It takes time and cards to restore a razed Realm, and players who lose too many battles will find themselves way behind in the race to establish six Realms on the table. After a Realm is successfully attacked, it is "razed" - turned face down. There are also Holdings cards, which can be played on a Realm (one Holding per Realm) to give it special qualities that make it tougher to attack.Īll the other cards - Heroes, Wizards, Clerics, Monsters, Spells, Magic Items, Artifacts, Allies, and Events - are used to attack other players' realms and to defend your own. Only one can be played per turn, no matter how many you have in your hand. Instead of trying to defeat another player, Spellfire players (the game can accommodate any number of players with no changes to the rules needed) are trying to put six Realms cards into play. The "Waterdeep" card has simply a detail from the Forgotten Realms map with - you guessed it - Waterdeep on it.
The most common type of card in the game, the Realms cards, are sadly the least impressive - TSR used excerpts from their many maps to illustrate the cards. The art doesn't have the "edge" that a good deal of the original art on the Magic cards has, but it's still very good nonetheless. While it's true that there is no original art on the cards, when you've got a 20-year library of some of the best fantasy art in the industry, why bother? Most of the pieces are small croppings from covers of old AD&D products, and they almost always fit the subject of the card nicely. Fortunately, neither of these is true, not by a long shot. The cards could have been filled with the same kind of slapdash art that killed the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Trading Cards.
In a worst-case scenario, the game could have been a barely-concealed ripoff of Magic, or some childish fantasy version of Old Maid or Crazy Eights.
I must admit to being pleasantly surprised by Spellfire. Spellfire is just the first of what is sure to be a long line of games trying to take advantage of the market that Magic opened, the first new market to appear in years. I've tried to think of a way to do a review of this new collectible card game from TSR without mentioning Magic: The Gathering, but I can't think of a way to do it. Written by Steve Winter, Jim Ward, Dave Cook and Tim Brown
This article originally appeared in Pyramid #9
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