How to play · Collision · beybladewiki.com

Before you read

Every Collision starter deck came with a 28-page booklet, narrated by Kenny in his Chief persona, and everything on this page comes from it. We have rewritten it in our own words so you can learn the game in one sitting. If you would rather read the printed version, the scan is on this site, viewable in the browser or as a download.

One booklet holds two ways to play. The basic game uses every rule below but ignores the text printed on the cards, which is why a player who cannot yet read can still join in. The advanced game is the same game with that text switched on. Learn the basic game first; the advanced rules only describe what changes.

A trading card game, for anyone new to the hobby, is one where each player brings a deck assembled from their own collection, so no two decks and no two games are alike.

The four card types

Every card is one of four types, and the type is marked on the card, not implied by its colour. Actions, Characters and Events carry a small round badge beside the title box; Blades have no badge and show a spin-strength number and a colour bar instead.

Blade. The Beyblade itself. Your Blade stands face up on your side of the table from the first moment and is never shuffled into the deck. Its spin strength sets the size of your spin pile, its colour bar spells out the order of battle, and in the advanced game its text is active for the whole game. Blades are the one type with no colour. The two starter Blades, Dragoon (Tyson’s) and Dranzer (Kai’s), each have a spin strength of 6.
Action. The only type that can open a battle, and battles are how you strip cards from an opponent’s spin pile. In the basic game an Action is nothing more than a coloured card with a battle edge; in the advanced game its text adds a bonus, timed by a play symbol or a win symbol (explained below). Actions are the bulk of the set: eighty of the 130 numbered cards, by the checklist.
Character. Tyson, Kai, Max, Ray, Kenny and the rest of the cast, along with the adults and bystanders around them. In the advanced game a Character that passes its test stays on the table and helps you turn after turn until something removes it. In the basic game it is a coloured card like any other.
Event. A moment from the show, usually away from the dish. In the advanced game an Event that passes its test does one thing, once, and leaves. In the basic game it too is just a coloured card.

The four colours and the stop sequence

Every card except a Blade has a coloured frame: red, yellow, green or blue. That frame is the card’s colour, and it has nothing to do with type: all three coloured types exist in all four colours. What matters is the order. Read the colour bar on any Blade and it runs red, yellow, green, blue, and after blue it loops back to red.

That loop is the engine of every battle. A card can only be stopped by a card of the next colour along: red is stopped by yellow, yellow by green, green by blue, blue by red. Not a matching colour, the following one. Hold that sequence in your head and you can play the basic game tonight.

The battle edge

A strip of notches runs along the top of every card, Blades included. That strip is the battle edge, and some of its notches hold a piece. When one card beats another, you lay the winner’s edge against the loser’s and look for notches where both cards hold a piece that counts. Each such pairing is one hit, and each hit costs the defender one card off the spin pile.

Three kinds of piece exist:

A live piece is the standard one. It always counts.
A strike piece (printed red) counts only for its owner, and only while it is its owner’s turn. On anyone else’s turn, treat that notch as bare.
An empty piece (a dark, hollow socket) is the reverse. It counts only when it is not its owner’s turn, which means only while its owner is defending. On the owner’s own turn it does not exist.

Hits are only ever counted after the attacker wins, so in practice: the attacker’s strike pieces score and the attacker’s empty pieces do not; the defender’s empty pieces can be hit and the defender’s strike pieces cannot. A strike piece is pure offense. An empty piece is a hole in your guard.

Spin strength and the spin pile

Your Blade’s spin strength is your life total. At setup you deal that many cards face down from your deck into a stack beneath the Blade, and that stack is the spin pile. Every hit you take as a defender peels one card off its top into your discard pile. Lose the last one and you are out of the game; when every opponent is out, you have won. Some cards in the advanced game let you gain spin, which moves the top card of your deck to the bottom of the pile, but the pile can never hold more cards than the Blade’s spin strength. Any gain past that limit is simply lost.

Setting up

Pull your one Blade out of the deck and stand it face up on your side of the table.
Shuffle the remaining cards and let an opponent cut them.
Deal cards from the top of the deck, sight unseen, face down into your spin pile until the count matches your Blade’s spin strength (six for either starter Blade). Rest the Blade on top of the pile.
Draw five cards.
Pick who goes first. After that the turn moves to the left around the table. The booklet’s suggested tiebreaker: each player cuts their own deck to a random card and shows it, the edge with the most live pieces goes first, and ties cut again.

Nothing here needs a mat, but Decipher drew one and gave it away: the printable play mat marks all six places a card can sit, one sheet per player.

A turn in the basic game

Play a card

Your turn begins when you lay one card from your hand on the table, face up. That card starts your battle pile, and it starts a battle. You are the attacker; the opponent you pick (any one of them, in a game of three or more) is the defender. Unless the defender stops the card, it will hit their Blade.

Stopping

The defender stops your card by playing, from hand, a card of the next colour along the bar. It goes face up as the first card of a battle pile of their own, directly across from yours. Stopping is a choice, never an obligation: a defender holding the right colour may still let the hit land in order to keep cards for later.

Back and forth

If you were stopped, the battle is not over. Now you need the colour that follows the defender’s card. Your answer goes on top of your own battle pile, covering what you played before, and the defender’s next answer covers theirs. Play alternates like this, each card one step further around the loop, until someone does not answer.

The end of a battle

The moment a player does not play a stopping card, because they cannot or because they choose not to, the battle ends and that player has lost it.

Counting hits

If the attacker won, take the card on top of the attacker’s battle pile and line its edge up against the card on top of the defender’s pile. Only those two cards matter; everything beneath them is buried. Count the notches where both cards have a piece that counts. For every hit, the defender discards a card off the top of the spin pile. Then both players sweep their battle piles into their discard piles.

If nothing stops you

If the defender never played at all, there is no defender’s pile to compare with. Lay the attacking card against the defender’s Blade instead, count hits against the Blade’s own battle edge, and then discard the attacking card.

If you lose

When the attacker is the one who runs out of answers, nothing happens to anyone. Spin is only ever lost while defending. Both battle piles go to the discard piles with no comparison at all.

Refill

With the battle over, every player, not only the one whose turn it is, draws back up to five cards, one at a time. The defender you just fought will usually be drawing on your turn. If you ever draw the last card of your deck, shuffle your discard pile and it becomes your new deck.

End of turn

Once every hand is back to five, the turn passes to the player on your left, who plays a card and starts a battle of their own.

Passing

You may pass instead of playing. Discard your whole hand, start no battle, and at the refill draw five fresh cards. Kenny’s tip in the margin: a hand that is all one colour is a fine reason to pass, because a single stop would end your attack anyway.

A worked battle

Say you are the attacker. You open with a red Action. Your opponent must answer with yellow, and does, laying a yellow Action across from your card. Now you need green. You have a green Character, and in the basic game that is simply a green card, so it goes on top of your red one. Your opponent needs blue, holds a blue card, and decides to keep it for later. No answer means the battle is over and you have won it.

Compare the two cards on top: your green Character and their yellow Action. Number the notches on the edge one to six from the left and suppose the two edges read like this:

Your card: live pieces at 1, 2 and 5, and a strike piece at 4.
Their card: live pieces at 2, 4 and 6, and an empty piece at 5.

It is your turn, so your strike piece is on and their empty piece is on. Notch 2 is live against live: a hit. Notch 4 is your strike piece against their live piece: a hit. Notch 5 is your live piece against their empty piece: a hit. Notches 1 and 6 have a piece on one card only, so nothing. Three hits, and the defender discards the top three cards of their spin pile. Had their card carried a strike piece at 2 instead of a live one, that notch would be ignored, since it is not their turn, and you would score two.

Both battle piles go to the discard piles. You hold three cards, they hold four; you both draw back to five, and the turn passes left.

Now flip the turn and keep the same two edges. If your opponent were the attacker and won with a card carrying the second edge above, while your beaten card carried the first, the count changes. Notch 2 is still live against live: a hit. Notch 4 is your strike piece, and it is not your turn, so it is bare. Notch 5 is their empty piece on their own turn, so it is bare too. One hit. The same pair of edges scores three on one side of the table and one on the other, which is the whole point of strike and empty pieces.

Building a deck

At least sixty cards. More is fine; fewer is not.
Exactly one Blade. It must be there, and there can be no second.
No more than four cards sharing a title. The title alone decides this, whatever else is printed on the card. Tyson, Eager Champion (#96) and the promo Tyson, Bladebreaker (#141) are both titled Tyson, so you may run both, but four across the pair, not four of each.
No colour rule at all. Kenny’s advice is to spread the four colours evenly, because the more colours you hold the likelier you are to have the stop you need.

The title is the large name line on a card; the subtitle is the smaller line beneath it, which Blades and Characters carry and Actions and Events do not. Our database writes the two as one name, “Tyson, Eager Champion” style, but for the four-copies rule and the one-in-play rule only the part before the comma counts.

Match play

A competitive match is best of three games, and the first player to take two wins it. Whoever lost the previous game goes first in the next one. Kenny frames it as the format the Bladebreakers face in their tournaments.

The advanced game

Same game, text on. Read the basic rules first; what follows is only what changes.

Game text and its timing

Much of the text on the cards is limited to one player’s turn, and the card says so with a bold header, YOUR TURN: or OPPONENT’S TURN:, ahead of the effect. Text with no header carries no such limit. Your Blade’s text is on from the first turn and stays on all game.

One card, three outcomes

On your turn you still play exactly one card, but what happens next depends on its type. A Character is tested. An Event is tested. An Action starts a battle.

The test

To test a Character or an Event, show it to the table. The opponent you choose turns over the top card of their deck, called the test card, and you lay the two battle edges together. At least one matched notch and your card passes; none and it fails. Either way the test card is discarded, and because you have now played your one card for the turn, you go straight to the refill. No battle takes place.

A Character that passes goes face up onto the table before you, and its text works turn after turn until something removes it. A removed Character lands in its owner’s discard pile with its text switched off. A Character that fails is discarded with nothing gained. You cannot test a Character while you already have one with the same title out; an opponent’s copy does not block yours, so each of you may have your own Kai on the table at once.
An Event that passes fires once, right away, and then goes to the discard pile. Events never stay out and are never reused. An Event that fails is discarded with no effect.

Actions and battles

Only an Action starts a battle, and a battle runs exactly as in the basic game. Once one is under way, though, any card of the right colour can be used to stop, whether Action, Character or Event, by either side. Even a Character already in front of you can be picked up and thrown in as a stopper. A Character or Event used this way is nothing but a coloured card with an edge; its text does not fire. To use the text, play the card on your own turn, tested, instead of starting a battle.

Play symbol, win symbol

The text on every Action starts with one of two symbols.

The play symbol (a fanned hand of cards) means: carry out the text the moment the card hits the table, mid-battle. It may improve your position, or cost the opponent spin before the battle is settled.
The win symbol (a trophy) means: the text waits. It fires only if that Action is still on top of your pile when you win the battle. Count and pay the hits first, then carry out the text.

Only the top card counts. A win-symbol Action that you later cover with another card in the same battle gives nothing, however the battle ends.

Refill in the advanced game

Refill still means five cards, but some text draws extra cards, so now it cuts both ways. Fewer than five: draw up. More than five: choose cards and discard down. Exactly five: nothing. Everyone refills, whoever’s turn it is.

Reading a card, and the collector line

Besides the battle edge along the top, a card carries its title (with a subtitle on Blades and Characters), the type badge on the three coloured types, the game text, a line of italic lore that has no effect on play, and the collector line. Blades add the spin-strength number and the colour bar.

The bottom-right corner carries three marks in a row: a rarity symbol, the set icon, and the card’s number within the set. Collision’s icon is a small Tyson head; each later set was meant to get its own. So rarity is printed on the card, as a symbol rather than a letter. The booklet names six rarity classes, in this order: starter, common, uncommon, rare, xtra rare and special promo. On the cards those marks read as a slim lens (starter), a single spike (common), a four-point star (uncommon), a five-point star (rare), an eight-point burst (xtra rare) and a filled circle (promo). Which of these are foil is not something the booklet discusses; the collecting guide covers that from the checklist and from the site’s cards.

The booklet counts 130 different cards in the Collision set, with several special promo cards to be had separately, league and tournament play being the examples it gives. It sends readers to a web address, dgma.com, that it never explains, and we will not guess at it. Our checklist adds fourteen promos, #131 to #144; the only one the booklet names is Tyson, Bladebreaker. The card database has every card’s type, colour, rarity, source and graded population.

Glossary

Attacker — in a battle, the player whose turn it is.
Battle pile — the stack each battler builds from the cards they play during one battle.
Defender — in a battle, the player whose turn it is not.
Discard — send a card from hand to its owner’s discard pile. Text can name another place to discard from, such as a deck’s top card, but hand is the default.
Draw — move your deck’s top card into your hand.
Gain spin — move the top card of your deck under your spin pile, never beyond the Blade’s spin strength.
Hit — a notch where both compared edges hold a counting piece. A beaten defender loses one spin per hit.
Lore — the italic quotation or caption on a card. No effect on play.
Lose spin — move the top card of your spin pile to your discard pile. Losing the last one ends your game.
Random card — when text asks for one, shuffle the cards in question, hide their faces from the opponent, and let that opponent pick.
Refill — at the end of a turn, draw (or, in the advanced game, discard) until you hold five.
Remove — a Character in play leaves the table for its owner’s discard pile.
Spin — one card in a spin pile.
Spin pile — the face-down cards under a Blade. An empty pile means you are out.
Stop — answer an opponent’s card in a battle with a card of the next colour. A player who does not stop loses the battle.
Test — line up the edge of the Character or Event you are playing against a card your opponent reveals from the top of their deck.
Test card — the card an opponent turns over from the top of their deck for a test.