Tuesday, July 5, 2011

I love that huttlet!

For every product, there is a Star Wars version, and this includes the Top Trumps card game.  Connor was given a copy of the Clone Wars Top Trumps.  


The premise is simple: it's War with a twist. Each character is scored on Bravery, Cunning, Leadership, Fighting Skill, Battle Tech, and Jedi Power.  On each turn, the "starting" player draws their topmost card, looks at it, and decides which attribute will be used that round.  The other players draw their topmost cards, and the one with the highest value on that attribute wins.  


The problems are that:

  1. each attribute is scored on a wildly different scale; Jedi Power seems to range from 0-10, a Fighting Skill of 41 is very low and 130 is very high, and a Bravery of 24 is very high.  Maybe this is supposed to be a "feature" so that it's harder for players to remember a particular card's relative rank on each attribute, but instead it comes across as arbitrary. 
  2. and this is a much greater problem, many of the rankings don't make any sense.  The Jungle Rancor has the highest fighting in the game at 140; General Grievous has greater Bravery than Anakin; the typical Clone Trooper has Fighting Skill equal to Kit Fisto and greater cunning than Jabba the Hutt...
...annnnd, speaking of Jabba, his son, Rotta the Huttlet, has a Jedi Power of 5.  This is less than any Jedi or Sith, but greater than any other character.  Hunh?  Is Rotta supposed to be Force-sensitive?  What gives?  But... thinking a little more along those lines, that would actually have made the plot of the animated Clone Wars movie actually make sense.  If Rotta were Force-sensitive, the premise could be that the Jedi Order asked Jabba if they could take him for training.  Jabba refused, but when Rotta is then kidnapped and Dooku comes with "information" that the Jedi have done this in order to train Rotta in the ways of the Jedi, Jabba actually has a good reason to believe Dooku.  We could even have a discussion between Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan as to whether it's right for Jabba to refuse his son the chance to learn more about his special gifts, and whether it would be just for the Jedi to actually take Rotta and train him.

Sigh.  Can we retcon this ASAP?

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