I went to Games of Berkeley today. Wanted to go for a bike ride, and I can’t ever muster the will to bike for biking’s sake. So I decided, I’ll go to GoB, and see if they have the One Piece trading card game, since the only place I’ve seen it locally is in SF, which is way too far for me.

I got there just before noon, not realizing that they opened at noon, and was dismayed to find a line about 20 people deep. They said, “If you’re not in line for Lorcana, you can just go in.” So I just went in as they let the line in the store. After looking for One Piece, they didn’t have it, and none of the other new stuff looked interesting, so I got in the Lorcana line. Why not? I’d heard people waited in line for dozens of hours at GenCon, so what the hell, why not?

20 minutes later, I had a starter deck and a couple of boosters. Bummed they were 1 starter deck a piece, but they sold out three people after me, so I suppose that was a good restriction. The boosters are EXPENSIVE. $7.50/pop??

The game looks interesting. Sort of a stripped down Magic from what I can tell from the rules. Ink instead of lands, and most cards can be turned into ink. Otherwise looks broadly similar, but there are clearly some things that are significantly different and will become obvious as soon as I play it, since a lot of cards affect other cards that have the same character or type of character or what have you.

The art’s nice. It’s exactly what I expected, which is both good and bad - nothing that was “holy crap that is BEAUTIFUL!” But also everything was up to a high standard.

I’m curious to try it. But more, it was just a weird happenstance that I was in the right place at the right time for the launch. How odd.