I've seen the actual card game around so I know it's pretty legit. I can appreciate good art so I don't care if they're maids as long as they're drawn well imo. However I've never played this or any similar card games and I'm worried their tutorial won't help on such a complex game. I do wanna give it a try though :\ Sounds great having offline mode as well.
Apart from the possibly borderline suggestive "Love" currency cards and the unfortunate underwear-revealing "Milly Violet" card, there's absolutely nothing remotely tacky, titillating, exploitative or sexual about the illustrations in Tanto Cuore; they're all exceedingly tame, and fall purely on the "cute" side of the spectrum. The maid theme might not appeal to everyone, but the artwork is certainly professional and well-drawn. The tutorial follows the now-standard procedure of having you play a match while holding your hand and telling you what you're doing and why for the first third or so, then letting you finish the rest of it on your own. It may take a couple of attempts and a proper look through the rulebook to get a real handle on the mechanics if you're not familiar with Dominion/Ascension/Penny Arcade or the physical Tanto Cuore card game, though.
^ Ahh thanks for the clarification! I may give this one a go. Everything sounds good to me. I'm assuming you got a copy? What do you think of the game so far? Is there any card collecting involved or you just have a whole standard deck to use each time?
Well, TC is a deckbuilder rather than a CCG like Magic, if that's what you're asking. Basically, there are two rows made up of nineteen stacks of communal cards: two Private Maids with special powers (randomly chosen from ten available, who replace them as they are employed); three stacks of "Love" currency cards (worth 1, 2 and 3, respectively); one "Bad Habit" and one "Illness" stack (to use against other players); two Maid Chief stacks (used only for Victory Points); and ten assorted stacks of General Maids with different abilities (maids either chosen at random or using ten default choices depending on the game setting). The idea is to create an "engine" that will let you do the most each turn: employing maids, putting employed maids in service, hindering other players, and so forth to generate as many Victory Points as you can by the end of the game. Unlike games such as Ascension and Penny Arcade that let you buy and play as much as you can each turn, in Tanto Cuore (like Dominion) you can only play and buy as many non-currency cards as allowed by the skills of the maids in your current hand (plus any drawn during the turn), which is why you don't just want to stuff your deck with only one type of maid, or with currency cards. There's considerably more to the game, but I'd recommend just playing it. ^_-
Playdek? Bought. Hopefully it will stick around as a game I'll play for months and years to come. (Ascension, summoner wars)
I'm having a hard time figuring out how anyone can possibly extract the word "pedophile" from the art in this game, unless maybe you have never seen ANY anime or manga style art before this game.
While all art is subjective, your point is valid. But in my view I don't know how anyone can not look at this "art" and not think its boarder line child porn. While I know that's a very strong statement and it's not porn in any since, but think about it. You have young looking, very young looking, girls in suggestive poses, with a "love" theme, some in underwear...do I need to go on. Look I have loved all of Playdeks games and have nothing against anime but I would never be caught playing this game. Young girls portrayed like this, anime or not is, at the very least, taboo, IMO.
I guess it's a cultural thing, as this game is really popular in Japan and they even have women dressing up as the maids (like "booth babes" at E3) at gaming conventions and the like. I think that Playdek made this primarily for that Japanese market, and since the game has already been translated and has somewhat of a following over here (the US) as well with the "otaku" crowd, they probably figure that it would be folly for them NOT to release the app around the world. I mean, that's just free money that they would be missing out on if they had just kept it in Japan.
Ugh. No. Just no. If you'd ever had to deal with a victim of actual child pornography, you wouldn't have just written something so monumentally, massively stupid. In fact, the level of offensive, ignorant and racist posts has quickly grown to the point that a broom seriously needs to be taken to this thread in order to allow people to talk about the actual game. Of the 28 maids in the game, only one has anything close to a "suggestive" pose, and not one of the maids is "in underwear". In fact, almost all of the cards are no more "suggestive" or revealing than this: I think it's fair to assume and would certainly hope that the management of Touch Arcade wouldn't endorse or even entertain this notion being suggested on their message boards, that Playdek are a company of child pornographers.
It's a definite range: the easy AI would be better described as "braindead", as it occasionally plays negative cards on its own maids for no discernable reason, and has a tendency to end the game with about 15 points in total (in stark contrast to the human player having at least four times that many). I'd definitely recommend it as a good starting point for people unfamiliar with this type of game, but serious gamers are probably going to want to jump straight to the hard AI.
Thanks for the prompt response. So, would the hard AI offer a decent challenge to an average player (me).
Yeah, I was able to get the game to download shortly thereafter. (This might even be a common issue at "zero hour" when a game just launches, normally I'm at least PRETENDING to sleep at that hour. Heh.) When it comes to deck-building games, I think I prefer the Ascension-style "continually changing options of cards to draw from" as opposed to the ones like this which give you ALL the options to draw from all the time (with the exception of a few rotating maids). I had the same issue with the Penny Arcade game. I'd rather have the element of chance where I "buy deep" into the wrong currency and have a field full of/devoid of monsters. In this case, with only a single currency type, I could easily see myself falling into using one of several cookie-cutter strategies and not really having much of a need to deviate from that approach for the entire game unless I'm drowning in Bad Habits. The cards I want will always be available unless another player counter-buys them. It took me a bit of time in my first play session to figure out exactly what to do, when to do it and WHY to do it. I actually had to check the in-game rulebook to figure out "okay, I'm near Turn 50, how does this game END?" Fortunately, the tutorial CPU is dumb as a brick so you have all the time in the world to play randomly and probably still emerge victorious. It's good enough to play on occasion, but I'm glad I didn't invest $50 on the physical version. More "user friendly" on a virtual device then a game like Nightfall (which has multiple mid-turn 'pause for opponent decision' so you can't really play it unless all players are on-line at the same time), but no chance of it bumping Ascension out of its preferred game slot. And with the "OMG Artwork" reaction this one is getting, I can't wait to see what will happen if they ever release something like Kanzume Goddess or whatever that female character military-themed 17+ card game is by the same company (name escapes me at the moment, might not even have been released) ...
Having no knowledge of your actual skill level, all I can say is that in theory it should, especially if you play against more than one opponent.
Mm-hmm, the differing Dominion and Ascension styles of play really boil down to personal preference, but I like both, depending on my mood. Ascension has greater novelty and luck factors, especially if you lump in the expansions, whereas Dominion (and by extension, Tanto Cuore) revolves around knowing what resources are available at all times, and is more about planning than responding to surprises. On a tangent, one thing to bear in mind about this game is that unless you choose "Random" for the game type, the available decks will always be the same set of maids; the only way to see the rest is to play a "Random" game. That's the thing, though: such plans usually appear a lot simpler to implement than they tend to be in practice in these types of games, even with two players (and especially with more). In Dominion-type games, you can't just keep buying everything you can afford every turn, and if you have a lot of one resource in your hand, you often don't have many of the others that turn. The tutorial does actually cover that: you need to completely exhaust two stacks of maids (event cards don't count). This means you have a measure of control over exactly when the game will end, as you can deliberately draw or hold off depending on your needs and your opponent's actions. Hmm... a little research suggests that game is Barbarossa, which really does look ridiculous.
BGG thread with video review - http://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/23679?commentid=4096427#comment4096427
While there's definitely nothing hentai about the artwork, it's hard to deny the ecchi content (even if it is tame by ecchi standards) that does exist, like here And quite a few of the maids look young enough to wonder if child labor laws would allow their employment... like here, the right most maid
Your calling me ignorant because of the way I see this "art"? Well I won't get into name calling to prove a point. You should post all 28 pictures. Here in the US the strap that connect pantyhose to underware is considered underware. A girl on a bed in a doggy style position is disgusting to me. I'm free to post my thoughts and if your not offended by the "theme" I'm not bashing you. I see what I see, I am far from ignorant. But in the US if you had actual, real pictures, of little girls in the poses on some of the cards, at the very least people would keep their children away from you. Seriously go through every picture and tell me you would have no problem dressing your five year old daughter like that posing for a picture. If you would you are very far from ignorant and disgusting, your much worse. Read my post I never said playdek endorses or is peddling child porn.
I love deck building games and the art and theme come second to gameplay. So I am buying this regardless of what other people will think of me. As long As I enjoy the game it will be on my device.
