Enter the fantasy world of Gadia with this card game from its stories.
What Is Legends of Gadia?
Legends of Gadia is a card-shedding game for 2 to 4 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 20 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $25 for a copy of the game. (There are some early bird pledges available at $20, as well as several pledge tiers that include other goodies.) The game’s theme and content are family-friendly and the rules are inspired by traditional card-shedding games, but younger players may need some help learning the different combinations of cards.
Legends of Gadia was designed and published by Su Mon Han of Dream Compendium Design, with illustrations by Cyvii.
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Legends of Gadia Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and may not reflect final component quality.
The game consists of a 48-card deck, along with some player aid cards, in a small tuckbox.
The cards feature 12 heroes, with 4 copies of each one—two with a light background and two with a dark background. Aside from their names and numerical values from 1 to 12, each card also belongs to one of three houses (Innocence, Eminence, and Transcendence), and one of four strata. It’s a lot to keep track of, so the player aid is an important reference!
Legends of Gadia is intended to be a card game played by characters within a fantasy novel series, and the card illustrations fit that concept, with an intricate frame and lovely portraits of each hero. The number in the top left corner is pretty easy to see, but it will just take some time to get more familiar with the other notations like the stratum across the top and the house name below the portrait—this last bit is particularly hard to see when you have a full hand of cards, though eventually you may remember that the three houses just divide up the set of 12 numbers in order.
How to Play Legends of Gadia
You can download a draft of the rulebook here. I’ll give an overview of the rules but will try not to get too far into all of the specific details of the card combinations.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to be the first to get rid of all of your cards.
Setup
Starting player is decided by “scrimmage”—everyone draws a random card and high card goes first, and then the cards are shuffled back into the deck.
Shuffle the deck and deal out all of the cards evenly to all the players.
Gameplay
On your turn, you either play a card (or set of cards) that beats the previous person’s play, or else pass. If everyone passes, then the person who last played wins that round and starts the next round.
The simplest hierarchy is in single cards: you can usually beat a single card with any single card of a higher value.
You can also play pairs—a pair will generally beat another pair of a lower value. However, to use a pair to beat a single card, you have to use a pair from a lower House. The designer explained that there’s a “Good Sportsmanship” rule that won’t allow people to form a bigger group to defeat somebody smaller—thus you can go from a single to a pair, but only from a lower House and not a greater one.
Next are Team-Ups, sets of two cards. There are several of these with names like “Nobility” (6 and 7, the Lady and the Lord) or “Soldiers of Fortune” (2 and 7, the Archer and the Lord). They have different effects—some of them let you pull cards back out of the played stack, or reset the stack. Above those are the “Grand Trinity” of Team-Ups, which have a rock-paper-scissors relationship with each other. One thing about the Team-Ups is that most of them have a weakness, allowing you to defeat it using a single card from its weakness.
The advanced rules introduce the Houses and Stratum. The three houses are Innocence (1–4), Eminence (5–8), and Transcendence (9–12). If you have all four cards of a house and they have the same background, then it’s a “full house”—these can usually beat just about any of the other sets, and to beat a full house you’ll need a higher full house. (Note that this is not the same as a poker full house, which is a pair and a triple.)
The Strata cut across the houses: 1st Stratum is 1-5-9, 2nd Stratum is 2-6-10, and so on. A Stratum can be used to defeat a single or Team-Up if it’s from a Stratum one step lower than its target. (Again, there’s a reference to the Good Sportsmanship rule.) However, once you’ve switched to playing Strata, then you defeat a Stratum by using a higher Stratum.
The Jesters (value 3) are also used in special “Chaos” Team-Ups—basically you can beat anything with a pair of 3s, and then play something else to reset the stack.
Round End
The round ends when everyone in turn has passed—the last person to have played wins the round, and performs a card exchange: the player to their right must give the winner their numerically highest card, and then the winner gives that player any other card of their choice. Then a new round begins.
Game End
The game ends when a player has played all of their cards from their hand, winning the game.
Why You Should Play Legends of Gadia
I met designer Su Mon Han at OrcaCon a couple weeks ago, where she was running demos of Legends of Gadia during the convention. She’s a fantasy author, and the characters in her novels play a card game based on some of their folklore about twelve legendary heroes who set off on a quest. She decided to design the game herself and has been playing it and working on it for over a decade, and when she found the artist Cyvii she felt like she finally had the style of artwork to make the game a reality. I sat down for a demo at the con (you can spot me very briefly in the Kickstarter video) and then Su Mon loaned me a deck so I could try it out some more for a review.
Legends of Gadia feels like a card game that has been passed down through the ages, full of lore that’s common knowledge in a fantasy world but may be new to players in this world. That has its pros and cons. When you’re learning the game, it can feel complicated: What are the Team-Ups again? What happens when you play a Chaos Pair? When do I use a lower House instead of a higher House? I imagine it’s a bit like the first time you play poker (Why is a flush called a flush? What’s the river and what’s the flop?). Or maybe the way pieces move in chess originally had some stories to them, explaining why the king moves slowly and bishops move in diagonal lines. But because those games have been around for so long, we no longer refer to the stories and we just remember the terms and the gameplay.
The fact that the sets in Legends of Gadia are all based on some ancient lore doesn’t help you at first if you don’t know that lore (though if you’re into that, there are pledge levels that include a companion book filled with it), but I was also impressed by how quickly players seemed to be picking it up. Even in my own plays, we’ve been referring to the cheat sheet cards (along with a more detailed player aid that Su Mon provided), but even during a single play, my friends had started picking up on some of the names of the Team-Ups. (I do think a more comprehensive player aid is key to learning the game, so I don’t know if the player aid card will get some tweaks to it.)
Lore aside, the base card-shedding mechanic is familiar with only a few tweaks here and there like the card exchange for the winner. The various Team-Ups, while they may seem kind of random at first, do make for interesting decisions when playing cards. Do you look for an opportunity to play pairs, or do you try to form the more powerful Houses and Strata because those let you drop more cards at once? You might think it’s great to play your single 1 if you have the opportunity to start a round because it’s the weakest single, but don’t forget that it can also be part of the Purest Heart, not to mention its place in the Innocence House and 1st Stratum. One of the things I liked most about it is that there is no single play that is absolutely unbeatable—even with the more powerful hands, somebody could play a Chaos Pair and then reset to a single card, starting the process over.
Since there are sometimes opportunities to pull cards from the discard or swap cards at the end of a round, there’s always a chance that you might form a set later. The winner always gets the highest card from a hand during the exchange, but what they choose to give back could also complete a Team-Up. Just because it’s a low card doesn’t mean it may not be powerful with the right companion.
If you like traditional card games, and you’re intrigued by the tarot-like art and the story behind the game, it’s worth checking out! Soon you can dive in and experience a piece of the world of Gadia yourself.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Legends of Gadia Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad was loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes.
