I could've sworn we had a topic for this, but search turned up nothing. Anyway, Serpent's Tongue finally entered manufacturing somewhere between 6 to 9 months over schedule. They have preorders up on their site for people who missed the kickstarter at a fairly heavy discount. Fair warning: I backed the kickstarter so I'm somewhat biased about this game.
Either way. Serpent's Tongue is a CCG where people play magi casting spells to try and blow each other up. But it has some key differences to set it apart from Magic: The gathering.
Instead of building a deck of cards and drawing a hand of those after shuffling, each player has an honest-to-god spell book with pockets to store their spells in. At the start of any round, you select up to 3 of these spells to "prepare" by moving them into the pocket on the first page of the spell book. These are the spells you are able to cast for that round, and the ones you don't are moved back to their spot in the book.
Instead of tapping lands like in magic, spells have an activation cost. This can come from several currencies, "resonance" being the most common. An equal (random) amount is generated every round for all players. They can gain more by using their casting actions to meditate instead of casting spells and some spells even give you resonance instead of consuming it as part of their cost. Others may draw from your hit points or require you to discard spells you already have in play as their activation cost.
The game comes with a significant amount of LARP. This is the major draw for some and for others it'll probably be a huge turnoff. The LARP primarily manifests itself in how people cast spells. Besides paying the resonance/matter/essence/whatever once activated, people have to speak the spell out loud to activate it. Depending on the complexity of the spell, its name could be between 2-6 syllables. There is a glyph on the card which corresponds to a map inside your spell book with the various syllables of the Serpents Tongue, allowing you to translate unfamiliar spells on the fly. Higher-level spells may also require you to make specific gestures as part of their activation. Failing the enunciation makes the spell fizzle and deducts resonance for the player. The game also has a timer, so people will have a strict(ish) time limit to translate their spell if they haven't memorized it.
The LARP continues into the written material. There's a draft PDF of the tutorial up written as a 2-player LARP session which seems to do a pretty good job of covering the game mechanics up here: http://www.becomemagi.com/walkthrough-draft/
The game is also supposed to ship with a co-operative campaign called Out of Eden where 2 or more players team up to fight PvE encounters and/or each other. Again, this is something I find pretty appealing but will probably turn off people who aren't into LARPing during their board game sessions. Finally, the game comes with PvE encounter cards that players can try to defeat solo or as a group. The card details an enemy's stats and has a table you roll on to determine what the opponent does every round.
The final components look pretty sweet. I particularly dig the over sized cards. There are some game play demonstration videos up that are obviously staged but show off the components:
So yeah. I'm pretty pumped that they finally got this thing out. Preorders on sale until May 31st. Haven't actually played this yet for obvious reasons. Playtest versions have been available to kickstarters but the rules iterated so quickly after feedback from a way more dedicated group of backers than me that I couldn't justify taking time to print a full set of components for testing.
http://www.becomemagi.com/
Either way. Serpent's Tongue is a CCG where people play magi casting spells to try and blow each other up. But it has some key differences to set it apart from Magic: The gathering.
Instead of building a deck of cards and drawing a hand of those after shuffling, each player has an honest-to-god spell book with pockets to store their spells in. At the start of any round, you select up to 3 of these spells to "prepare" by moving them into the pocket on the first page of the spell book. These are the spells you are able to cast for that round, and the ones you don't are moved back to their spot in the book.
Instead of tapping lands like in magic, spells have an activation cost. This can come from several currencies, "resonance" being the most common. An equal (random) amount is generated every round for all players. They can gain more by using their casting actions to meditate instead of casting spells and some spells even give you resonance instead of consuming it as part of their cost. Others may draw from your hit points or require you to discard spells you already have in play as their activation cost.
The game comes with a significant amount of LARP. This is the major draw for some and for others it'll probably be a huge turnoff. The LARP primarily manifests itself in how people cast spells. Besides paying the resonance/matter/essence/whatever once activated, people have to speak the spell out loud to activate it. Depending on the complexity of the spell, its name could be between 2-6 syllables. There is a glyph on the card which corresponds to a map inside your spell book with the various syllables of the Serpents Tongue, allowing you to translate unfamiliar spells on the fly. Higher-level spells may also require you to make specific gestures as part of their activation. Failing the enunciation makes the spell fizzle and deducts resonance for the player. The game also has a timer, so people will have a strict(ish) time limit to translate their spell if they haven't memorized it.
The LARP continues into the written material. There's a draft PDF of the tutorial up written as a 2-player LARP session which seems to do a pretty good job of covering the game mechanics up here: http://www.becomemagi.com/walkthrough-draft/
The game is also supposed to ship with a co-operative campaign called Out of Eden where 2 or more players team up to fight PvE encounters and/or each other. Again, this is something I find pretty appealing but will probably turn off people who aren't into LARPing during their board game sessions. Finally, the game comes with PvE encounter cards that players can try to defeat solo or as a group. The card details an enemy's stats and has a table you roll on to determine what the opponent does every round.
The final components look pretty sweet. I particularly dig the over sized cards. There are some game play demonstration videos up that are obviously staged but show off the components:
So yeah. I'm pretty pumped that they finally got this thing out. Preorders on sale until May 31st. Haven't actually played this yet for obvious reasons. Playtest versions have been available to kickstarters but the rules iterated so quickly after feedback from a way more dedicated group of backers than me that I couldn't justify taking time to print a full set of components for testing.
http://www.becomemagi.com/
Undoubtedly they will release it sooner or later as a 
