M.Indie is a World Apart by Game Tunnel

M.Indie by Joseph Lieberman

M.Indie is a World Apart (April 26, 2006)

In the last year I have been sucked into two online games that are tough to classify. They aren�€™t �€œbig name�€? and they aren�€™t really indie. They fall somewhere in between. The strange thing about them is they are both Online Trading Card Games and they are both made by the same company. That company is Worlds Apart and the games are Star Chamber: The Harbinger Saga and Auto Assault: The Trading Card Game.

Auto Assault? Indie? Well, it is just intellectual property. It just uses the pictures and names from the game, but the crew who made the game certainly aren�€™t NCSoft in size.

Both games have a lot of similarities to them. You design a deck of cards and use them to battle your opponents in casual games, tournaments, and special events. However, Auto Assault is like the kid brother to Star Chamber.

Star Chamber is the advanced game, basically. In Star Chamber not only do you have your deck of cards, but you also have a strategic map, unit production, unit movement, and 3 possible victory objectives to achieve and prevent your opponent from achieving. Also since Star Chamber is much older, there are a lot more cards.

In Auto Assault TCG you have only two objectives and no strategic map. That isn�€™t to say the Auto Assault game lacks strategy, it just isn�€™t quite as deep as Star Chamber. If you are a hardcore strategy fan, check out Star Chamber at www.starchamber.net. If you are a Magic the Gathering player or simply curious to see what a TCG is all about, I suggest Auto Assault at www.autoassaulttcg.com.

There are similarities between Auto Assault and Star Chamber though, a lot of them. The deck building is similar in that there are specific �€œraces�€? or �€œclasses�€? which shape the deck you are going to use. Some vehicles in Auto Assault TCG excel at completing missions while some races in Star Chamber excel in combat. That isn�€™t to say there isn�€™t room for variation, but this race/class system is important to new players because it gives them very easy directions to take their deck. You can also see that the clear division in objectives are very similar. Though Star Chamber contains more objectives, both games have the users vying to excel at multiple tasks simultaneously. In both cases the winner is usually the one capable of striking the best balance, though sometimes the one who can simply overwhelm one objective quickly.

Both games eliminate a lot of tedious work that goes into tradition trading card games. The card book is easy to look at and you can filter every aspect of the cards. If you want to find all the cards that cost 2 power or less and contain the word �€œexplosion�€? you can. It�€™s a heck of a lot easier than post-it-notes and binders. The PC aspect also prevents any cheating, randomizes card draws, and in Star Chamber�€™s case presents a game that would be far too complex to ever be in cardboard form.

All in all, Worlds Apart has a model and it is a good one. These quasi-indie developers are on the fast track to TCG Fame and I highly recommend jumping in.

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By: Joseph Lieberman
Posted: Wednesday April 26, 2006