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A few years ago, I played an interesting game by Leo Colovini called Masons, and while the game had some neat elements, the overall play experience was just okay. For me, the brilliant idea was players being challenged to use different scoring cards that best match the current situation on the game board.
My attempt to blend these two ideas resulted in the design of the new card game Oz from Ystari Games. The game – simple but at the same time challenging – uses two kinds of cards: character cards and story cards.
• Character cards show the main players in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Dorothy and her little dog Toto; the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, who join Dorothy on her quest to the Emerald City; and of course the fantastic characters of the Wicked Witch, the Good Witch, and the Wizard of Oz himself!
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Prototype story card
• Story cards are used for scoring at the end of the game based on the character cards you've collected.
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Example of a story card as published
It looks simple, doesn't it? So where's the interesting part? Each round character and story cards are drawn and placed together in sets, with two characters and one story in a set; the number of sets laid out in a round is one greater than the number of players. When a player chooses what to take, he must take the entire set. As a result, you're often forced to choose between the best story card that matches the characters you've already collected or vice versa. The ideal choice, in which both character and story cards will be of great advantage to you, is of course a rare occurrence.
Oz is so simple and fast that even with four players, a game can be played in just 15 minutes.
I presented this game to Ystari's Cyril Demaegd in Essen at Spiel 2010. We hadn't scheduled an appointment prior to the fair – just agreed that I'd pass by at some point – and he happened to be free when I arrived, so we moved to the cafeteria. "I'm sorry," I said, "but I do not have any game to show you this year. I have only simple card games." His reply surprised me: "I've been thinking of starting a line for Ystari with card games."
We started to play Oz, and he was interested immediately. The nice thing with a simple card game is that you can explain it and even play in a few minutes, which is handy when you're trying to grab the attention of a publisher. Cyril was enthusiastic from the first game, and after the second game he decided to publish it – which he did in just a few months!
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Two of the eight characters
As for the look of the game, when Cyril showed me Maliki's website, I was hesitant at first. Why adopt a manga-style artwork for Oz? But that hesitation lasted only a few seconds as I soon realized that Cyril had a wonderful idea. Several games have already been themed in the Oz universe, and Disney is aiming to release an Oz movie prequel in 2013 – Oz: The Great and Powerful – so any "conventional" artwork would have been less interesting for being common and expected. To depict this fantastic world in the style of a Japanese cartoon is something original and appealing!
Not everyone agrees with the look of Oz, particularly the sexy style used for some of the illustrations, but in my opinion fantasy games already have so many illustrations of sexy realistic-looking women that the look of Oz should not disturb anyone. And honestly, I don't find the images shocking at all!
Emanuele Ornella
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