The Spoils

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The Spoils
The Spoils's card back design
Designer	Tenacious Games
Publisher	Tenacious Games
Players	Two and up
Age range	12 and up
Setup time	3-4 Minutes
Playing time	~30 Minutes1
Random chance	Some
Skills required	Card playing Arithmetic
1 Games may be shorter or longer depending on a deck's style of play.

The Spoils is a collectible card game produced by Tenacious Games. It launched with a free open beta in August of 2006, and officially released for sale in November 2006. The Spoils was in development from 2001 to 2006. Jon Finkel, a prominent player in Magic: the Gathering's Pro Tour, aided the development team as an advisor since 2002.

[edit] Gameplay and setting

The Spoils uses a number of mechanics in common with other collectible card games. Unlike many games of this kind, you start the game with a faction card in play, which determines how you begin your turn and which actions you are allowed to take. These factions have special abilities, unique to each faction card. Currently, only one faction is available to the public, the Tournament Faction. Special foiled versions of this card were given away at Gen Con.

Players need to amass resource cards in order to play characters, tactics, items and locations. Certain cards are "staple" resources and any number of these may be played in a deck. Most cards require between 1 and 4 of these staple resources in play to meet the threshold indicated by resource icons on cards. The resource icons come in the form of five trades.

To supplement the staple resources, players may play any card from their hand face down as a resource; however, cards played face down in this manner will not count as having any resource icons.

Playable cards come in several types: characters, items, tactics, and locations. Each of these types often have subtypes. To win the game, the opponent's faction must be reduced to 0 influence. The Tournament Faction starts with 25 influence. The faction's influence may be reduced by attacking it with characters, or by using tactics or special abilities. Characters have three stats: strength (amount of damage the character deals), life (amount of damage needed to destroy the character), and speed (faster characters deal their damage earlier).

[edit] Trades of The Spoils

The Spoils cards are designated by various types and trades. © Tenacious Games, Inc. Images used without permission.

• Banker (Greed icon) as a trade are heavy influence gainers and spenders. For instance, not known for their COVERT characters playing one such as "Concealed Goon" will cost you 5 influence, whereas playing "Nasty Butler"(low speed character) will gain you 4 influence. Bankers also like to draw a lot of cards(Cashout or Beatrix Winterbottom for examples) and have direct character removal with some benefit/choice to their opponents(Irresistible Bribe).
• Rogue (Deception icon) as a trade try to use their opponent's discard pile against them. And the way they facilitate this is to mill their opponent's library. One particular card, "Pluck", can snatch opponent's discarded cards for his controller's use. But it doesn't end in the discard pile; Rogues can take control of some cards their opponents control(Example being "Rapine"). Another trait of this trade: high speed characters, speed manipulation, and removing opponent's discard cards from the game.
• Warlord (Rage icon) as a trade are the straight forward beaters and damage dealers. They want to lay down efficient(strength to cost ratio) characters to attack with while using damage dealing sources to clear the way. They also have cards that will help them to overwhelm their opponents with a sizable board control.
• Gearsmith (Elitism icon) as a trade use cost reduction in many ways to help spur them ahead. As well as possessing selective tutoring, the highest number of "ITEM" cards, and character token creator cards(Micromajig 1/1/3), they have a "node" theme that can become quite powerful but is particularly vulnerable.
• Arcanist (Obsession icon) as a trade they sport the most COVERT characters. They can use bounce and discard against their opponent as well as generate tokens that can be used from certain cards to bounce cards or cause their opponent to discard cards. Another ability of these arcane experimenters is to manipulate the top deck of libraries and to retrieve specific "type" cards(Example being Servile Centipede).

[edit] Open beta tournaments

From August 1, 2006 through the launch date of The Spoils, Tenacious Games supported the release of a limited set of Open Beta cards of The Spoils Tournament Card Game with over 1000 free tournaments and over $60,000 in prize money.

[edit] Sets

To date there have been three sets either released or announced. 1st Edition, and 1st Edition Part 2 will be combined and reprinted at a later date as the 'core' set, or 2nd Edition.

[edit] External links

[edit] Official sites

• The Spoils.com The Spoils Official site. News, forum, tournaments, and store.
• Athena The Spoils card database.

[edit] Unofficial sites

• Pojo.com Pojo recently started to host "The Spoils." The website includes card of the day reviews as well as a few articles.
• Spoils @ TCG Player One of the world's leading TCG fansite chains with arguably the best content out there for The Spoils with articles by the best known players in the game, sortable spoiler, great forums and the most up-to-date information to be found anywhere.
• TheTournamentFaction.com The Spoils Fansite, contains downloadable content pertaining to The Spoils as well as the most up to date Spoiler List for The Spoils as of August 14, 2006.
• The Spoils Universe The Spoils Universe is a dedicated fan-forum for The Spoils offering more forum-based support than any other forum (aside from TheSpoils.com, of course).
• TeamCovenant.com Team Covenant is a group of highly experienced players offering insight into the current tournament meta and their personal play-testing sessions. Team Covenant also has a monthly article contest with various prizes up for grabs.
• Kotuki.com Malaysian Forums with The Spoils area.