Feature image: “Ragamuffin’s Hat” by Joseph Qiu, ©️ Legend Story Studios, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

For the past year or so, we’ve hosted weekly Magic nights open to the public every friday, dubbed Friday Night Pauper. It’s been a blast! Recently, however, some of us have been getting into a newer game called Flesh and Blood. It’s a trading card game, just like Magic, but the gameplay is very different. We would like to broaden the scope of our weekly game nights to encompass this game in addition to Magic and are therefore rebranding the concept to “TCG Thursday” (Trading Card Game Thursday).

Perceptive readers may already have picked up that this new name refers to Thursday instead of Friday. We are indeed changing the day of the week for these game nights to Thursday, as we feel that might fit people’s schedule a bit better. TCG Thursday starts at 18:00. See this page for directions to Hacklab.

Welcome to Rathe

Flesh and Blood, which came out in 2019, takes place in a medieval-esque fantasy universe called Rathe. It has all the classic settings such as medieval castles and towns, spectacular and mystical natural landscapes, but also a steampunk-inspired city. The game is centered around unique heroes which have certain talents and classes – you can for example play as Victor, a Guardian, Boltyn, a Light Warrior, Kano, a Wizard or Fai, a Draconic Ninja. Each hero has a unique ability and also has access to talent/class specific cards.

The game is essentially a fighting game in card form, where the cards you play represent different actions and attacks your hero performs. You are thrown straight into the action from the start of the game fully equipped with weapons and armour, and nearly every deck will play somewhat aggressively, since this is a great way your force opponent to divert some of their cards towards defence. Constant back and forth is built into the game mechanics, which means there are frequent opportunities for making choices, which cannot always be said for Magic. (Since you only draw one card each turn in Magic, sometimes you draw cards you can’t play and have nothing to do that turn.)

There is great variety in playstyles between classes, but also within the same class. Like Magic, there is a “Commoner” variant, where you only play with common cards. We think that will be a good fit for us at the Hacklab, but we’re not closing any doors just yet. We have made a few decks from donated cards that you can use to try out the game.

We recommmend picking up a “Blitz deck” if you are interested in getting your own deck. They cost around 13€.

Welcome to TCG Thursday, and we hope you would like to give Flesh and Blood a try!