Have
you ever had a dream where you could fly? Only to
wake up and try to fall asleep again so that you could
do it all over again - which never quite works? Yu-Gi-Oh:
Destiny Board Traveler is like that second dream.
It just never gets off the ground.
Based
on one of the most popular strategy/collecting card
games of all time, Yu-Gi-Oh: Destiny Board Traveler
is a sad attempt at combining a card game and a board
game into a videogame. There are reasons that card
and board games exist in an altogether different medium
than videogames. Videogames are capable of action,
animation and virtual reality. Card games and board
games may be great in their own right but they don't
always make great videogames - as illustrated by this
disaster.
The
biggest problem with this game is that it all boils
down to luck. A roll of the dice decides your fate.
There is so little strategy to this game that there
is no challenge for even the casual Yu-Gi-Oh player.
I don't know the exact demographic this game was targeted
for but it seems to be aimed at kids with an IQ comparable
to a single-cell bacteria.
Monsters
are located on every space of the board. Some of them
are there from the onset of the game while others
may belong to other players that have successfully
challenged the other monsters. The premise of the
game is to gain control of the board. You do this
by fighting the monsters on the spaces that you land
on.
In
all there are 750 cards. Each player receives a hand
in which he or she must place their best monsters
on the six sides of a die. When you land on a space
you will roll another die to determine if you gain
powers or lose them. This is where the fate of the
game is determined. It doesn't matter how powerful
your monster is if the die determines that you lose
powers. Conversely it doesn't matter how weak another
players' monster is. If he gets a lucky roll, he'll
take your monster out. It's that easy. Of course you
can substitute other words for "easy" such
as "stupid," "lame" or "#%$!-ed
up."
There
is nothing in the way of a tutorial which lets you
play this game out of the box - unless you're trained
in the way of Yu-Gi-Oh. Even then, you're going to
have to consult the instruction manual to learn the
rules of the board game. All of the rules attempt
to convey the illusion of depth but it will only take
a few hours to realize that it's all smoke and mirrors.
You can unlock more boards but that's not an incentive
to keep playing this game. It's slow, unchallenging
and ultimately unrewarding.
Up
to four players can take part in the board game but
if you want to make three friends, warn them about
this game instead of getting them involved. Don't
get taken advantage of just because you're a Yu-Gi-Oh
fan. It's game like this that can cause irreparable
damage to a franchise. Not that I'll complain if I
never have to do another Yu-Gi-Oh game review again
as long as I live.
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