Undead Duck - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Blood not included.

I love card games that give me the power to collect and play the weirdest things. How many games in the world let you play a card named Undead Duck? It's so completely random yet awesome that I love it. It's a freaking vampire duck!

Mechanics wise, this is one of the Creations, the things your characters are supposedly making for the holidays. The main benefit is the scare value, usually on the high end which means more scare points at the end game. There are several creations in the game that are tied to several of the characters. Sometimes having a certain character reduces the cost to play it, and others just give you a bonus effect. How each creation is linked to each character is unclear. I suspect these are the "toys" the residents of Halloweentown made, each group of characters having made one toy. That or the game developers just went with whatever character was in the same stillshot. I'm hoping it was the former.

Hanging Tree, Murderous Host - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Branch for four?

This one is really creepy to me. Technically, it's just an anthropomorphic tree with skeletons dangling from its branches. Plants in general need a lot of work to accomplish being scary. It's not enough just to make them animate; there has to be something unnerving. When you try to make plants scary but fail, you get stuff like The Happening.

So why do I find this frightening? The ability. You can lower the tree's cost by 1 by discarding 1 character from your hand. You are making this thing cheaper by hanging your own characters! That's the flavor I get from this. Whether the lynching allusion is what the designers were really going for is unknown to me.

On a random note, had they called in an illustrator instead of taking film stills, I would have told the artist to show three skeletons instead of four. Why? To play this card for free you need to discard three characters. That's the maximum number since you can't pay a negative number. Three hangings, three skeletons.

Jack's House - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

I get the feeling insurance premiums are really high in Halloweentown.

Time to talk starting locales. Like Outfits in Doomtown and Strongholds in L5R, this is the card you start the game with and that determines what actions you can take. Each starting locale has 3 Functions, and each turn you're allowed to activate 1 of them. Usually, the first function draws cards, the second function adds pumpkin points so you can play cards, and the third one lets you move cards.

The number in the corner is the scare threshold. Usually, you need characters whose total scare value is equal or more than the threshold in order to activate the locale's function. Starting locales all have a threshold of 0 though, meaning you don't need any characters at that locale to use its functions.

Card design wise, the starting locales are kind of boring. They're all associated with different characters, but they all do pretty much the same thing thanks to card frame restrictions. You can only fit so much text in the spaces given before it gets too tiny to read, hence the three basic functions: draw, add, and move. There are probably character cards that interact with the appropriate starting locale, but I haven't combed through the entire set yet to see if this is true. I feel like these cards could have a lot more interesting designs, and possibly functions that interact with their characters, if the frame allowed more room for text and the font wasn't so bloody big.

Clown, With the Tear-away Face - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Tim Burton plus clowns is a scary combination.

Clowns can be terrifying. Yes, there are a lot of nice clowns in the world, but it takes very little to make a clown into a serial killer. This guy for example is a clown with razor sharp teeth. The subtitle is also unsettling. Of all the adjectives that could describe a face, tear-away should not be one of them.

The ability is that you can sacrifice him to get rid of a character 1 cost lower. I imagine what he does is tear his face off, causing the less scary character to run away with screams of terror. Even residents of a Halloween plane can be terrified of clowns! They're that scary.

Shadow on the Moon - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

It's that time of year, the Halloween season, which means its time to get a bit festive. The game I'm looking at though is very weird. The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG. In the game, you take 12 rounds (the twelve days of Christmas, ha ha) to build your own Halloweentown and make your own Christmas-themed creations in time for the holidays. In the end, you tally up the values of your characters and creations, and the highest number wins.

This was weird. Whether you're a Tim Burton fan or not, there is only so far you can go when basing cards off of the film. Ideas were going to run out very quickly. The second set (yes, this actually got two sets) expanded the scope by introducing Christmas characters and locales, but this only gave the game one good final breath before expiring. Which is a shame because I do like the design of the game, I just also knew it was doomed. Anyways, enough ranting. Here's the card.

How many people have the "This is Halloween" song playing in their head?

This is a Surprise card. They're the Trainers of this card universe, except the game developers already came up with an idea to limit the number you can play. This card is also not typical of Surprise cards, since this one attaches to a character, and is therefore a confusing choice to start things off, but I'm sticking with it.

So, what does it do? Characters in the game have only one number on them, a scare number. Everything including how much it costs, when different location effects activate, and how many points you get at the end are determined by this one number. This lowers an opposing character's scare by 1, making them less scary. This makes it harder for your opponent to trigger locales, and it takes away 1 point for your opponent in the end game. I like to think that you are casting a shadow over the opposing character.