There were many exciting indie board games that were introduced in TableCon Quest last weekend. Today, we’ll be covering the recently released Detective Conan trading card game (TCG). It is based on the famous anime/manga with the same name as part of their 30th anniversary of the series. Currently, they have five colored themes for the cards and each colour associates with a character. We have blue, green, white, red and yellow with Conan, Hattori Heiji, Kaito Kid, Shuichi Akai and Toru Amuro on each color respectively.

Diving Into The Game

In the Detective Conan TCG, there are 5 types of cards. There’s the case card, token card, partner card, 40 character cards and event cards in total. For every case, there is a required number of evidence to solve it and whoever goes first has to collect more evidence. To collect said evidence, you’ll need character and partner cards. Whoever collects the required amount of evidence first wins the game.

The goal of the game is simple enough. You and your opponent must race against each other to see who can collect evidence faster. You can sabotage your opponent by destroying their pool of evidence or character card. Each character card has abilities, of which we won’t dive into details as there’s an extensive amount to cover. For now we’ll focus on what the cards are able to do such as perform actions and reasoning.

Let’s check out the field of the game. So on the bottom side of the field is where the files lie. Files act as the energy source of the game. By taking a look at a character card, you’ll notice the number on the top left. That number is how much it costs to deploy it.

So you’ll need to be careful of energy consumption when choosing a character to solve a case. Additionally, you can turn your partner card and move it to the file field and play them as a file too.

For every turn, players can add two energy but only the player who goes first can add one energy at the first turn. You can also store one energy then play another character card because each player is only allowed to play one card on their respective turns by either summoning a character or by activating an event card. In the middle of the playing field is where you put your character down with up to a maximum of 5.

After putting down a character card, you’ll have to wait unless your character specifically has the rush skill which allows you to act after setting it down. Using character cards, you can either attack your opponent’s evidence pool or character. If the attack is successful, your opponent must check and remove one card from their evidence and give it to you.

On the bottom right side of the card you’ll notice some numbers. They signify as your AP and LP. AP is similar to Attack Power while LP acts as the time of reasoning, it can help you collect evidence faster. Depending on if you’re attacking or defending, we take a look at the AP that you have. If the amount is lower, then the card gets destroyed but if the AP is the same amount there may be a chance that card gets destroyed. Only the standing character card that is turned to the side is used to defend an attack. It cannot defend if its not turned.

The winning condition doesn’t necessarily require you to collect only evidence. Each partner card has a skill called assist. When the player’s active partner card turns and gets into file area, if we get 6 files, we can also turn the partner card with an active skill called flip to turn it over to a token card to complete other winning requirements. 

Overall, it was a fun and unique experience as it not only requires you to just destroy your opponents character cards like other TCG games. The player has to actively stop the opponent from solving their case while handling their own case as well.

It’s not beginner friendly as you really need to read the rules properly and understand what each card does especially when collecting evidence. You can’t just aggressively attack your opponent all the time as you also need to collect the evidence to stop them from winning the game.

Only the Japanese version has been launched globally as of now. The staff have even said that they ran out of stock in Japan so don’t miss out on playing the Detective Conan TCG especially if you’re a huge fan of the series.