Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection: Destiny Board Traveler

Final Yu-Gi-Oh! review for this year! Yet again, we’re moving away from the card game as it usually works to delve into a different type of gameplay – this time, a proper board game that involves dice and spaces and Yu-Gi-Oh! monsters- wait, again? Yep. Can’t escape those.

Destiny Board Traveler was first released in Japan under the name Sugoroku’s Sugoroku on March 18th, 2004; and then made its way to North American markets on October 26th of the same year. That original title is a reference to Yugi’s Grandpa; Solomon Muto’s original name is Sugoroku, also the name of two ancient board games that have some similarities to modern Snakes & Ladders and Backgammon, respectively.

But of course, there needs to be a twist that involves the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game. The characters of the manga/anime appear as playable, there are several boards to choose from (if you unlock them), and the cards themselves will be integral parts of the strategy and gameplay.

Maybe this time I can keep it short.

’Round the Board

Makes sense to pick Yugi. ow I just have to hope his
legendary lucks rubs off on me. (Hint: It didn't.)

Four players move around one or more 5X5 square-shaped boards. Each player has a hand of monsters drawn from their Deck (this game doesn’t use Spells or Traps, and all monsters are treated as Normal and don’t have their effects). On their turn, each player creates their own die from cards in their hand by setting them onto its faces. They do not need to set monsters onto every face of the die, however. The value of each side of that die is equal to the level of the monster on it. The die has one side known as the Star Face, while the other five remain regular faces.

Then, the die is rolled. The rolling player can mash the A button (X on keyboard) to make it spin increasingly fast, a feature known as the Soul Shuffle. The faster the die is spinning when rolled (by pressing B, though it will roll after a few seconds if you are button-mashing), the more likely it will be to land on its Star Face. It’s not a guarantee, but it can help – therefore, it is encouraged to put on that face the monster you most want to summon.

Your card is at the bottom but its stats are shown above it.
The way it's made, it does kinda look like it's supposed to
be the stats of the monster next to it...

What’s that? Summon? Yep. The player then moves spaces clockwise equal to the level of the monster on the result (ex. Move 3 spaces if it’s Level 3, 5 if it’s Level 5, etc.). If they land on a space with a grey card, a battle begins between the monster rolled and the grey (unowned) one. Those are usually weak, so easy to dispatch – but beware! Before combat, Solomon will roll a special die for both monsters. It can either do nothing (“Miss!”, 4/6 chances to happen), or impact the monsters in some way (“Reverse Attack/Defense” will change the monster’s battle position, not switch their stats around – I made that mistake at first; or “Reduce ATK/DEF”, which will lower their opponent’s ATK and DEF by 500 points). If the battle is won, the grey card is replaced by the monster that was rolled, with the player’s current color to boot, and its owner gains Stars equal to that monster’s Level.

One of the few games where you'll actually be happy
if the die fails to roll anything.

The monsters that get Tributed don't return, so they leave
empty spaces behind that can be claimed without a fight
by any of the playersé

Monsters are still bound by the rules of tribute summon; if you roll a Level 5 or higher monster, before the battle you will need to tribute monsters among your previous victories to bring them out. One for a monster Level 5 or 6; two for a monster Level 7 or higher; and three for a few instances.

As grey cards get claimed and opponents put their own cards on the field, the monsters on the board become stronger and more difficult to fight. Since battle outcomes happen the same as for the card game, it is possible for players to lose Life Points; everyone starts with 4,000 LP and may win or lose LP based on battle results and player/field abilities. A player whose LP reaches 0 is removed from the game (but thanks to some field effects and Super Powers, this may not be permanent).

Dark Magician Girl's Super Power is that if she summons a
monster and enters a fight, her monster will be replaced by
Dark Magician, Sorcerer of Dark Magic, or another very
powerful Spellcaster of that lineage, which will win the
battle in place of her actual monster. That's stupid powerful.

And you’ll have to put out high-level monsters eventually, since they are worth more points; victory is tied directly to the total Level (Stars) of the monsters a player has on the field. The first to reach the goal quantity of stars wins. It can be as low as 1 or go as high as 250.

What can change the game? Two things. The corners of each square are special spaces which will either help or impede the players that land on them. As examples, the first field grants players who land on its corners an extra 1000 LP; another makes them lose a turn. All characters also have their own Super Power, which triggers on random turns – there is no clear recharging or gauge system to tell when it will next be available, which can make these abilities unwieldy and hard to plan around. However, many of these Super Powers are strong enough to be worth using, despite that weakness.

Yugi won? What a shock!

Who will be touring, and where?

Which one of them has the better chances? Well, my money
would be on Yami Yugi, but the tide can turn anytime in this
game.

While only four players can duke it out around the boards, they can choose among a roster of 12 characters, with 8 available at first.

-Characters in both the manga and anime: Yugi Muto, Joey Wheeler, Seto Kaiba, Mai Valentine, Mokuba Kaiba, Yami Yugi, Yami Bakura, Solomon Muto and Maximillion Pegasus;

-Two Duel Monsters: Dark Magician Girl and Kaibaman;

-From the anime: Rebecca Hawkins.

A sweet selection, but it disappoints me that, of those 12, the four that are unlockable (Yami Yugi, Yami Bakura, Kaibaman and Solomon Muto) cannot be discovered through natural progress. Nope, you must input a code on the title screen instead.

Ohhh, this setup looks FUN to play.

You start with one field, but you can unlock a new one by winning a game (no matter how long) with a specific character. When enough fields have been unlocked, you become able to link multiple boards together to create wider maps, allowing for longer matches. The downside? You can only unlock 7 more boards. You can never unlock all 11 of them through the game’s progression, unfortunately. I think that’s kind of dumb, especially since you can link up to 10 boards together.

The Early Days Collection enhancements allow the unlock of all characters and boards.

What it feels to play

Again: The interest, once gameplay has been explained, is to come back with my observations after a couple matches. And, well, at no surprise for this month, this is a mixed bag.

There are only three squares on each side, between corners. Tactically, this means that you cannot summon any monster with a level higher than 3 on the first turn, since rolling a Level 4 monster takes you to the next corner (where you can’t summon), and you need a Tribute (A monster with your color on the field) to summon anything stronger than that. If you land on a square and you can’t summon, you take direct damage from the opposing card. (Solomon still rolls his die, though!)

Yep, one chance out of 6 to lose the fight just because
Solomon rolled the bad die side. I fucking hate this.

Speaking of Tribute Summons, they are necessary to win extra stars, sure, but they are a doubled-edged sword. The reason? Once you’ve moved the number of spaces rolled (5 or above), only THEN do you Tribute a monster (or two, if you moved 7+ spaces) from the ones you’ve already summoned. And THEN, you must also win the battle for that space if there was already a card there. No problem, right? Solomon will still roll his die for both parties. But! If your monster doesn’t destroy the opposing one, the summon fails. This goes if your monster is destroyed, if the attack fails due to the opposing monster’s DEF being higher… or if your monster got forced into Defense position by Solomon’s fucking die roll, which has a 1/6 chance of happening.

Of course, whenever that happens, the summon fails, which means that you lose your Tributes. You’re not getting them back. That’s Stars you’ll have to work to regain. And, of course, you must now bring out lower-level monsters again in order to have tributes for bigger creatures – and more spaces will have been claimed by that point, making the climb back a lot harder. One stroke of bad luck can set you back immensely.

The number of times I've seen CPUs move 5+ spaces
around the board without enough monsters to Tribute...
Oh yeah, the AI in this game can be very stupid.

In the same vein, your movement is dictated by the cards in your hand, the ones you pick for your die faces. If your hand is mostly made up of monsters that must be Tribute Summoned, your options become very limited. Same if your hand contains many monsters of one level – it can be troublesome in late-game, where the spaces unoccupied by monsters owned by opposing players get rarer, and landing on one becomes risky. On more than one occasion testing this game, I started with a hand of three or more Level 5+ monsters, or ended up with it later. Yet, at the same time, you’re still better off covering every side of your die with monsters, because moving is better than not moving at all, which is what happens if you roll a die side that no card was set on. The Star Face is fine, since button-mashing can help you roll it a little more reliably, so you can set one of the monsters you most want to summon on that turn – but it’s very much not a guarantee. It helps, maybe, 10% of the time.

Playing a long game with many boards, I found a good
strategy was to find a board with nobody else on it and just
claim everything for yourself. It's not fool-proof, but it
can help. Best case scenario, you get ahead of the others.

To top it off, the playable characters’ Super Powers lack balance. Some of them are just okay, like Mai who can see the stats of every monster on the field, or Joey who can reroll his die if he doesn’t get the result he wants. Then there’s Rebecca, who teleports every player (including herself) to random spaces on the map, or Kaiba who uses Crush Card Virus, destroying every monster in the other three players’ hands with ATK of 1500 or higher. In late-game, that’s a death sentence. Mokuba steals a monster from each of the other three players’ hands, Yami Bakura steals LP from the other players, Kaibaman makes everyone else lose a turn, Dark Magician Girl will special summon a powerful spellcaster to fight in the place of her actual summon for the Battle Phase. This being his game, Solomon’s Super Power is to literally change the number of Stars required to win. So yeah, there’s definitely an issue of balance between abilities here – some are utilitarian, others can break the game.

Current Level: 84. Damage dealt: 8400 LP.
This game fucking OTK'd me. What the actual fuck.

To say nothing of the effects of boards, which can also make you go from winning the game to losing it in just one turn if you are unlucky and don't roll what you need. To pick more screenshots for this review, I played a longer game with everything unlocked. Pegasus was set to win until he ended up on the Outer Space board and lost 1000 LP per turn after running out of air, which is that board’s gimmick; his LP hit 0, so he lost. I took first place. And then I died to a bad board effect that inflicted damage equal to 100 X the number of Stars I had, which was at around 80. A board fucking killed me in one hit. Yeah, I think that’s what made me go from tolerating this time to outright hating it. Balance? What balance? Even fucking Mario Party does it better!

Final words

I complained earlier about ending up with hands with too
many high-level monsters; I started this one game with the
opposite issue, where my hand was basically nothing but
Level 1 and 2 monsters, so I was limited in both movement
and in firepower when I did land on a space for monsters.

The fourth Yu-Gi-Oh! game I’m covering this month, and yet another one that I’m not feeling that great about. It’s got an interesting concept and mechanics, but comes with major downsides regarding balance and other inevitable annoyances when luck gets involved. Mixing up the classic card game and a game about traveling around a board makes for something I’ve seldom seen, and there’s decent work in combining the elements of both. Moving around the board with the die you create every turn, special spaces with effects and super powers that the playable characters can use, for the board part; and summons, tribute summons, battles, and drawing, for the cards themselves. These two don’t entirely gel together, but the attempt is nice.

I like the selection of characters; lots of famous faces, and even a few unexpected folks as well. I wouldn’t have thought to have two Duel Monsters, or Rebecca, playable here. The selection of maps is nice, though I wished we could unlock them all and not have the game stop at a maximum of eight. Having access to all of them for a variety of experiences with this board game would be better, y’know?

I think the "Reverse ATK/DEF" effect is so stupid, too.
How many times have I failed a tribute summon solely
due to Grandpa's die? How many turns were wasted
with this?

That said, though there is an element of strategy, it’s also very dependent on luck – Solomon Muto’s die can screw you over during an important battle, you lose the stars of tributed monsters if a tribute summon fails, and you’re always bound by what’s in your hand. It is unlikely, but possible, to have a hand filled with nothing but monsters Level 5+, and no way to summon anything. Just like it is possible to have your strategy destroyed by a Super Power – these abilities unlock randomly instead of on a set number of turns, which leads to issues where you can never know when you’ll have access to it, nor when opponents will be using theirs. To say nothing of boards!

I guess that’s it for Destiny Board Traveler – I gave it a chance, but way too much about it does NOT work. It would need a serious rework to feel like something I would actually enjoy. One feature I would add would be a button, during the creation of your die to roll, where you can choose to re-draw your hand at the cost of skipping that turn. I guess I would have also made it so the unlockable characters could be found by achieving specific goals, since the only way to unlock them is through cheat codes.

There will be more Yu-Gi-Oh! next year, but for this month, I’m feeling like I’ve done enough. Tune in soon for the next articles!