean the 'Tech II building" and not the single Tech II unit out; or will ask things like "did you Tech?" meaning "Have you completed your Tech Phase, is your turn all the way done?" and yet being interpreted as "Did you spend gold to build your next Tech Building". At least one set of players at a demo was completely baffled by the 'Tech Phase" as they saw it is the phase where they added new Spells to their deck and not as the Phase where they got higher Tech units into their deck. This is another case where a bunch of misunderstandings could have been preempted by using slightly different terminology.
Speaking of preempting, the deal with Tech buildings having HP and being vulnerable to attacks, spells and abilities is that they take a full turn to build. You cannot (generally) summon a Tech II unit unless you started your turn with your Tech II building in play. The idea here is that players can preemptively "counterspell" an opponent playing a given unit by destroying the relevant Tech building, which will take that opponent their next turn (but not additional gold) to rebuild, and so on. That is supposed to add a level of strategy to the tactical targeting choices in the game, and it does, but it seems to add a bigger amount of slippery slope and lockdown potential while making having solid defenses critically important. If an opponent can overwhelm your defenses enough to start taking out your Tech buildings, they are going to be able to play better and more efficient units than you, and you are unlikely to be able to catch up by playing the lower Tech units which are still legal for you. So to stay relevant in the game, you really have to either have set up solid Patrollers or do things to minimize your opponent's ATK strength. The more interesting strategic case is where an attacker cannot simply overwhelm a defender to cripple their future options, but instead has attackers with evasion abilities that lets them get some damage through, but at the risk of leaving their own defenses understrength (since units with no abilities general have higher raw stats than similar cost and Tech units without such abilities).
Moving on, the next thing to talk about is Spells. Minor spells just have a Color and come in one of the starter decks. More powerful or efficient spells have a Spec and are associated with a specific hero. Ultimate spells are a special subtype of spell. You need a Hero in play to cast any spell. Minor spells can be cast for their normal gold cost by any Hero associated with the relevant color (or by any Hero at all for Neutral Minor Spells), but incur an additional gold cost if cast by a Hero of a different color. Everything that's not a Minor Spell will have a specific Spec listed on it, and can only be cast by the Hero associated with that Spec (aside from the inevitable exceptions for specific cards). Each Hero has exactly one Ultimate Spell, and these are supposed to be game-changers when played. Ultimate Spells can only be cast if the relevant casting Hero started your turn at their maximum level (again with an inevitable card-specific exception). Thus if you are worried about your opponent casting a particular Necromancy spell on their next turn, you can try to kill their Necromancy Hero this turn - which would render him sitting out of play on the next turn and your opponent unable to cast any Necromancy spells until they had the chance to resummon their Necromancy Hero on their turn-after-next. Thus you have the tactical option to preemptively counter spells being played via the same mechanism that lets you preemptively counter given units being played. This is interesting, and the interplay between giving the attacking player choice of targets, the defending player advance choice of defensive bonuses, and the attacking player the choice between neutralizing threats already on the board or preventing the defended from playing specific types of new threats on the next turn does add quite a bit of tactical depth. However, it makes for a game that is fucking complex as all get out and you will probably never be able to explain to someone who wasn't previously exposed to MtG or Starcraft, and that's just at the tactical level.
The discard and draw phase is the final thing I have to talk about before I get to the strategic level. Much like Dominion et al, you discard your whole hand at the end of each turn, and then draw a new hand. You never end up with cards above your mana Gold curve clogging your hand for multiple turns in a row. However how many cards you draw for the new hand is not fixed, but is instead determined by how many cards you had to discard. You get to draw two more cards than you discarded, to a maximum of five (plus the inevitable potential exceptions for various drawing effects). Thus if you play a bunch of cards at once, you will suffer smaller hands and slower cycling in the future, while if you limit yourself to using no more than two cards per turn you will have hands with more options, faster cycling and a chance to drop more cards on a future turn.
So at the high-level strategic overview, this is a Deckbuilder wherein each player has one of seven different starting decks and drafts additional cards into their deck from up to three different pools of cards. Except unlike most Deckbuilders, there are no direct in-game costs to add better cards into your deck. Instead, most cards have both significant resource costs and game-state prerequisites to play from your hand onto the board. Alternately, I could describe it as a CCG where you modify your deck each turn instead of merely between games. Except unlike most CCGs, the card pool is finite and all players have the same access to it before the game starts.
Overall it's got absurdly phenomenal depth, but the rules complexity and amount of accounting needed combine to make it actually impossible to play correctly. By which I don't mean that correct play requires a lot of familiarity and skill (which it does), but rather that in each of the three demos I have done with the Starter Set P&P, there was always at least one major mistake resulting in a game state which was rules-illegal, but not noticed by any of the participants until later. And while those experiences all involved new players, the Starter Set is also the 1 hero training mode for this game, much simpler than the full 3 hero mode. So I rather mean that this is a great game, but it's going to be actually unplayable by the majority of people reading this. And yes, I am taking into account that this rant is posted on a site populated with obsessive gaming nerd types who like games with lots of math and fiddly bits. I still say that more than half of you will not even be able to completely follow the rules when playing this game.
I know that my knee-jerk review of every board game ever is "it could use streamlining to make it faster and more accessible", but that has never , and likely will never be truer than it is in the case of Codex : Card -Time Strategy: a game made for Sirlin superfans to replay thousands of times, while offers a baffling-at-best new player experience to everyone else.