NGE CCG: OMG WTF ASL

Giant Monsters and Emotional Abuse, Now in Card Game Form!

There was a full-on, playable collectible card game based on Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'll let those of you familiar with that series pick up the shattered remnants of your exploded heads, before we catch up the unenlightened.

NGE is an anime show that often gets fulsome praise these days for inverting the expectations of the viewing audience. It started as a fairly straightforward teenage-boy-pilots-giant-robot show with a lot of (literally) arbitrary Judeo-Christian-Freudian mythology as set dressing, and then took a headlong dive into psychological fuckery, high weirdness, and ultimately the creator more or less directly telling anime fandom as a whole to put on a non-dragon shirt and leave the basement for God's sake. Of course, as certain observers have pointed out, this message was somewhat diluted by the creators' willingness to pimp out the series for a wide variety of collectibles. tie-ins and relaunches, many of which involved heavily sexualized incarnations of the two pubescent female pilots, colour-coded for your convenience as red (dominant) and blue/white (submissive). The demands of crass commercialism and creepy anime fandom aside, NGE managed to squeeze out a pretty decent boy-becomes-man story viewed through the funhouse mirror of animoo.

The NGE CCG, one of the tie-ins relatively light on both crass and creep, is actually startlingly faithful to its source material. Relationships between characters are key to gameplay, and six of the main characters from the series are arranged in a pentagon plus the three Evas (aforementioned giant robots) below, creating something like a Tarot layout¹.  Every card title is a line from the show, spoken by a character in the relationship matrix - Ordinarily, each character can only speak one line per turn, though as in all CCGs, rules are flexible things. Cards can be played both for their normal effect, or flipped over for another line that can be used to either attract or harm a character. In the former case, the targeted character is "grouped" with the character who spoke the card - in the latter, they're either broken out of whatever group they're in, or if alone, are "downed" (injured, sunk into a deep pit of despair) until someone says something nice to them and gives them the strength to carry on and keep fighting (this is anime, after all)². Characters who are downed can't speak cards, and pilots who are downed can't pilot Evas and fight Angels (the giant monsters drenched in aforementioned Judeo-Christian mythology).

Another interesting rule is the "Draw points" in the upper right corner. Rather than drawing one card per turn automatically as in Magic, you draw a number of cards at the end of the turn equal to the total draw points of the cards you played. Most cards are worth +1, including all cards played as attract/harm lines³. Particularly powerful cards are worth 0, and devastating ones are worth negative draw points, requiring a player to discard cards. Since having no cards in hand at the end of a turn eliminates a player, this serves as a rather severe limiting factor⁴. It's an oddly roundabout way of doing things, and keeping track of total draw points looks like a pain in the ass, but the suspense of instant elimination unless cards are shepherded very carefully could save the system.

The CCG is also faithful to its roots in that the victory conditions vary - Each player chooses a particular consummation card to start, and although consummations are tied to particular characters, a given character has several consummations (reflecting various goals they had over the course of the series). Victory is achieved by first reaching a particular gamestate (two characters are grouped together, a certain character is downed, you defeat an Angel) and then flipping the victory card over and achieving a different condition. The sheer variety of win conditions means that, particularly for the first "level" of victory, it's not a zero-sum game - One action can easily fulfill multiple win conditions. Although Angels have to be defeated (an undefeated Angel forces the active player to discard cards, hastening their end as mentioned), their defeat is often only incidental to the ultimate goal of the game, which again works well for a show where the giant monsters often took a backseat to the main character's torturous and mindfucky relationship with his father, his fellow pilots, and pretty much everyone he met.

Is it any good as a game? No idea - despite an entire cardset and rulebook being translated and made available online, I haven't yet gone mad enough to try printing the whole damn thing out and negotiating the fan-translation on the cards (See the card above - it's powerfully evocative of the feel of the show, but what the hell does it mean? Does Shinji's group break up? Are cards attached to him discarded? The rulebook offers no assistance). It remains a mysterious enigma of odd rules and Mysterious Japanese Game Design, waiting for the day I lose my sense entirely and attempt to print and play. For the time being, I'm quite content just to know that it exists.

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1. And heap another layer of symbolism on there, whynot.
2. Rei Ayanami is the only character who automatically recovers from being downed every turn. It's a big old spoiler to explain why this rule exists, but it amused me to no end.
3. Again, except for Rei, whose attract/harm lines are worth 0. And again, hee hee hee.
4. Although logical, since a player with no cards has no means of getting new ones.