The Phantom the Card Game

When my friend asked me if I wanted to try out a game before it got up on kickstarter, ofcourse I said yes. I love trying out new games. When he told me it was about the Phantom, a childhood hero of mine I quickly remembered all the comics I read in bed as a kid and might have ordered a few more, since I didn’t have that many left.

This game is a card and token based game. Your cards can either give you the card skill if you have enough tokens to play it. Or you can get the token on the right upper corner if you discard it. You can play the 21st Phantom or you can play as Diana. Tjey have different decks and play a little different from eachother. If someone asked which character I liked more, I have to say Diana. She felt more right to my playstyle. In the first mission you get to use thee most iconic, atleast to me, friends of the Phantom, Thunder and Devil. You even get to raise Devil before you add him into your deck.

On any given round you do the following. Heal or refresh your played cards. If you do one, you cannot o the other.
After that you draw a destiny card. A destiny card is almost always a bad thing, it can be an enemy or it can be weather conditions or something else. All are not bad, but it can be a bit hard if the cards are stacked against you.
The next round is the preparation pahse. Here you draw the amount of cards that will be your hand for this turn. Usually 3.
Adventure Phase is where you play cards, discard cards for tokens, activate cards that you have already played or initiate combat.
After that there is the Fate phase. Here you take damage from the enemies that are on the destiny row. You always go from left to right (oldest to newest) on the destiny row.
And then you finish up with a Clean up phase where you discard cards that you already have not discarded during the adventure phase.

The first round is always a bit hard. Since you do not have any tokens, it’s hard to play cards, but there are possibilities. But more often than not, atleast to me, it is a round for just discarding your cards for tokens. When you play a 2-player game there is a chance, if not very high, that you get to matching injury cards, which might kill you. This can happen if there are 2 enemies in the play area and they wach do one damage. If the first destiny card reveals an enemy and the first player can not defeat it, it stays in the play area. If the second destiny card is also an enemy and you cannot defeat it, you take two damage. Two matching damage, except for the “flesh wound”, kills you.

I was lucky enough to get to play 3 different missions from the game and I can say this, they get better and better. The last one was, to me, by far the best. Fun cards in the destiny row, tougher enemies, not all destiny cards were enemies, some needed to be taken care of before you could attack the enemies again. So to me there is where the game really shined.

There are also different ways to play this game. One way is to add the Injury cards to your deck to make it a little bit harder for the heroes with te injurys still showing in the deck. Another is a positive one where you can get loot after killing enemies. I really like the fact that this is game is mostly cards and some tokens. This makes the game alot cheaper to print and will hopefully keep the cost down.

For me to be able to play one of my old heroes was really a fun trip down memory lane. I don’t know how big the Phantom is outside of Scandinavia, but there was a Billy Zane movie a… well not few years ago (1996) but some.

My biggest problem with this is that the third mission is so good that I wish every mission was like that. That and that I wanted more of that.

There is so much to say but I don’t know where to start and I have not prepared any photographs. I will add them tomorrow. But the Kickstarter for this game will come out on may 1st. Check it out for yourselves and see what you think.

What childhood hero of yours would you like to get a board or card game?

As always. Play more games!!!