Terminator: Dark Fate The Card Game - First Play!

21st June 2022

Tuesday is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Board Gaming Club.

Terminator: Dark Fate The Card Game is a cooperative deck-builder based on the film of the same name. In this game, players try to avoid or engage a pursuing terminator in a battle... to the death!
First apologies in advance; this is a card game about Arnie and terminators, therefore must have the requisite Arnie quotes.
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Does this game make you want to 'come with me if you want to play?'
'I'll be back?' No, not likely, more like 'hasta la vista'​!

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What's in a game?

• Cards: Lots of cards!
  • Hero cards: There is one each of these 4 oversized squares cards for each of the heroes. It has a photo of the relevant character and displays each character's special ability. It also lists their unique card which only appears in their deck.
  • Starter cards: These come in 3 types,
    Resource cards: Each grants 1 resources.
    Unique hero cards: There is 1 unique card per hero and is also a starter card.
    Setback cards: Recognisable to people who have played pretty much any deck builder. These are trash cards do nothing - other than clutter a player's hand.
  • Fate cards: Yes, since this called Terminator: Dark Fate, 'Fate' is the fancy way of saying; the main ​deck of cards in the game. There are several types of fate cards. Many cards will have a associated cost shown in the bottom right corner and all cards will have keywords displayed on them which are related to their abilities such as action, draw, discard, defence, etc.
    Resource cards: No surprise here, these cards provides supply points which can be used to buy more cards.
    Munition cards: These provide combat points which can be used to damage the Rev-9 (What they call the Terminator.).
    Action cards: Allow players to perform a special action or confers a bonus of some kind.
    Location cards: Like action cards, location cards allow players to perform special actions except they are err... location based! These locations will be recognisable to fans of the film.
    Skill cards: These cards also give players bonuses or special actions, unlike other cards however, skill cards are NOT discarded at the end of a turn and remain in play, providing ongoing effects.
    Hostile cards: These cards can actually harm players as per their instructions, they can't be bought and have no cost but they do have a Resistance value. Hostile cards are activated when a terminator is running around. Speaking of which...
    Rev-9 cards: There are 4 Rev-9 cards of varying toughness which can fine-tune a game's difficulty. Each also has their own special ability. They lurk in the deck and pop out to cause trouble.
    Rev-9 cards have a Hunt value and a Stagger value as well as some special rules or ability.
• Wound cards: These do not go into the deck and are used to track how many wounds a player takes. When characters are wounded, these cards go into their discard pile and when drawn clutter the player's hand.
  If a player has too many wounds at the wrong time... Game over man! (Wait that's the wrong movie!)
• Damage tokens: There are 2 types of these acrylic tokens, representing 1 or 5 damage, they are used to track damage the terminator has taken.

It's a minor quibble but the acrylic tokens used to track damage are a little strange and seem a bit like some generic components cobbled together and sourced elsewhere for the game, I guess the 5 point damage tokens could interpreted as being mangled steel? Not so sure about the red gems though.
The cards are a pretty standard quality and what you'd expect from a modern game.

In terms of presentation, the game mixes a little original artwork with for the most part photos from the film.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, using photos that may well have been taken from a press or promotional pack provided by the distributor always looks cheap. This is no different.
The small amount of artwork used is fine and does its job.

Most of the game's information is relayed via text, there are only a couple of easily learned icons in the game which won't provide any obstacles.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Starter deck: Randomly deal or choose a character card for each player and also give them the relevant unique starter card. Give each player 5 prep cards and 4 setback cards.
  Each player should shuffle all 10 cards into a face-down deck.
• Wound cards: Put all the wound cards into a separate face-up deck of their own, they are NOT put into the 'fate' deck.
• Fate deck: Shuffle all the fate cards into a face-down deck.
  Reserve: Deal five cards into a face-up row next to the deck. This is the reserve, often called the market in other deck builders.
  Terminator: Randomly pick or choose a Rev-9 card, different cards provide different difficulty.
  Next; draw 5 cards from the fate deck and shuffle the Rev-9 card into them face-down, then keeping them face-down put the 6 cards on top of the fate deck. Thus the Rev-9 will be one of those 6 cards.
• Starting hand: Each player should draw 5 cards as their starting hand.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Terminator: Dark Fate follows the typical turn structure for a deck-builder. The active player plays as many cards as they are able to and resolves them, then all cards (Except skill cards.), including un-played cards are discard. The active player then draws 5 new cards.
There are 3 phases to each player's turn.

• Play Phase: This is the phase where the bulk of play takes place. At the start of this phase, the active player must choose to either Rest or Play Cards.
  Rest: If the active player rests, they may Destroy a card in their hand. Destroying a card removes it from the game entirely, useful for getting rid of setback cards or wound cards (More on wound cards below.).
  If the active player rests, the play phase ends after they've destroyed a card.
  Play cards: Obviously, most of the time, the active player will play cards.
  The active player will use as many of their cards as possible, since there's no cost to playing cards, they should be able to play all of them.
  Generally, played cards do 1 of 3 things, trigger a special ability or generate supply or combat points.
  Special abilities may allow players to draw extra cards or discard them, etc.
  Currency Pool: All cards that generate currency, contribute them to a pool, which can be used to purchase a card from the reserve, which is placed in that player's discard pile.
  All unspent currency is lost between turns.
  Combat pool: As with currency, all cards that generate combat points, contribute them to a combat pool. This can be used to apply damage to a Rev-9 card (If one is in play.) or hostile cards in the reserve by putting damage tokens on them respectively.
  If the damage on a Rev-9 equals or exceeds it's stagger value, it is considered Staggered, more on this below.
  If the damage on a hostile card equals or exceeds its resistance value, then the cards taken out of the reserve and placed at the bottom of the fate deck.
  Unlike currency, damage persists between turns.
  End of playing cards: Once played cards are resolved, all cards are put into the player's discard pile and 5 new cards are drawn.
  Exception: Skill cards stay in play, face-up in the controlling player's play area and persist between turns.
• Reserve phase: There are 2 actions to resolve in the reserve phase, carried out in the following order:
  Refill reserve: if there are fewer than 4 cards in the reserve, add cards to the reserve until there are 4 cards there.
  Add to reserve: The active player must add a card to the reserve, taking it up to 5 cards. After this, provided the Rev-9 card is not in play, the active player may choose to add as many cards to reserve as they want. However, there's just one little drawback...
  Terminator: If and when the Rev-9 card is revealed at any time in either of the 2 reserve actions, then the reserve phase immediately ends.
  The Rev-9 card is not put into the reserve and is considered separate from it.
• Hunt phase: If no Rev-9 has been revealed, then this phase is skipped. Otherwise the active player has potentially 2 following options to chose from.
  Flee: IF the Rev-9 has any damage counters on it, then the active player may chose to flee.
  When fleeing, draw a number of cards equal to the amount of damage on the Rev-9, remove all damage from the Rev-9 card and shuffle it into those cards and put them face-down back on top of the fate deck.
  The rest of the hunt phase is skipped.
  The hunt: If the active player does not want to or cannot flee, then the terminator goes on the hunt. They will have a number of actions equal to their hunt value.
  First; any hostile cards in the reserve are resolved (And costs a hunt point.) and then placed at the bottom of the fate deck.
  Then for each hunt point remaining draw a card from the fate. Any hostile cards are resolved and put at the bottom of the fate deck. Any location cards are also put at the bottom of the deck, all other cards are destroyed.
• End of turn: Once the terminator has finished it's hunt, play proceeds to the player to the left of the active player.
• Other Rules:  The game has some situational rules and rules exceptions mostly based on keywords.
  Leadership: These cards can be played at anytime.
  ​Location: When a location card is bought, it does not go into a player's discard pile but is immediately activated and placed at the bottom of the fate deck.
  Staggered: When a Rev-9 reaches an amount of damage as specified on their card, they become staggered, this means they are vulnerable to attacks that target staggered terminators.
  Wounds: When a character would take a wound, they take a wound card from the wound deck and adds it to their discard pile. If at any point in the game, a player has 3 or more wound cards in their hand, they are killed and the player's lose.
  Additionally, if the wound deck is depleted and any player needs to draw a wound card, the player's lose.

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Endgame
Play continues until the Rev-9 is destroyed, in which case the players collectively win or until the any of the players are defeated by the Rev-9, in which case they collectively lose.
​Alternatively, if the wound deck is depleted and a player needs to draw a wound card, the players lose.

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Overall
There's definitely some things to like about Terminator: Dark Fate.
I like that it's a cooperative deck-builder, which is pretty rare.
I also like how the game's mechanics captures the theme of being chased - something that occurs throughout the terminator films. A lot of the cards that appear in the game do a good job of reinforcing this.
How the terminator lurks in the in the fate deck until it appears and starts causing trouble and how the players can then can damage and push the terminator back into the deck to get some breathing space until it reappears.

I like how the Rev-9 hunts, activating hostile cards and also trashing the deck, it adds a natural countdown to the game.

Often players will need to make the choice between buying cards and damaging the terminator, it's quite hard to do both.
Players will also need to judge if it's beneficial to flee or sometimes rest - getting wound cards out of your hand/deck can be vital

Having said all of that, it brings me to a couple of issues with the game.
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Firstly, is the game's currencies. There are essentially 2 currencies to manage, supply to buy cards and combat to damage the terminator.  It felt rare to have what you need in your hand when you need it.

There were frequent times that players would have a lot of combat orientated card in their hands but no Rev-9 card to fight as it was somewhere in the deck. - This probably also meant that since they had combat cards, they had little to no supply cards to buy more cards.
Conversely, they were times players were sitting there with supply cards and no way of fighting or fleeing the terminator.

Secondly and by far my biggest gripe is reserved for the errr, reserve rules: To put bluntly, I feel the reserve is too small.
Most deck-builders give players a choice of 10 cards to acquire, in Terminator: Dark Fate players will generally have a choice of 5, this will be worsened by the presence of hostile cards which will further reduce the choices. This can be bad in the early game if expensive cards appear, players may frequently find themselves unable to buy any and just passing or resting.
Yes players can choose to add more cards but quite often this felt too risky. Increasing the risk of drawing hostile cards or revealing the terminator if it's not out.
I'm not sure there's an easy to fix it though, a bigger reserve would risk more hostile cards appearing, this would be bad in the early game as players would have less ways to manage those cards.
Perhaps there needs to be a way of wiping and refilling the reserve? Or having a separate supply of cheap low value cards that are always available to purchase - as found in some other deck-builders.

We also found the game a bit harder than we liked. I know that luck always plays a role in any cooperative game but when you get a choice of 4 cards that you can't afford, it feels pretty futile.
I think perhaps, in earlier games that we didn't use the flee or rest actions quite enough, but honestly they felt a little counterintuitive; scrubbing all the damage on a Rev-9 to flee didn't seem to sit well with people, neither did resting.

It didn't help that the 'easy' starting Rev-9 card forces players to flee if they stagger it, meaning that to destroy it they will need to do a minimum of 11-15 damage in a single turn to defeat it, or to do 5 damage and and then have a card which defeats staggered Rev-9s.

The best strategy it seems, is to damage and constantly flee the Rev-9 until enough resources can be gathered to defeat it. It feels appropriate for a terminator game but also perhaps felt like it made the game a little too overlong. 

The game all felt a little frustrating and futile, especially with frequent turns where players had nothing to do.
It's a shame really, because there's the DNA of a good deck-building game somewhere in there that could really do with some balancing.