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Parallel Worlds - Quantum Adjuster Set
01/06/2008 . Source: Phil Jones 
pub: The 9th Dimension. A Starter Pack box of 25 RPG playing cards. Price: £ 5.65 (UK). check out website: www.the9thdimension.com
I remember the joys of playing on the old Commodore Vic20, ZX Spectrum, tabletop-based RPGs, war-games and playing Top Trumps or as you can now get Crap Trumps. Card trading games were also popular, people looking for that elusive rare card. So bringing it back up to the present, traditional RPGs and war-games are still popular, Games Workshop is still being frequented and trading games are still being bought or at least that's what 9th Dimension are hoping with their new game 'Parallel Worlds'.
OK, so you get a little black box with a red orb on the front and a deck of 25 cards, most with artwork on by a range of artists including Alejandro Diaz, Marta Dahlig, Volkan Korkmaz and Paul Gerrard. If you inhabit websites such as divantART you will probably be familiar with some of these artists already. The deck consists of four suits, Air, Earth, Fire and Water. Each containing six cards along with the Portal Stone card of which is the most powerful in the whole deck.
The back story is a piece of emmental - a little bit on the cheesy side. Toward the end of 1st Ellipsar Cycle, the House of Maylar get a hold of the portal stone while investigating, wait for it 'Insertiar Hole Technology' (stop sniggering at the back) utilising the Quantum Dimensional curvature theory. The funky portal stone allows them the ability to travel not only dimensionally but also through time. Thus, they nipped back in time corrected all their cock-ups and Bob's your uncle, there technological standing shot forward. What of course does any species do when they get the technological upper hand? That's right, kick butt right across the universe. So by the time they owned or had overthrown most of the known universe that had been set up by the species that were left, an attempt to thwart the Maylar Conquest. Forming the Astvaarian Alliance, they sent out temporal adjusters who had been injected with a cocktail of the four elementals and particles from the portal stone. This changed them into 4th dimensional creatures.
By the second Ellipsar, it was not looking good if you weren't Maylarian. They tried a bit more inserting with the Bipolar Insertiar Experiment, bring two insertiar holes together to try to get to the 9th dimension, rumoured to be the location of the creator. If they could get there they could gain ultimate control of the universe. Hey ho, it all went a bit to their heads and things went a bit Pete Tong. An event horizon formed causing a super-massive Black Hole which sucked in their universe and the portal stone.
Onto the third Ellipsar and the Strotian's, while destroying a planet (as you do), released the portal stone and its all starting again. The formation of temporal adjustors is happening again and the quest to save the universe, dimensions and time have started again.
So this is basically a game for two to four players. It's a trump-based game similar to a mixture of the card games Hearts and Spades. Scoring, you start off with 11 points and the first one to zero wins. The general gist of it is that you act as the temporal adjusters. If four are playing you pair up. Everyone gets five cards dealt in a particular order. This is a bit of a pain and you do end up dealing out the cards as you would in a normal card game. The trump suit is then selected by turning over a card and going round the players and they decide whether to accept or reject the suit on the card as the trump suit. Depending on the outcome a different series of rules are applied.
Once play starts everyone puts down a card starting with the dealer or the last winner. The person putting down the highest card wins the temporal (hand). The idea is to win as many temporals and depending whether your attacking (chosen the trump suit) or defending depends on how many points are deducted once all the cards are played. With four players, you can have the option of going solo and if you win all five temporals you have a higher score deducted. There are slight variations with three and two players usually involving having extra cards to choose your five cards from.
There is also the option of trading and purchasing further cards. Expansion sets are due out in the summer. This does little to affect game-play except esthetically as you just swap the new card(s) for there equivalent in the pack. The artwork is impressive and nicely printed on the cards. The back-story is a bit lame but in someway the artwork makes up for this. The game-play is OK, especially with four players, and there is elements of strategy but also like most card games a huge amount of luck. The choice of the trump suit can make all the difference. I think it would have been more interesting if the addition of new cards affected game-play. As it stands its just the collector value and whether there will be any limited or special edition cards offered that would make it more interesting. Not bad but could have been a bit better in game-play and collectable stakes.
Phil Jones
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