What, you haven’t heard this trading card game before? Where have you been for the last 10 years, anywhere except my backyard?
Alright, the jig’s up. The “Warriors” card series was a project of mine for a long, long time in the past. The first edition dates all the way back to my grade school days. I was reading a book about games one day and found out that dices can roll things other than a D6… I was especially excited about the D100, and this facination along with some rural knowledge about a card game called Magic: The Gathering compelled me to make my own trading card game out of back covers of notebooks.
The first set of trading card games are based on the various famous weapons used during the Dynasty Warriors period, believe it or not, so weapons like the Twin Dragon (Liu Bei) or the Moon Cresent (Lu Bu) were all there in the first edition of Warriors. Since there’s no store that sell D10 dices anywhere, we have to replace the rolls with two draws from a deck of hard using 1-10 of two different suits.
The set that you are looking right now were done during my high school years. Every card had the same identical background created by tracing an image… but because this is done on index cards, the tracing process has to be done by first placing the index card below the original picture, then trace heavily with a pencil… that leaves a groove that I can retrace on the index card with a pencil. It was hard, tiring work, but I really enjoyed how professional it looked as a result of the hard work.
The basic mechanics of the game is even easier than MtG. Every player starts with a 100 life points and a deck of 7 cards from the card pile. During each turn, you declare an attack by throwing down a weapon card, and the defender throws down a weapon or a shield to defend the attack. The attacker then makes a D100 roll. If the roll is less than or equal to the difference between the two card’s attributes, then the attack is successful and the defender subtracts the dice roll number from his life. There’s some variations like spells and enhancement cards that stacks onto attack/defend cards, but it doesn’t deviate much from the luck based dice rolling basis of the game.
Even though I recovered a good sum of these cards, the deck that I have is too small to actually play a game. Maybe someday, when I once again have the time and energy to do this again, I’ll make a new generation of “Weapons” card and sell it to Wizard of the Coast…. or something like that.