Post originally by Shannon Appelcline at 2005-02-03 16:26:23
Converted from Phorums BB System

I tend to agree that the rules are a bit overly complex, as partially shown by those 11 special rules. I actually read the entire online FAQ through before I played it for the secodn time, and thus cards like Hank Highflyer Hawk were a bit more obvious.

To a certain extent, this is a natural outcome of any customizable card game where you have a large number of cards interacting. I use to do all of Chaosium's support for the Mythos CCG, and as I offered up rules explanations for interactions of cards, sometimes it felt like a very unstable house of cards.

But, yeah, I was disappointed by some of the convuluted rules that have appeared in Blue Moon, given that it was put together by Knizia and they had a chance to look at the whole game before they released anything. In particular, Hank is a card they never should have released because it's just too confusing.

On the gameplay: I think you may be missing an entire aspect of the game, whereby winning or losing a duel isn't as simple as whether you have the cards, but also whether you want to use the cards and whether you think your opponent's investment is larger than yours. The majority of the time, the game involves one player going through their whole deck, and so the way you win is by making better use of your entire deck of cards than your opponent does.

Know when to hold them, know when to fold them, that sort of thing.

Shannon