Chron X is set 100 years into the future and things are, of course, bleak. You operate your group, company, or cult of futuristic and aggressive naughty people. Your objective: eliminate your opponent by destroying their headquarters. Well, now a little bit about the game itself.

Are you familiar with trading card games like Magic? Well Chron X is a trading card game over the Internet. You don’t need to buy cards or worry about keeping your cards in good condition to preserve their value. Everything is maintained for you online; there is a player card database that allows you to create and tune decks into winning combinations. Even trading with other players is possible online.

I was amazed and astounded by the amount of people that play this game. It must have some addictive qualities if people want to play a trading card game that has no physical cards. In my experience people who play trading card games are also involved in the game for the collectible aspect of the game. Even though there is card trading in Chron X, you can’t sell a card to a comic book store for a quick buck. So I wanted to dig further and find out why so many people are having their souls sucked by Sony.

Which brings me to playing the game. The first step is to build a deck, which is kind of awkward since you can only view one card at a time. The descriptions on the cards are vague at best and are lacking in background information. So, after 45 minutes of guessing which cards might work, I decided to play against the trainer.

The trainer is an artificial intelligence player that is there for you to test decks out on. When starting out against the trainer, you first choose a city to be the location of your headquarters. You can play in various different sizes of game that are related to geography in some way. You can select any continent or the whole world.

Actual game play was a little difficult to follow at first, and with such a scattered starter deck, a discernable pattern had a slim chance of emergence. Confused? You bet! After being miserably beaten, I went on a search for the rules of the game, and it wasn’t long before I thought to myself: “Self, should the rules of a game be this difficult to find?”

If you like trading card games, then perhaps this will be to your liking. It is available from The Station as a free trial download, so you can try it before you start investing tons of money into those booster packs.