There are two Magic: The Gathering mini starter decks sitting just a foot away from me. My wife requested them for free as part of some Wizards of the Coast mass promotion. I don’t think she quite fully realizes just how big a can of worms she threatens to open by doing such a heinous act. CCG’s were a high-school and college obsession. I still have a large number of voluminous boxes full of various cards sitting in the office closet.
That sinister craving began creeping over me. I resigned to digging through my endless cache once again, if only to remind myself of what could happen if I did not control my hunger. This did not, of course, go without triggering waves of happy, card-collecting nostalgia.
I remembered Brian, one of my best friends from middle school, trying to explain how to play this new craze that was sweeping the campus lunch tables. He babbled on in some accursed tongue about “mana” and “tapping”. That term “tapping” was especially troublesome. It took several iterations of his explanation for me to realize that he wasn’t talking about repeatedly touching the surface of a card.
It’s been a long time since Magic’s 3rd edition. I believe the game is in its 10th edition now – making fifteen years since I rid myself of that addiction. CCG’s/TCG’s have, in that time, become increasingly ubiquitous – especially among the younger generation. And it comes as no surprise that many of those card games were heavily influenced by Magic. Throughout the course of my personal excursion into the genre, I often stumbled upon a very commonly used convention – the turning of a card 90 degrees sideways. Magic called it “tapping” to denote that a card was “used up” and could not be used again until the next turn, when all of the player’s cards were “untapped”.
The mechanic is a very sensible one, and I can’t fault other games for borrowing it. But while a small subset of games have since used different indicators to denote the “usage” of a card – for instance, turning it face-down, setting it aside, putting counters on it, or just remembering that it had been used that turn – a great number of games continue to use that tried and true card-turning convention.
Out of sheer boredom, I’ve compiled a list of terms used by other CCG’s to fulfill the same purpose as the term “tapping” does in Magic. I’ve left out the games that use the turning of a card to signify wounding (such as in .hack and Doomtrooper, among others) and the games that involve turning the card 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees (such as Shadowfist and Guardians).
- Boot – Doomtown
- Bow – Legend of the Burning Sands, Legend of the Five Rings
- Commit – Universal Fighting System, WarCry
- Deplete – The Spoils (implied)
- Drain – Tempest
- Engage – Dune
- Exhaust – Call of Cthulhu, World of Warcraft, VS System
- Kneel – A Game of Thrones
- Lock – Warhammer 40k
- Roll – Gundam WAR
- Rotate – Babylon 5, Mythos
- Set – Ophidian
- Spend – Warlord
- Tack – 7th Sea
- Tap – Battletech, Magic: The Gathering, Middle Earth, Star Wars: Trading Card Game
- Turn – Shadowrun
- Use – Cyberpunk
Feel free to let me know of any other neat alternative “tap” terms I might have missed. I have, after all, been mostly out of the CCG loop as of late.
As a bonus, here’s a quote out of the Dune rulebook for the best CCG rule ever:
To indicate the completion of your House Interval, you may turn the palms of both hands toward the ceiling, say “I honor you with my water,” and make a spitting gesture toward the table (no vulgarity or actual spitting, please!). If you do so, each of your rivals must respond “Your gift is a blessing of the river.” Failure to respond incurs a loss of 1 favor.
I never could get that spitting gesture right…
