No, wait, I meant Flirting of the Nine States, no, Romance of the Nine Empires, yes, that’s the one!
So that thing (AKA R9E) is now available to play on OCTGN!
This game is based on the ruleset of one of my obscure but favourite classics from back in the final days of the CCG boom, Legend of the Burning Sands (LBS) which unfortunately didn’t survive the bust of that particular bubble. The theme of the game if based on the fictional game used in the movie The Gamers: Hands of Fate and it has some minor rules tweaks and additions (e.g. Quests) to work within that.
R9E came into my attention when we were discussing favourite CCGs with Mark Wootton and he informed me of LBS’ revival under a new theme. I had never even heard of this due to the fairly baffling marketing AEG employed to promote it along with the movie. You see the game was created as a kickstarter reward for backers of the movie, so they obviously knew what was up, but when I first noticed this game, the 15year old anniversary and “CCG” format completely threw me off. The game of course is neither! It’s a new game from 2013 and it’s actually released in more of an “ECG” or “LCG” format, than an LCG (I don’t think a full playset is included in the core, but there’s certainly no collectible expansions etc)
Since I was always planning to bring LBS to OCTGN at some point, this was a good opportunity to get the updated rules and perhaps push some more activity to this buried gem. And after the good people of the R9E Facebook group approached me, offering to do all the work of compiling scans and spreadsheets with the cards, I was halfway there already! It still took me a few months to get motivated and have enough time to actually sit and do it, but it’s finally here!
Anyway, the game is fully playable on OCTGN now. It does not have complete automation such as Doomtown:Reloaded or Android:Netrunner, but all the common actions have been scripted and the game cards are simple enough that you should be able to take care of everything else easily. I’ve written a handy guide to get you started.
The good thing is that now that the game is build, due to how much of a ruleset it shares with Legend of the Burning Sands, I might be able to actually easily port the OCTGN code into an LBS version in the near future, without huge hassle. If anyone is willing to help me with that, drop me a message 😉
And as always, Enjoy!