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Stargate Online Trading Card Game: A Decade in the Making


Stargate Online Trading Card Game brings together the characters and events of more than a decade's worth of material and mythos into the form of a CCG. Not only that, but its release corresponds to a non-videogame version of the same card game.

For 11+ years, the characters from the Stargate universe have been venturing out to distant worlds and encountering enemies and friends the likes of which humans have never seen before, and you will get to play as both the heroes and the villains in one-on-one battles in order to get seven glyphs before your opponent.


The structure of Stargate Online Trading Card Game is slightly different from most other CCGs. Instead of just trying to take out as many of the opposing player's health or summons as you can, you are trying to complete seven missions before he/she does. Each deck contains at least a dozen missions and when it is your turn to play the hero, you put down a mission and try to meet whatever goal it throws at you.

These goals are typically to get as many characters into play that total a certain number of points in a particular skill (the skills are culture, combat, science and ingenuity). For instance, if a mission card has a win condition of 3 cultures, then you need to activate enough team members so that their sum of culture points is equal to or more than 3. Once you have reached this goal, you will get the glyph assigned to that mission and you are one step closer to winning the game.

Where things get interesting is when you play the villain. Here, your opponent is trying to earn the glyph and you have to stop him. You do this by adding obstacle and complication cards to the mission that up the number of skill points he/she needs to meet the win condition.


This two-part aspect to the Stargate Trading Card Game seems to make each round last longer and tends to drag the game out a bit, but it is an interesting enough spin that it is definitely not noticeable, especially since your role switches between the two positions throughout the game.

The computer game itself (as opposed to just the CCG aspect) seems to have everything laid out nicely and puts all of the necessary parts to managing your decks and challenging opponents at your fingertips. I found that the layout of the different systems made it really easy to go from the tutorials to the deck builder to the store and finally to challenging other people in the beta from around the world.


While actually taking part in a match, I found that Stargate Online Trading Card Game's placement of both mine and my opponent's cards made it easy to keep an eye on everything and the ability to view the details of any face up card meant that I could read as much detail about every card as I wanted to without having to squint at the screen.

Pretty much any CCG fan should find the hero/villain/mission aspect of this game intriguing and different enough from other CCGs so as not to consider it just another Magic knock-off. Meanwhile, any SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis fan should definitely look into either the computer-based or actual card game since it will sport tons of events and characters from the show.



-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

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