Battleforge tutorial

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Part I.

BattleForge for Beginners
by

Juan David Gonzales

Let’s start with a confession, shall we? There’s a reason this
column has the name it has, and it’s this: I’ve never played a Real-Time Strategy game in my life. Unless you count marriage. If BattleForge was ‘just’ another RTS, there are a ton of people who could guide you through it step by step. So what’s the deal? Howcome I get one of the best gigs in town, and get to chat to you about this fantastic new game from Phenomic and EA?

Well, as you should know by now, BattleForge is a lot more than
an RTS. It has three other letters intimately allied with those strategic elements, and they are three letters that really light my fire:

T.C.G. That, my friends, stands for Trading Card Game, and in BattleForge weget to see something never tried before, a seamless blend of two hugely-entertaining, pulse-pounding, brain-frying genres. And where do I come in? Well, the RTS bit may be new to me, but the TCG bit certainly isn’t. I spend my life covering some of the best TCGs ever to hit the shelves. I get to travel the world watching the best players on planet Earth go toe-to-toe in a genre so compelling thatmillions upon millions of words get written about it every year. Quite a few of those words have been written, read, or spoken, by yours truly.

So I’ll make you a deal. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be delving

games. Whether it's role-playing, board, trading card, console, or computer games, he covers events ranging from conventions to world championships. He writes for various websites, andcreates audio and video content for clients around the globe, including many of the biggest names in the gaming industry. Watching the best, talking and writing about the best, and playing with the best – it doesn't get much better than that.

Rich Hagon spends his life around

into the world of BattleForge from a TCG perspective. That means I’ll be talking to you about the characteristics ofthe different kinds of decks available in the game. I’ll be showing you some of the skills that make the best in the TCG world so good at what they do, and how you can apply those skillsets to master the world of BattleForge. And I’ll be showing you inside the deep hidden strategies of deckbuilding that the TCG world has been developing over the last fifteen years or so.

But for all thethousands upon thousands of TCG duels I’ve
played, and watched, and analysed, and commentated on, we come back to the fact that, as I sit staring at the button marked ‘tutorial’, I’m both excited and nervous, because this is a step into the unknown for me. Perhaps it is for you too? Then let’s raise a lantern, and step hopefully forward into a brave new world of gaming, together. Ready? Let’s begin.

Part I.

Skylord? I like the sound of that, and come to think of it, I like
our tutorial guide. We haven’t done anything yet, but already I’m impressed. This thing looks fantastic, and sounds simply amazing. Who wrote that stirring music? As someone who writes music for TV and film, I can say with certainty that the composer knows their stuff. Talk about immersive. Right, pay attentionRich, she’s talking to you. Here come...six Northguards. They’re my guys to command, right? It’s quickly apparent that I get six of them every time I use my Northguards ‘card’ sitting at the bottom of the screen. I’m expecting them to have some sort of cost to cast, and I’m not wrong. In BattleForge, this comes in the form of a Power cost, and a number of Orbs, featuring the appropriate color.Because the Northguards are from the Frost faction, they’re blue. Looking at my cards at the bottom of the screen, I have a bunch more blue cards, and some red ones too. I guess the purple and green are for next time.

My Northguards have 450 attack, and 720 hitpoints. Is that good? I
have no idea, but I know from TCGs not to expect too much from my early plays. If this is what I get for 50...