When Transformers hit the scene in August of 2018, I was pretty pscyhed. I was at GenCon for my software company, running a booth and hosting demos, and I was ITCHING to get out of the hall and into a demo event, and snag my own starter and packs. I’ve been in the industry for almost twenty years now, and spent a good deal of time before that as a player. I’ve seen a TON of games come and go (and written a few myself) and everyone seemed to operate on a gimmick. The granddaddy, Magic the Gathering, was your most straightforward game, and YuGiOh and Pokemon largely built on those. Future games would add plastic swords, slotted stat trackers, webcams, transparent cards…a TON of ancillary, unneeded stuff, and all it did was clutter the table. If I see a gimmick, it usually turns me off pretty solidly. But Transformers was doing something…fun.