How the game plays

Before you read

The rules came on paper. The starter, ¥1,000 before tax, held 40 cards and a rulebook, and the back of the Ver.2 booster box states that the stadium sheet the game is played on, with the rules printed on it, came only with the starter; a Ver.2 pack prints that a pack alone cannot be played with. No scan of either has reached us, and no rules page appears in any capture of Broccoli’s site we have read. Rules questions were not even taken by telephone; the support page asked players to write, fax or email. What survives is the site’s front page describing the game (captured 27 December 2001), a seven-question FAQ (captured 9 January 2002), the box backs and the printed cards. This page is built from those alone, and the last section lists what is still missing.

Three kinds of card

The front page names three kinds of card, Beyblade, special move (必殺技) and stadium, and promises that combining them produces moves of extreme destructive power. The box backs are plainer: stadium cards form the battlefield and carry attributes of their own, how well they suit your Beyblade cards decides the outcome, and special-move cards recreate the exchanges of moves seen in the anime.

The printed cards show what each kind carries. A Beyblade card has a type (attack, defence, stamina or balance), one of six colours, a spin direction, attack and defence values in the thousands, a stamina number (1 to 6 on the cards we have read), a bit, and its three toy parts: attack ring, weight disk and blade base. Special-move and stadium cards carry a colour and a run of one to four attribute symbols. Ver.3 adds four cards that count as both a Beyblade and a special move, the Majestics’ bit-beasts. Every card is listed on the game page; these figures appear on the cards whose printed text the collector database carries, while the 104 cards known only from Broccoli’s lists show a number, name and kind and no statistics yet.

The four attributes

Water, fire, wind and earth. The front page stresses that all three kinds of card carry one, stadiums included, and tells players to understand the attributes and make them their allies. That is all the site says; how one attribute fares against another is not on any page we have read.

Go Shoot

Several cards say that something happens “at shoot time”. The FAQ fixes the moment: it is when the players call “Go Shoot” and turn their cards face up. Our reading is that each player commits a Beyblade card face down and all are turned over at once, though the FAQ does not describe the sequence. Some later Beyblades choose at that instant: Dranzer Flame (card 089) picks attack, balance or stamina as it is revealed, and Seaborg 2 (card 155) picks attack, balance or defence.

The elemental judgement

The FAQ names an “elemental judgement” at which the card each player has played carries a count of elementals; a card effect worded as raising that count by one adds one to your own card at that judgement. Nothing on the site says what the count is compared against or who wins. The one-to-four attribute symbols on move and stadium cards are the likeliest thing being counted, but that is our inference, not a rule we have read. Stadium card 076 replaces the judgement with rock-paper-scissors and lets the winner’s card take effect, so the judgement normally produces a winner.

Stamina cards as currency

Stamina cards pay for effects. The FAQ’s longest answer separates two printed wordings: “by discarding N stamina cards” fires an effect once, while “for each N stamina cards discarded” repeats, and it warns players not to confuse the two. The cards fill in the rest. A stamina card is placed, or “set”, beneath a Beyblade; a number of moves grow stronger with the number set; card 050 makes an opponent discard one and adds that once a Beyblade’s stamina hits zero it is discarded; and moves that add stamina “regardless of maximum stamina” show that a ceiling exists.

Attack, defence and first strike

Only the card texts speak to how a clash is scored, so treat this as what the cards presuppose rather than a rule we have read. Damage compares attack against defence: card 059 adds the surplus of your defence over the opponent’s attack to your own attack, and card 133 skips the comparison and decides by stamina alone, a “stamina contest” that card 067 wins outright. “First strike” is a keyword; several moves grant it, as does stadium 078, which hands it to every stamina-type Beyblade, while stadium 079 caps each player at a single special move. From Ver.3 onward colour matters too, with texts keyed to “a blue-colour card” or to a white battle stadium.

The bit-chip families

The FAQ describes itself as a list of players’ questions and hard words, and four of its seven entries define families of bit-chips, which suggests that card effects refer to them. Gal-type bits belong to the Chinese team’s four bit-beasts, Galeon, Galzzly, Galman and Galux (the White Tigers in the dub). Try-type bits belong to the American team, whose bit-beasts are Trygle, Trypio, Tryhorn and Trygator (the All Starz). Flag-type bits are those named “something Flag”, which carry a national flag where a bit-beast would be. Joint Project bits come from Beyblades that the Joint Project developed; in place of a bit-beast they show a JOINTPROJECT mark.

More than two players

The front page says a battle need not be one against one: as with the toy, several players can fight at once, and it invites you to gather friends and settle who is strongest. One Ver.2 move, card 137, obliges every player to attack one chosen Beyblade whatever its spin direction, and its text bars it from two-player games. Together those facts imply that in a bigger game spin direction normally decides who attacks whom; the rule itself is not on any page we have read.

What we have not sourced yet

Every item below depends on the rulebook or the stadium sheet, neither of which we have read; the December 2002 news page says the stadium sheet with the printed rules also ships in the Victory and Flash character decks, so any of four products would settle them.

• Deck size and building limits. Forty cards in the starter is a product count, not a stated deck size.
• Turn order. The sequence around Go Shoot, the number of Beyblades a player fields, and how stamina cards are set.
• The win condition. No page says how a battle or a game is won.
• The elemental judgement in ordinary play. Which count beats which, and how a tie resolves outside stadium 076.
• The four types. How attack, defence, stamina and balance interact, beyond the bonuses printed on individual cards.
• The colour system. Six colours sort the cards and later texts key off them, but the rule behind them is unread.
• The starter’s contents, and the text of the rulebook and the stadium sheet.
• Unexplained keywords. The “special-move bit” instructions on Ver.1 cards 019 to 026, the “Bey Revenge” state named in the character decks, and the MG category of Ver.4.
• Event formats. The news page names a “Point Battle” and a “Teaching Corner” at the 2001 final and explains neither.

A starter rulebook or stadium sheet would close most of these at once. The packs and boxes we have photographed are all boosters and boxes of boosters, which is why the gap remains.