Welcome shinobi! Are you ready to express your ninja way? Well now's your chance with Bandai's new expandabledeck-building card game: Naruto Boruto.
We sat down to learn more with game designerRyan Miller, who passionately brought a lifetime of experience, from credits on titles likeBetrayal Legacy, Epic PVP Fantasy, and UFS Streetfighter to the world of Naruto.
I'm Ryan Miller, I'm the designer for theNaruto Boruto card game, I'm a 19 year veteran of the industry, I've been designing gamessince I was 11 years old and haven't stopped.
Just the sheer number of awesome characters;there's so many.
And awesome battles, it really lends itselfwell to a card game.
Naruto fans I think are really going to enjoy that they can put together their dream team of their favorite characters andbattle it out with their opponents.
Even if you're not a fan of Naruto, the gameitself is very fast-paced, accessible, it's just a blast.
And it's mainly due to the Chrono Clash system itself.
Also we're planning on doing other worldswith this system too.
So I think that we're going to see some reallyinteresting, you know, cross-world battles going on in the future, it's going to be prettysweet.
So there's two sets you can buy: $34.
99 a piece.
Each set has two decks of 53 cards, and alsothe extra card decks.
The extra cards are these amazing, oversized, and totally used in the game, it's not a gimmick at all, these are the cards you're going tobe slamming down against your opponent.
You know, whenever you do it's really awesomecause you slam it down, a breeze goes over your opponent's face, it's really cool.
And each set is unique.
You're not going to get overlap between thetwo sets when you buy them.
When you do buy both sets you get a playsetof the entire game, you're going to get 3 copies of every card, you're going to geteverything you need to make whatever deck you want.
The way the Chrono Clash system works, isthat basically you start, there's a track that goes from 10 to 0, and from 0 to 10 onyour opponent's side, whenever you pay for a card it's going to move a counter towardsyour opponent, right? And when it gets to their side, it's theirturn.
Your turn is over.
What that means is on the very first turnyou can drop a 9 cost, if you really want to, but now you have given your opponent 9points to just play with and go nuts with, right? To me that's very exciting because it's notlike other games where you just can't play the 9 cost until very late in the game.
This game you can if you want to but thereare strategic reasons why you may not want to.
And I think that adds a very dynamic element.
You can play any card in your hand at any time.
So it's up to you as a player to use yourskill and your experience to decide when is a good time to drop your huge card.
Multiplayer games always kind of add thiselement of diplomacy, and I'm always trying to hide that I'm a threat.
And I don't want to be– “I'm just this littleguy, you know, I'm not gonna hurt anybody” that sort of thing.
The, in the Naruto game, multiplayer feelsmore like this Battle Royale, mayhem, fists flying everywhere, if you can picture dust, you know a cartoon kind of dust whirlwind, that's kind of what it feels like.
The interesting thing is that it doesn't lengthenthe game significantly like other games will when you add that multiplayer element so itreally adds just a furious, it's a furious battle.
So I designed it to be almost like a tradingcard game experience, and to that end games tend to, a 1 on 1 game tends to take 10-15minutes.
Depending, of course, on the players.
You don't need to build decks if you don't want to.
You fairly quickly start to learn like okay, what works for you as a player, what types of play styles you want to do.
It's easy enough to start swapping out cardsand that sort of thing and so, since you start with a deck already you can kind of ease intothe deck-building if you want to.
Right, it's not something that you have to do.
If you just want to play with your favoritecharacters just put them together.
That's the other nice thing is that sinceyou don't have to rely on a certain amount of low cost cards, or a certain amount ofhigh cost cards, if you just want to put your favorite guys together and just duke it out, you can do that.
And it's, and you play a fun game with it.
I've been working on trading card games fornearly 20 years now.
I love them.
I think that the idea that I can come– beforeI even come to the table I get to play the game.
I get to put a deck together, I get to makesome secrets that I'm going to unfold before my opponent and try to beat them with them.
You know, that to me is very exciting, very fun.
What I've attempted to do, at least, in thisset, was to give you lots of different strategies, lots of different decks that you can build.
And that's something that we, that I've learnedthroughout my career is that you want the player to be able to design how they wantto play the game and what is fun for them.
My philosophy has always been that I owe myplayers the best experience that I can give them.
And I'm also excited for this to release andgame design is like when you buy a gift for somebody and you're excited for them to openit, you can't wait for them to open it.
Right, that's exactly what game design is like for me.
I can't wait for the players to get this intheir hands, open it up, and just start having a blast with it right? Cause that's, I mean that's what we do it for.
Thanks for joining us on APN.
Shinobi, you can look for Naruto Boruto atyour FLGS this June.
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