What makes the Altered TCG innovative and how do you play it?

The French studio Equinox (creators of the well-known family game Dixit) is launching a new trading card game, Altered TCG. When they introduced the game on Kickstarter, they hit their funding goal within 2 minutes and the counter didn't stop until it reached an incredible 6.2 million dollars. What caught the backers' attention, what new elements does the game bring to the world of TCGs, and what is Altered actually about?

The World of Altered

During the Convergence, a planetary catastrophe caused by the collision of an imaginary world with reality, a magical storm transformed everything in its path. Some human communities survived and settled on the Asgartha peninsula, where they built a new civilization. Five hundred years later, humanity is embarking on its greatest expedition to explore the unknown and unstable lands affected by magic. Exalts, explorers who command magical power, turn their imagination into reality using mana—the energy of the Tumult—and search for its source to stabilize the chaos in the world.

So much for the story, which probably won't surprise anyone. However, the goal of the game is surprising. We've become accustomed to the goal of trading card games being various forms of defeating the enemy: smashing each other's faces, draining the other's life, trampling them into the dust—in short, beating the opponent. That's not the case in Altered! Altered is a cheerful, inclusive affair without violence. The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and your task is to explore.

Cards like paintings

The whole game feels cheerful and colorful. It's a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, historical figures, heroes from famous real-world stories—simply anything you can think of is there. Personally, I prefer more cohesive and unique worlds, but the success of the Disney Lorcana TCG shows that such a mashup can work.

When you look at any card from Altered, you'll likely notice the QR code immediately. It has no special meaning during the game, but it serves to load cards into the companion app. Thanks to this, you can manage your collection, build new decks, or buy and sell cards (at the time of writing, the official store wasn't launched yet). Once you load a card into the app, it's yours, and you can even have a physical copy printed. It sounds interesting, and I'm curious to see how it works in practice.

How to play Altered?

There are 6 factions in the game world. In the first edition, Beyond the Gates, you'll find 6 different pre-constructed hero decks and the obligatory booster packs with random cards. If you have a basic forty-card deck, let's play!

The core of the game is adventure cards, which lie between the players. On one side of the cards, the hero token starts, and on the other, their companion token. During the game, you earn points that allow you to move the hero or companion forward. There are effectively two different fronts, and the player must decide whether to try to move the hero token or the companion token. As soon as both tokens meet on an adventure card, you win the game.

The rounds of the game are called days. As is customary, the day is divided into five parts: morning, forenoon, afternoon, evening, and night. In each phase of the day, you can perform different actions based on the card type and its keyword.

At the beginning, both players draw 6 cards and choose 3 to place face down as mana. This resource management system is becoming very popular. It works the same way in both Disney Lorcana TCG and Star Wars Unlimited. It forces players to think about which card to sacrifice. In subsequent rounds, everyone draws 2 cards and can choose which additional card to turn into mana.

In Altered, there are four basic types of cards: heroes, characters, spells, and permanent effect cards. Players take turns playing cards until they run out of resources or pass. A hero always belongs to a specific faction, and their abilities focus on specific mechanics and playstyles. Spells act as one-time effects that influence card outcomes or adjust stats. Permanents are cards that change the game or add an effect that lasts until they are removed from play.

The main cards are character cards, which the player sends on expeditions. Characters have numbers on them corresponding to the three basic regions in the game: forest, mountain, or water. These stats can be influenced by other cards. If a hero has a region matching the region on the adventure card they want to reach, they move forward. Of course, only if their total point sum in one of the regions is greater than the opponent's.

And that is what Altered is really about. Collecting more region points than your opponent. When the region also matches what is on the adventure card, the player moves forward. In the end, the game requires a bit of math at a first-grade level.

You can read more in the concise and clear rules.

What is different?

Every new card game tries to come up with something new. Some element or mechanic that another game doesn't have. In the case of Altered, it's the connection to digital card copies and their "print-on-demand" feature.

In the game itself, it's the reserve system. It works by moving a played card to your reserves at the end of the turn (unless stated otherwise). The reserve is a kind of second hand from which cards can be played one more time, for the last time. The cost of such a card is usually lower, and some effects refer to this.

The rest of the game probably won't surprise you with anything fundamental. If you take away the adventure cards and replace them with a life counter, nothing major would change. But let's leave that aside.

Altered in a nutshell

Altered TCG is a thoroughly positive, color- and smile-filled card game that approaches some established mechanics differently. Older, battle-hardened, and cynicism-soaked Magic players might turn up their noses, but for younger generations, Altered can be an interesting entry into the sometimes crazy world of trading card games.

If you're still hesitating, you can download the free "Print and play" version or play Altered for free in your browser on Board Game Arena.

author Karel Krajča