(I did this news post last week, and lost the entire post before it went up, so it has taken this long to get over the frustration of having to start over from scratch - it's almost like I'm not meant to like this game)


The second series of booster packs (Rise of the Combiners) has now been out for a month, and the creators are still detailing specific elements of the new cards, with special focus on their new green cards (the colour code added to the second series, that relate to special functions or actions, like combiner enigmas), with the four colour codes being key to cards like the "Espionage" card... a particularly fascinating card from the second series that gives you the power to see cards in your opponent's "secret" hand of cards.
If you have it in your hand, when you have the opportunity to play an Action card, you can play the Espionage card, and name a colour type, to which you can select a card from your opponent's hand to put on their scrap pile (it sounds like you can only see the cards that are of the colour you have chosen, and risk coming up empty... but you'd have to trust your opponent to be honest if they deny having any of the colour you have chosen). It also means that cards with no colour icon on them, are immune to this card, as you would only be able to call out green, blue, orange and white.

As noted at the facebook link, this card is particularly useful if you see that your opponent is close to combining their team (they have to convert all of their team to bot mode first), you can force them to scrap their Enigma card, and they then have to wait until they get another one in their hand... which could be too late if they were allowing a couple of their bots to be KOed before combining.

It also means that cards with two colours (like orange and blue, for people who might pad out their battle deck with them to improve their chances in battle, both offensively and defensively), are more likely to be scrapped, if you select either of those colours when playing Espionage.



The more I try to work out the specifics of this the game, the more confused I get... or unsure if I'm doing it right. Like, if one of your team is KOed, can it still be transformed, or is it stuck in the mode he died in... meaning, you can't then combine your team if any of them are KOed in alt-mode. And is there an actual meaning for the white and green cards... as it isn't specific/unique enough, other than a one-off purpose for the white cards (drawing two more cards in battle, but that only happens once), and basically just to have a fourth colour is the reason for the green cards. Plus, the pdf rules suggest that your battle deck can be any amount of cards above 40, as long as you don't have more than 3 of any card.... but the official videos were saying you had to have a deck of just 40 cards.
Plus, the limit of 25 stars still annoys the crap out of me, especially when it doesn't relate to any element of the character (it's power or rarity), so you end up with 4-5 star combiner bots, and 12-13 star individual bots. The first series bots were mostly 6-10 stars, so that you could have 4 or 3 in your team... but the second series is full of 10-13 star bots, forcing you to end up with a team of two, which reviewers have said is not enough for a decent battle (particularly when reviewing the starter pack, as they would find that having just two bots was rather unchallanging and boring).
Is there anywhere that actually archives and clearly lists the specifics and unique rules for this game, like an FAQ? (something similar to this one, done up by a fan)

To be honest, the official rules videos that Hasbro/Wizards have posted on their site (with Optimus, Megatron and Windblade as narrators), are completely useless. I watched them and was just as lost as I was before I watched them.
In the end, this 42 minute video of the game being played out (from here) with commentary and explanations, was way better, and made sense of a lot of things, and I recommend others who are yet to get into this game, have a watch of that video as well.
(I tried to play the game with someone last weekend, but trying to explain it to them, from the point of view of someone who hasn't yet mastered it, meant we didn't get far before they lost interest and we just quit playing it.)