TCGplayer Staff
4/2/2008
On March 31st the TCG company Decipher, known for the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings TCGs, announced a new trading card game called
Fight Klub a game that promises to “revolutionize the way trading card games are played.” The basic premise of the game revolves around fantasy fights between characters across several different licenses. There is no particular genre the game is centering itself in, instead opting to be completely fan driven in terms of its content. In short, we may be seeing matches such as “Hannibal Lecter vs Doctor Evil” and other strange scenarios depending on what licenses Decipher has already acquired and what licenses fans request.
Main game expansion will be developed via popularity contests. The Fight Klub website at will host several pools that Fight Klub members will then vote in. The winner in these polls will be added to the game. Players will vote on things as small as “what powers a card should have” to as big as “what license should Fight Klub include next”. The website itself boasts that the game will be 100% fan driven and will only go in the direction fans tell it to go. Fans will also be able to decide what cards go foil, which cards get placed at what rarities, and they can even create their own custom payer made cards that they can submit for a chance to see them enter the main set.
The game itself is deciding to abandon traditional styles of marketing as well. First of all, “Fight Klub” will not be available at any retail store. Instead product will be sold and shipped exclusively off the main Decipher website. In addition, Decipher has abandoned the concept of “Booster Packs” and “Starter Packs”. Instead, the product will be shipped exclusively in their own format the “Kilo”. Each card kilo will contain 121 cards and will roughly be the equivalent of 10 booster packs, although it is being advertised on the main Fight Klub site that each Kilo will be a fully functioning self-contained card set. Players will also be able to “subscribe” to Fight Klub and receive Kilo's automatically each time a new set releases. Subscribers will either receive 3 Kilos each time a set comes out, or they can choose to receive one Kilo per month for a whole year. Decipher states that Kilos, being the approximate of 10 booster packs, essentially sell their card game at a dollar less per pack than traditionally marketed games.
Decipher's reasoning behind this new marketing plan is that traditional distribution of card games is “messy” according to their website, and kept game developers from direct contact with the fans, thus sometimes producing a game that wasn't what the fans expected. According to their “grass roots” marketing approach, since all the fans will have to come to one stop for all their Fight Klub needs, this will foster fan interaction with the community.
Even more interesting is the fact that not everyone can play Fight Klub, making it one of the first “Exclusive” TCGs. The game is advertised as “Invite Only” on its official website. In short, as of right now Decipher is taking applications for one of 6,000 “Founding Mentor” positions. These positions will have a pass to play Flight Klub. If anyone else other than a “Founding Mentor” wishes to play, they must receive an invite code from a Founding Mentor. Then when they are invited, they too can give out invite codes to allow their friends to play, and so on, and so on. But in short, if you don't know someone who is already playing Fight Klub, you cannot start playing yourself.
Also strange is Deciphers new “player incentive” plan whereby players receive 10% of the purchases of their invited friends directly to a paypal account. The official Decipher website encourages Fight Klub players to post on forums, spread their code on newsgroups, and do whatever they can to get other people to join the game under their invite code, even if they don't know these people personally. One section of their site even states that if you manage to invite a thousand people to the game, you will be able to make upwards of $40,000 dollars a year. This plan is of course meant to spread the word of Fight Klub faster and more efficiently, but the player incentives actually have several fans skeptical, although no less excited about the game itself.
The game itself will be broken up into “good” cards and “evil” cards featuring four heroes and four villains in each Fight Klub set. Their starting set, tentatively titled “One” will feature kilos that provide a full card set to fans, while their next set “Two” will start randomizing kilo distribution.
Aside from all of this, Decipher is also launching several other marketing plans to help Fight Klub grow. One of these is the Gang system, by which Fight Klub members will be able to join certain “societies” called gangs. Once you have joined a gang, you can get gang specific cards and items, and you can participate in gang rivalry events. It is something like the concept of “guilds” or “clans” except the card designers are making the guilds for you. Other marketing plans include open calls for all licenses, which allow companies to volunteer their license to be featured in Fight Klub, the connector program, where important game companies and game magazines can connect people to Fight Klub to earn money and benefits, and the “Fight Klub Girls”, my personal favorite part of their plan, which essentially involves contracting attractive women to promote their game. As anyone who has played TCGs long enough can tell you, attractive women are a definite deciding factor when it comes down to deciding what game you are going to play.
There is one month left to become a founding member, but fans thus far on the official site have been sending mixed messages. Some are absolutely drooling over this game and can't wait to see certain matchups such as “Sauron Vs. Chuck Norris”, while others have gone far enough to call the game a pyramid scheme on their own forums. Very few details have been released about “Fight Klub” and little is known about the game system other than the fact that it takes about 15 minutes to play. This has caused several fans to hold off on joining the site, as they are unsure as to whether or not the game will actually be fun or not.
Either way, joining the Fight Klub forums is free, and the project itself is definitely revolutionary at least in the idea. So if you are interested, feel free to log on to
http://www.decipher.com and make your own profile. Regardless of what happens, TCGplayer will be there to give you all the dirt on this game right up to its release.
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