Millennium Blades Board Game Review

Overview

As a game reviewer who used to play Magic the Gathering at Tournaments and dabbled in both the Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh card games, It’s my professional opinion that those games are a ton of fun. It is also my professional opinion that you should run as far away from them as possible. The TCG & CCG game models are, to be frank, hot garbage. 

Many cards in them are designed to suck, purely to inflate the value of others through an expensive gambling booster pack business model and terribly inflated secondary market. Tournament play at you’re local game store boils down to who has the most expendable income to buy all the cards they need to mimic some deck a pro player uses that will rotate out of standard play in three months anyway.

You can find a video version of this review on my YouTube Channel!

Millennium Blades seeks to emulate the Collectible Card Game experience by throwing down large stacks of cash for boosters of random cards, making a deck out of them, and then taking part in tournaments. The thing is, those concepts work quite well when it’s fake money you’re throwing down for a fake CCG. You get all of the fun and none of the price-gouging predatory horse crap.

Millennium Blades is a game within a game. You aren’t just playing a card game, you’re playing as a tournament card game player, playing a card game. If you have ever seen the Yu-Gi-OH anime series, it’s pretty close to that in both the theme and feel of stepping into the shoes of those characters.

Gideon’s Bias	Millennium Blades Information
Review Copy Used: No	Publisher: Level 99 Games
Number of Plays: 10+	Designers: D. Brad Talton, Jr
Player Counts Played: 2 & 4	Player Count: 2-5
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Deck Building, Drafting, and Hand Management
Fan of Weight: Yes	Weight: Medium
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Enjoyed It	Price: $79.99

Presentation

It should go without saying, that you get a lot of cards with Millennium Blades. I do mean a lot of cards, over 600 of them. I sleeve most of my games, but I tend to unsleeve them when I take photos and footage for my reviews because of how sleeves tend to glare in my lightning. When it comes to Millennium Blades, the sleeves stayed on. I’d rather cram every single card up my nose, one by one, than ever consider un-sleeving and re-sleeving it. It’s that many cards.

The cards look fantastic, however, with great artwork. Not just on the front of the cards, but on the back as well. The back of every card resembles the booster pack of various card sets, and it really helps sell the theme. The art style is consistent all the way across the game, and I particularly enjoy the little references and parodies.

Various sets are plays on real-world media, such as The Legend of Zelda, James Bond, and One Piece. The visual design and iconography of the cards are clean, easy to understand, and once again really push that trading card theme.

You get a set of player boards that have helpful card placement spots and icon references, and some boards to manage the store and aftermarket. You get a handful of nifty tokens and stacks upon stacks of paper cash. The setup for Millennium Blades is pretty quick, resetting the game less so, as you have to separate out the various card sets that you mixed together.

I do want to note that the very first time you sit down to play, setting the game up is going be a long tedious endeavor thanks to the paper money. You have to gather up and bind the money together in stacks of 10. This gives the money a really satisfying heft that’s fun to throw around when buying cards, but the process takes forever. 

It’s a mandatory step, not just for the thematic feel, but because you really need that heft for the money to be manageable. You wouldn’t want to try to peel apart and throw around flimsy singles in the heat of the game.

What I Like About Millennium Blades

The Theme

Millennium Blades captures the spirit of a collectible card game exceptionally well. Not only that, it makes you feel like you’re in a card-related anime series. You throw down huge stacks of money for random cards to build a deck, obtain deck boxes, and accessories, and form card collections for extra points from cards you aren’t putting in your deck.

As players sell unwanted cards, you can buy them in the aftermarket, and you can even trade with your fellow players. On the more fictional side, you duel in various arenas, such as a volcano, that has various effects on the game. You can fuse together cards to obtain powerful promos. Before a tournament, metas emerge, giving extra value to certain elements and types that can influence your deck building.

The game takes place over three rounds, all of which include a deckbuilding phase, followed by a tournament. Millennium Blades also follows a neat tournament scoring system if you are playing with 3 or more players. It’s all wonderfully thematic and it really does feel like a game within a game. Sure, there are gaps in the logic. Each “pack” for example is really just one card, but honestly, even that’s sort of accurate. In most TCGs, you open boosters for the rares, and the rest get tossed aside.

Millennium Blades manages to capture the more enjoyable sides of a collectible card game while cutting off the dead weight. I find that type of game within a game mimicry to be very impressive.

The Variability

At the start of each game, every player gets a character and starter deck. The starter decks differ from one another, and each character has very different and meaningful powers, but they play a small part in the game’s variable nature compared to the real stars of the show. The card sets.

Cards are divided into various tiers. You have your core set that goes into every game, but you also have expansion, premium, and master sets, as well as promos. At the start of each game, you mix a number of these sets together with the core set. Five expansion sets, four premium sets, and three master sets. You also choose a few promo sets for fusion and prizes.

Each of these individual sets tends to be very different from one another, not just in its thematic artwork, but game mechanisms too. For example, the Fists of Steel is all about Clashing with other players, while the Super Plumber Bros scores extra points by Thwomping cards with a lower star rating.

You can mix and match the various sets every game and it results in no two sessions of Millennium Blades being anywhere remotely the same. Cards are bought blindly in the store, the back of the cards indicate various elements and types contained in a set, but you never truly know what you are buying ahead of time. That blindless combined with the variable setup means new strategies and plans emerge every time you play.

Millennium Blades is less about developing an alpha strategy you can use every game, and is more about adapting on the fly based on the cards you obtain, and what the other players are doing. Millennium Blades is a game where you never know what’s going to happen when you first sit down, but the randomness isn’t simple chaos. It’s a masterful tool to be used to tune your engine and focus your tableau.

The Deck Building Phase

Before each of the three tournaments is a deckbuilding phase where you spend money on cards, form your deck, and try to acquire a collection for extra victory points. The deckbuilding phase is real-time and split into three chunks. Two 7-minute phases and then a 6-minute phase. During this time players frantically try to buy the cards they think they need, put aside cards for a collection, fuse cards for promos, sell cards, and trade with each other.

The element meta and arena are revealed during the first timer, and the type meta during the second. The trick is, that you can only have one deck box, two accessories, and 8 singles for your deck. You can keep any spares in your binder for the next round, however.

Cards cost various amounts of money, with higher-tier sets being more expensive. You have to try and build a deck capable of winning a tournament while also attempting to build a collection. You can turn in one collection per deckbuilding phase, the bigger the collection, the more victory points it’s worth. A collection has to be a set of cards of the same element or type, with different star ratings.

The mere act of throwing down cash and collecting cards is fun, but there is a ton of depth and nuance to the deck-building phase, far more than I can illustrate in this review. There are many, many ways to build a tournament deck and your cards, character, and deck box will often bounce off of each other in fun ways.

In a tournament, you will only play 6 cards, but your deck has to have 8, so you can take two extras to form a plan B if things go south during the tournament. Since players can affect each other, they often will.

At the same time, collections are worth a lot of victory points and you have to decide what cards you can sacrifice because once you turn in a collection, it’s gone forever. You also have to keep the meta’s in mind once they are revealed. An extra 15 points for simply having a faceup card of a given element or type at the end of the tournament is nothing to sneeze at.

The real-time element adds some serious, but enjoyable tension to the game. You have to think fast and make sure all your ducks are in a row before the final timer. All while juggling several different concepts and ideas, including keeping tabs on the other players, because what they do matters.

The Combo Play

The higher your placement in a tournament, the more victory points you earn. You don’t have to come in first in every tournament to win the game, especially if you have been turning in high-scoring collections, but tournaments are the biggest source of victory points.

On a player’s turn, they must play one card and can take an action before or after. Most players will have six turns during a tournament, and six actions. Played cards must be played to the leftmost slot of your tableau. It’s pretty simple.

However, that simplicity balloons with possibilities based on how you have built your deck and how the tournament might progress. Mistakes are inevitable but costly, and the rulebook even specifies that it’s exceptionally important that you should not allow players to undo a mistake. Mistakes are part of the game.

Cards can do a variety of things, but it’s important to note that a card’s star rating, effects, types, and elements only count while they are face up. So for example, if you have a deck box that grants you eight points per fire card in your tableau at the end of the tournament, it only counts face-up fire cards. Rather than trying to explain the vast possibilities of a Millennium Blade Tournament, I’ll give you some actual examples from my own sessions.

I had built a deck with the Numerology deckbox in mind. With it, I could name a number during scoring and gain points based on how many face-up cards I had with that star rating. I also had two different sleeve protector accessories that I could use to prevent an opponent from flipping my cards. The problem is, that I didn’t have six cards of the same star rating that scored well together. But I was playing as the character Fulton Suitcase, who as an action, could pay one dollar to add a star to a card.

So I had this plan where the star rating I was shooting for was 6, and my character’s power gave me some leeway to use 5s and 4s. I entered the tournament planning to use all six actions to place those star tokens on 5s and 4s. On my first turn, I screwed up and forgot to use that turn’s action and botched my plan.

However, my opponent made a terrible mistake by not paying attention to who I was. Fulton Suitcase has another power that grants 10 points during scoring for every card I had that has a higher star rating than ALL of my opponent’s cards. My opponent had built a deck where she was going to score high for having all of her cards facedown at the end.

She pulled her plan off way better than I did mine, but since she flipped all of her cards face down, NONE of them had star ratings. That meant all 6 of my cards were higher than ALL of her cards, which put me high enough to win the tournament.

That’s just one example of a two-player match. Some cards allow you to flip an opponent’s cards, and others allow you to clash, where you compare the star value of your rightmost card to another player and then draw from the top of the deck and add those star values, and the total determines who wins the clash. There are numerous abilities to combo, score, and manipulate, and thanks to the massive variability, you will discover new ones every game.

What I’m Mixed On

Player Count

The basic rules of the game assume three or more players. When playing with two players, the game is mostly the same, but there are a few important changes. Victory points aren’t a thing, instead, it’s whoever wins two out of three tournaments. Collections don’t add victory points, instead, they contribute ranking points during the next tournament that go toward winning that tournament. You can also build two collections per deck-building phase instead of one.

For the most part, it feels like the same game. There is a bit less trading going on with just two players, but the core deck-building and gameplay are intact. Collections do become a strategic part of your deck building which can be even more fun in some ways.

The one issue I have with this setup is the game can end a bit earlier than I would like. I really enjoy playing all three rounds, and if one player gets two wins in a row, the game is cut short, and that can be a real bummer.

Millennium Blades makes these changes to a two-player game because the victory point scoring system doesn’t math out very well with just two players, and the two-out-of-three system is a solid fix. I just hate getting into the momentum of the building and draft without seeing that third round of frantic buying and building. 

That said, I still enjoy playing the game with two players just as much as I do with more. Some games feel fundamentally different at separate player counts and that’s not the case with Millennium Blades. It just gets cut short if one player is playing worse than the other, and that player is, much to my shame, usually me

Runaway Losers

At higher player counts the scoring system can lead to a player having zero chance of victory after the second round. This is not at all a problem that’s exclusive to Millennium Blades, but it’s very visible and apparent here.

The main issue is that each deck-building phase is a minimum of 21 minutes due to the timers, and then you have a tournament after that. The 4th player has a lot to play through for the sole purpose of being a good sport. During one of my games, we just called it during the second round to avoid forcing a player to deal with that.

It’s not a huge deal. After all, in any game with a winner, others have to lose. But it can be demoralizing to very visibly see that you have zero chance of victory, and play out a 21-minute real-time deckbuilding phase followed by a tournament anyway. It’s a nonissue if you happen to value 2nd or 3rd place for the sake of statistical tracking like I do. But that’s not everyone’s wheelhouse. It came up enough that it was worth noting, even though it doesn’t particularly bother me.

Verdict

Millennium Blades is a unique game with a novel concept that it pulls off very well. It manages to make you feel like you’re taking part in the buying, selling, and collecting of a trading card game as a tournament player. While neither the deck-building nor tournament phase reaches the depths of a real CCG. Millennium Blades is still a very deep game with a rich decision space, plenty of player interaction, and an incredible amount of variability.

I get fuzzy feelings just seeing it on the table as it really does remind me of my glory days as a Magic Player, but without the capitalistic pay-to-win trashy design that constantly siphoned money from my wallet.

I still think a living card game is the best replacement for scratching the collectible card game itch. But there is something to be said about having the CCG simulator in a box that Millennium Blades provides, especially because it requires a great deal less investment than a living card game.