So in previous Final Fantasy Friday I talked about the minigame Blitzball that was in Final Fantasy 10, This time I will be talking about another minigame that called Triple Triad that appeared in Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 14.

Triple Triad is a card game that first appeared in Final Fantasy 8 and it was made by battle system designer Hiroyuki Ito. Triple Triad is a 2 player card game with one player playing as blue and one person playing as red and is played on a 3 by 3 grid. The main aim of the game is to capture the opponent's cards by turning them into the player's own color of red or blue.

Rules

Triple Triad is played on a 3 by 3 grid of blank spaces where cards will be placed as the game progresses. Each card has four numbers placed in top left corner, each number corresponds to one of the four sides of the card with these numbers ranging from one to ten.

Each player starts with 5 cards and takes turns placing a card onto an empty space on the grid, The winner is decided by whoever has the most cards on the board in their colour once the cards have been placed, you can capture card by placing a card adjacent to an opponent's card whereupon the 'ranks' of the sides where the two cards touch will be compared. If the rank of the opponent's card is higher than the player's card, the player's card will be captured and turned into the opponent's colour. If the player's rank is higher, the opponent's card will be captured and changed into the player's colour instead. Capturing can only occur during that player's turn, and no other opponent can capture a card during said turn.

If at the end the players are tied the outcome will be determined depending on what rules are being used which could be sudden death where the first person to capture a card in a new game wins overall.

Final Fantasy 8 Collecting cards

In FF8 the cards had monsters, Guardian forces and playable characters on the cards, The GF and playable characters cards are the rarest with only having one of each of them in a world and having quests to get some of them and the regular enemies drop their cards and can be turned into cards in battle with the card command.

Final Fantasy 14

A version of Triple Triad was also introduced into Final Fantasy 14 playable at the Golden Saucer and several other locations. The main difference from the Final Fantasy 8 version is that you don't lose a card when you lose a match and card drops from NPCs are random.

Physical Cards

Bandai produced a full set of collectible Triple Triad cards following the release of Final Fantasy 8 but these were only ever sold in Japan and have since become a collectors item due to the rarity of them.

That pretty much covers Triple Triad, Final Fantasy has plenty more minigames that I will cover in future FF Fridays.