Neopets Battledome: Trading Card Game

From the online world of Neopets comes Neopets Battledome: Trading Card Game! Neopets is in its revival era, and leading the craze is the new trading card game that brings your favorite characters off the screen and into your hands. There are tons of different Neopets to collect, along with the various codestones, equipment, foods, potions, and paintbrushes that can help during battle. For children just learning about the world of Neopets to adults who are seeking a thrilling yet nostalgic game, the trading card game is the perfect game to immerse yourself in.

Here are the different starter sets I tried out:

• Champions of Meridell (starter set with dice, playmat, and rule sheet)
• Starry Acara (starter set with dice, playmat, and rule sheet)
• Fire Uni (starter set with dice, playmat, and rule sheet)
• Defenders of Neopia (just cards)
• 25 Year Anniversary Celebration Set (just cards)

If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend the Champions of Meridell, Starry Acara, or Fire Uni, so you have a good set of cards you can play against anyone with and your own playmat and set of dice. If you’re looking to expand your collection, the Defenders of Neopia and the 25 year Anniversary Celebration Set had some pretty cool additions.

Types of cards

1. Neopets
   • There are many different Neopets with unique names, hit points, and statistics. For example, Acara has 8 hit points, an attack stat of 3, a defense stat of 2, and an agility stat of 6.
2. Codestones
   • A codestone provides a temporary boost to your Neopet’s stats (attack, defense, and/or agility). Each codestone has a number in the same spot as one of the above would appear on a Neopet card, and that number is added to the one on the Neopet card during battle. For example: Mau helps by adding one attack number.
3. Equipment & Petpets
   • Equipment and Petpets attach to a Neopet during battle to give stat boosts or special abilities during battle. Only one Equipment and Petpet can be attached to a Neopet at any given time. If you attach a new one, you need to discard the old one. If a Neopet leaves play, the Petpet is discarded too. The cards will instruct you to add numbers to your stats or other special abilities. For example, the Sturdy Blue Sword helps by adding one attack number, and the Mazzew Petpet card reads: Equipped Neopet can’t be tapped by card effects.
4. Food
   • Food cards are also one-time use cards with temporary affects to help your Neopet in battle. Hot dogs are pretty common. They will have different instructions that affect your stats, inventory, healing, and other special actions. For example, Blueberry Jelly’s instructions read: Play when one of your Neopets is about to lose a contest. That Neopet gets +4 to all stats this contest.
5. Faeries & Legends
   • Faeries and Legends bring in some of the NPCs from the online world. Faerie and Legend cards will have different instructions to assist during battle that will increase stats, heal Neopets, or ask you to draw new cards from your deck or inventory. Faeries will remain in play until the end of the round, but, like Equipment, you can only have one in play at a time. After you play a Legend, resolve all the effects then discard. For example, Psellia (Faerie) instructions read: Once per turn, whenever you would add 1 or more cards to your inventory, you may play 1 of those cards. Jeran, The Defender of Meridell (Legend) instructions read: When this Hero is in play, all your Neopets get +2 to Strength
6. Paint Brushes
   • Paint brushes change how a Neopet looks and provide benefits to stats, change contest outcomes, or interact with specific species or colors in creative ways. For example, the Rainbow Paint brush added +1 to all stats.
7. Potions
   • Potions can be played to receive one-time-use effects including healing, stat boosts, and preventing discard, removing a negative Equipment, or blocking an opponent’s move. For example, healing potions are played when a Neopet would be discarded, and the Neopet stays in play instead.

Gameplay

The object of the game is to become the Champion of the Battledome. To do so, players set their Neopets up to battle it out, winning over one another using a combination of attack, defense, and agility to reduce your opponent’s hit points to zero. A game is made up of three rounds, and the first player to win two rounds wins.

Set Up

First things first, you’ll need a 50-card deck made up of a combination of the cards. They can contain no more than 1 copy of any Faerie or Pepet; at least three and up to five Neopets; no more than two copies of any Equipment, Food, Legends, Paint Brushes, and Potions; and a Rainbow Pool with up to 10 unique Rainbow Neopets.

Decide who’s going first, place your Neopets, Rainbow Pool Neopets, and deck in the designated areas on the playmat, then draw a hand of 5 cards into your inventory. You can choose to shuffle all the cards from your inventory back into your deck and then redraw. Once you have your inventory, select your Neopet, and place it face down in the Battledome (Neopet Area). To begin, both players simultaneously reveal their starting Neopet.

Turns

There are four different turn phases: Draw, Train, Prep, and Battle.

In the Draw phase, you’ll draw one card from the top of your deck into your inventory.

In the train phase, attach one codestone from your inventory to your Neopet. Note that your Neopet’s attack, defense, and agility numbers can never exceed 10. Attaching a codestone will add one level to your Neopet’s level, moving you from Level 0 to Level 1.

In the prep phase, play one card from your inventory that matches your Neopet’s level. This can be Equipment, Faeries, Potions, Legends, Food, Paint Brushes. After Paint Brushes are played, swap out your Neopet card for the corresponding Rainbow Card version of the Neopet.

In the battle phase, the if it’s your turn, you’re the attacker and the other player is the defender. Both the defender and the attacker role a set of dice. To determine how many dice you get to roll, add up your attack stats and defense stats. For example, if your Neopet has an attack stat of three, you get three dice. If your opponent’s Neopet has a defense state of 4, they get 4 dice.

After determining how many dice you get, roll them. A 1, 2, or 3 means your hit misses, and a 4 or 5 mans it succeeds. If you roll a star, the hit is a critical success, meaning it cannot be blocked by the defending Neopet, regardless of what they roll. The defender determines their defense stat in the same way: a 1, 2, or 3 is a miss, a 4, 5, or star, the block is successful.

We also need to address agility. The final stat is how fast your Neopet is and allows them to reroll dice. The player with the higher agility number gets to reroll, and the number of dice rolled is determined by the difference between the two players’ numbers.

Now that both players are done rolling, compare the dice. If there are more successful hits than there are successful blocks, the attacking Neopet wins. The defending Neopet takes damage equal to the difference. Keep track of this number! Your Neopet will be defeated once the hit point value on the Neopet reaches zero. The battles continue until one Neopet reaches zero, and then that round is over. Two round wins means you’re the champion!

History

Neopets is a free-to-play virtual pet browser game taking place in a world called Neopia. Users take care of their Neopets, feeding and clothing them, and can customize them with paintbrushes, morphing potions, and accessories. Neopets was first thought up in 1997 by Adam Powell, who was a student at the University of Nottingham at the time. He shared his idea with Donna Williams, his girlfriend (now wife). Adam did most of the programming and Donna did most of the art, and with the help of two other friends, they launched the site in November of 1999.

By Christmas of that year, the Neopets site averaged over 600,000 page views every day.  Donna and Adam took on investors to cover the cost of running the site, including Doug Dohring, who went on to become the founder of Age of Learning and a member of the UNESCO Global Education Coalition. Doug was introduced to the creators and bought a majority share of Neopets in January 2000.

Interesting fact: Doug used Scientology’s Org Board to manage the company, and Donna and Adam were unaware of the connection to Scientology until the company hired a woman to introduce Scientology to Neopets. They then immediately ensured no such content ever made it into anything site related.

The website first made money from paying customers in 2004. Neopets became a hit, with the average user spending 117 minutes per week playing the game in 2001. By 2005, the page logged over 4 billion web page views per month.

Viacom (which also owns Nickelodeon) purchased Neopets in 2005 for $160 million. Powell and Williams left shortly after due to creative differences. In 2006, Neopets Moblle was released, a T-Mobile exclusive premium service. It was discontinued three years later.

A redesign of the website came in 2007. It included changes to the user interface and the ability to customize Neopets. A partnership with Nexon Corporation allowed players to use real money to purchase Neocash to buy certain exclusive items. In 2011, Neopets announced the website had logged 1 trillion views since inception.

In 2015, JumpStart Games acquired Neopets from Viacom. Immediately, the site was plagued with glitches, lags, and even the chat filter stopped working, resulting in inappropriate messages appearing in forums. In 2017, NetDragon acquired JumpStart Games, and things went well for many years, until June 2023, when JumpStart announced it would be closing that month.

The next month, Neopets was purchased by Dominic Law, and he founded World of Neopia Inc., taking the position of CEO. He received $4 million in investment funding, and within a year the site achieved its highest revenue stream since 2017—tripling its monthly active userbase.

Now, Neopets has partnered with Upper Deck, the leading sports and entertainment trading card and collectibles company to bring you Neopets Battledome: Trading Card Game.

Variations

Neopets Battledome: Trading Card Game is a variation—of the online version!

Reception & Awards

In 2003 and 2004, Neopets was recognized as an Honoree in the Webby Awards’ Games category. The Editor’s Choice Awards saw Neopets reviewed by the Children’s Technology Review. Also during this time, both Time Magazine and Forbes recognized the game.

Neopets Battledome: Trading Card Game itself only launched a month ago, so no official statistics yet, but my little cousins, who tested out the game with me, are loving it!