Jack is Lethal

I wrote a few months ago about my top five TCG cards and I left one of them blank. I’m not quite filling in the section now because the cards aren’t approved, nor in fact are they completely done. Either way the card is Jack Bauer, well not a specific Jack Bauer but a gameplay mechanic that was started with the Jack series of cards.

I will get into how 24 TCG plays at a later time. Obviously we aren’t reinventing the wheel so if you’ve played other TCGs then you can play 24 TCG with little effort. To set up what I really love about Jack then I do have to explain a little bit. The basic premise of the game is that you play your characters (CTU or Insurgents) and they have an overall mission to score 24 (obviously) points. A character may attempt a mission and then your opponent may have one of their characters try and stop that character. That is how battling happens. The characters each have a skill rating and a health rating. When a character losses a battle they are wounded, when they get wounds equal to their health rating then they die.

Our game also has keywords, loaded (a gameplay macro) and unloaded (just to hang stuff off) but we call them traits (loaded) and keywords (unloaded). There were a lot of initial discussions about Jack and how we can give him some impact to the game, something that fits the IP but also is appealing the TCG. One day the conversation went a lot like this, I think this is pretty close to how it went.

“So what do we do about Jack?”

“Well one thing about Jack, anyone who walks into a room with Jack Bauer comes out wounded.”

And that was that, it just clicked with everyone. The trait Lethal was born. The name could change but we really hope not. Lethal works pretty simple, you deal an extra wound. When in a mission attempt with someone with the Lethal trait you receive a wound; win, lose, or draw.

In a game where most characters have one or two health the Lethal trait is incredibly powerful and has required a good bit of testing. When Jack (or anyone with Lethal) is one the table you must be very careful. It makes for some fun, fast paced games, which is obviously the goal.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post a card before too long. We have a few work in progress images up coming in Scrye and InQuest, I’ll post links once they are out.