This will be short and sweet. I wanted to love MLP:CCG, and the overall concept of the game - achieving goals and helping people (rather than slaughtering your opponent) - appealed to me. I'm a huge Euro board game player, so I'm very comfortable around victory points. The problem was the fit. Simply put, everything works, but doesn't work well together.

Once I discerned how to actually play the game, more by reading guides online than the rules, I found the problem. The clunkiness of the mechanics and the poor book drains the hopeful joy of the source material. The basic concept was simple - have enough power with friends and buffs, confront a problem, solve it, get points. But you also get points for solving it first......what? Solved is solved, right? Nope....because of reasons.

Honestly, and this can be seen as a cop-out, the problems of the game are hard to describe. It's very similar to trying to explain why a video game controls poorly. Relating the problem is sterile, as control is an experiential concept. Other CCGs can be explained easily why they fail - bad concept, broken mechanics, boring gameplay. MLP:CCG doesn't really suffer from these. Taken individually, the basics seem to work, and are very similar to modern tabletop games. It's hard to explain why it doesn't work, it just simply....doesn't. The concept fits (somewhat) with the show. The mechanics, once learned, are functional-ish. The gameplay is somewhat slow, but syncs with the bright, bubbly feel of the universe.....kind of.

The core problem is, MLP is a great show and setting - it just doesn't fit into a CCG well. A devoted fan, capable of tweaking the setting just a bit (put your torches and pitchforks away - sometimes it's ok to sacrifice a bit of authenticity for gameplay) could make a phenomenal co-operative board game based in Equestria. I would buy it in a heartbeat. Direct competition, in the MLP universe, just feels off, and leads to problems that shouldn't be present in an MLP game.