Hurray, a new game

Hi everyone,

I hope you all like the "new" blog of mine. Took me some time to find the right things and the header came out better than i expected but i think its still not perfect. Funny what you can do by only using Paint and Gimp.
The background looks good and now that I know how to make transparent areas in a picture, i have so many ideas but so less time. Well, looks like i have to skip one or two rounds of gaming for a great looking header-pic.

Anyway, today i want to tell you about a card game. A card game on what i spent like years of my life. I still got hundreds of those cards but i know no one who still plays that game.
The card game is called:

Duel Masters

Its like a modified rip of off the "well known" Card Game Yu-Gi-Oh.
The meaning of the game is to defeat your opponent (wow, who would have guessed that) through destroying 5 shields and then attack him directly.
I'll tell you how a game normally looks like:
You and your enemy have 1 set of 40+ cards. At the beginning, each of you draw the first 5 cards and put then upside down in front of you without looking at them. Those are your shields which are protecting you from the enemys attacks.
The you both draw 5 hand cards.
Then you decide who of you starts.

A normal round looks like that:
1. you draw a card
2. you can put one hand card into your "mana zone". Mana is needed to cast spells or to summon monsters.
3. if you have enough mana, you can summon a monster now which is then "untapped". Normally monsters have to wait 1 round till they can attack. Evolution-monsters that have to be laid onto monsters of the same species can attack immediately.
4. if you have enough mana, you can cast spells which have different effects on everything in the game like: you can draw cards, make a monster temporary stronger, destroy mana of the enemy etc.
5. you can attack the enemy or an enemy monster if you have a monster which can attack. You can only attack "tapped" monsters. If your monster has attacked, it is tapped and will get untapped at the beginning of your next round.
a monster can have different abilitties:
blocker: can block an attack and fight against the attacking monster
unblockable: cant be blocked
evolution: can only be put onto monsters of the same species and can attack instantly
double breaker: breaks 2 shields when attacking the enemy shields but when blocked only attacks 1 monster
strong attacker: while attacking, the monster gets +xxxx attack strenght
and way more abillities like "draw x cards", "retieve a monster", "search your deck for...". "when this creature dies do ...." etc.
if you break a shield of the enemy he takes the shield card and puts it to his hand cards
6. you end your turn.
7. your enemy has his turn

Now the same thing repeats until one of you has lost all of his shields and got attacked by a monster.
There are 5 different colour types of cards which specialise (more or less) on different aspects of the game.

red cards = fire nation. pure strenght, no blockers and a lot of "kill every monster with strenght xxxx or less"
green cards = nature nation. faster more mana to cast a lot of spells, some really strong monsters, monsters that reduce your mana costs but no blockers
yellow cards = light nation. strong blockers that can attack, unblockable spells and spells which allow you to attack tapped monsters
black cards = darkness nation. reaper monsters which kill enemys even if they are stronger, spells that can retrieve your own monsters, kill enemy monsters, droping enemy hand cards and messing around with your own shields
blue cards = water nation. faster more hand cards, nice blockers, nice unblockable monsters and spells/monster-abillities which send monsters back to his owners hand cards

It sounds a little lame and in the first place you have to remember a bunch of rules.
But i love that card game. I played it every day in school with friends. I knew a website where you can play Duel Masters against other players but there are only pros and you get beaten in a few rounds = No fun.
Normally i would say at this point "buy those cards and start playing" but i dont know any place where you can play regulary with someone or even buy the cards (instead of ebay) so it might be a waste of money if you buy them.

There are also some games for the "GameBoy Advanced" which are a nice try out but in those games your deck can only handle 40 cards and with a little practise the enemys are beaten in a few rounds because only a few of them are hard to beat.
If you want to give it a try, download "VisualBoyAdvanced" which is a GameBoyAdvanced-Emulator so you can play GameBoy-games on your computer. Then search for something like "Duel Masters gba rom" on google and you might find something. Im not sure if owning a rom (rom = name of the game-type for the emulator) is illegal or not so i wont post any links and i also tell you to buy it regulary in a store instead of downloading.
In the end, i just have to say:
To bad that game didnt get any more popular.

Bye :D