About
In the Kingdom Hearts Trading Card Game, you will take the role of Sora from the Kingdom Hearts story. Journeying from world to world, you will battle the unfathomable evil of the Heartless and challenge your opponent with the aid of your Disney friends to ensure victory!
Players
Two players can play in the Kingdom Hearts TCG, each of whom will have his/her own deck and Player Card.
Objective
There are two paths to victory:
- The first way to win is to travel to different worlds with a combined level value of 13. Each world's level is a measure of how dangerous it is, so a player could travel to a small number of hazardous worlds, or a large number of safer worlds, and in either case emerge victorious.
- The second way to win is to launch enough challenges to remove all of an opponent player’s Heart Points and eliminating him/her from the game. Of course, the resources you spend attacking your opponent are resources you're not spending battling the Heartless and traveling to new worlds! A good player will be able to adopt either victory strategy, depending on the current situation.
Worlds and the Heartless
On each turn, a player may play a single World Card from his/her hand to travel to that new world. However, a player may only do so if his/her way is not blocked by the Heartless! A player can play Dark Cards, such as the Heartless, onto his/her opponent’s World Card in order to block that player’s progress. The higher the level of a World Card, the more Dark Cards can be played on it. The more levels of worlds you've visited, the higher-level each individual Dark card may be.
Each Heartless Card has a Power Value, which indicates how difficult it is to defeat in battle. In order to remove Heartless from a world, your Player Card must battle them with enough strength to equal their power. In most cases, you will need to use the assistance of Friend Cards, Attack Cards, or Magic Cards (or all three!) to defeat the Heartless and move to the next world.
Friends, Magic, and Magical Friends
In the Kingdom Hearts TCG, friends are essential to success! Beloved Disney characters such as Goofy and Donald Duck will aid you in your quest, but you had best use them wisely, since each friend will be discarded after use.
Each friend has a level, a Strength Value that can boost the strength of the Player Card, and a Magic Value the friend can use to cast magic. In order to play a Friend Card, you must already have a friend in play that is one level lower – so at the start of the game, you can only play level 1 Friend Cards, whereas if you have a level 1 friend in play, you can play a level 2 Friend Card. If a friend is used to boost your Player Card’s strength during a battle or challenge action, the friend is discarded. But, this can be a good thing, since you can only ever have one copy of a friend with the same name in play at a time! Although there are level 1 and 2 versions of Donald Duck, for example, you can only have one of them in play at a time.
Player Cards and Friend Cards also have Magic Values that determine the level of Magic Cards that can be played during a battle or challenge. Some Magic Cards can deal damage to Dark Cards, restore Heart Points, or have various other effects.
Finally, there are Magic/Friends – characters or creatures brought forth from magic, such as the Genie or Tinkerbell. Like Magic Cards, these friends may only be played if a Player Card or Friend Card in play has a sufficiently high Magic Value. Magic/Friends can boost the strength of a Player Card and they can have a Magic Value of their own. Magic/Friends, however, are always discarded at the end of the turn, so be sure to use them right away!
Gameplay
At the beginning of a player’s turn, he/she draws cards until he/she has six cards total. Cards are played during the Action Phase to battle against the Heartless and to travel to new worlds by playing a World Cards.
During the Challenge Phase, each player takes it in turn to use friends or Attack Cards to boost the strength of his/her Player Card. When both players pass, strengths are compared and the Player Card with the lower Strength Value loses a single Heart Point. Since even the attacker in a challenge can take lose a Heart Point, players should be very careful about choosing when to initiate a challenge!
After challenges (if any), the current player may discard as many cards as he/she likes. Then, it's the other player’s turn.
Trading and Deck-building!
Everyone who plays the Kingdom Hearts TCG can make his/her deck unique! A starter pack or kingdom pack will have enough cards to get a basic deck started. Players can acquire new cards by purchasing booster packs and key packs, or by trading cards with other players. Choosing the right cards for a deck is the first step to victory.
Will your deck have lots of Heartless cards to slow your opponent down? Will you focus on challenging your opponent, or using your friends and magic to travel quickly to other worlds?
There are hundreds of cards to discover! New sets of the Kingdom Hearts TCG include even more new cards and provide new ways to build your deck and play the game!
