Spent a bit of time playing Triple Triad in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, and had a lot of fun.

Triple Triad, for the uninitiated, was a card game introduced in Final Fantasy VIII. It’s a very simple game, although optional advanced rules can make it surprisingly brain-melting, particularly when they’re used in combination. And it’s a flexible enough game that, by playing around with these rules, a player with a “better” deck of cards isn’t necessarily always going to beat someone with “bad” cards.

For those who have never encountered the game, here’s how it works: There’s a 3×3 grid onto which you and your opponent take it in turns playing cards from a hand of five. (This means there will be one card left over at the end.) Cards have four numbers on them, corresponding to the four edges of the card. When you lay a card down and it “touches” the edge of another card (for example, you played a card in the middle-left space while there was already a card in the central space, meaning the right side of your card is touching the left side of the card already there) you compare the numbers. Under the normal rules, if the number you laid down is bigger than the number that was already there, you flip the card and claim it as your own. (For example, using the situation above, if the card in the middle had a “4” on its left edge, and the card you laid had a “5” or higher on its right edge, you’d claim the middle card.) Whoever has the most cards under their control when the board is filled wins. Simple.

The advanced rules fall into several different categories. Variations on “Open” mean that you and your opponent reveal either three or all of your cards from the outset, allowing for a degree of forward planning. “Random” disallows you from using the five-card decks you’ve built yourself, instead pulling five random cards from your complete collection. “Order” forces you to play the cards from your deck in the order you put them in there. “Chaos” forces you to play the cards from your deck in a random order. “Reverse” flips the normal rules on their head, meaning smaller numbers now beat larger numbers — this rule makes a “bad” deck suddenly very good. “Ascension” causes cards of the same type to inflate in value the more of them that are placed on the board. “Same” allows you to claim cards if you put down a card and the numbers on two of its sides match two cards already on the table. “Plus” is a similar rule, only instead of matching numbers, the two sides must add up to the same value. Both “Same” and “Plus” can set off combos, too, allowing you to potentially take the whole board in one go with a lucky or well-planned move.

As you can imagine, combining these rules can make for a game with a surprising amount of flexibility, and change the feel of it altogether. But even in its basic form, Triple Triad is a surprisingly compelling little diversion, and the more you play it, the more cunning little strategies you’ll spot and be able to adopt. Final Fantasy XIV allows you to challenge various non-player characters around the game world to a game — who may potentially give up some rare cards if you beat them — and also to play other players. In the latter case, you have the option of customising the rules to your liking, or throwing caution to the wind and having a “Roulette” match in which the rules are determined randomly. There are also regular tournaments — the first one started today — in which you have a set period of time in which to complete (and hopefully win!) as many games as you possibly can in order to score points and get yourself on the leaderboard.

It’s an extremely well fleshed-out version of a game that was a lot of fun to play against the computer in Final Fantasy VIII; it’s even more fun to be able to challenge friends to a game thanks to Final Fantasy XIV’s massively multiplayer nature.

And if nothing else, it’s something to do while waiting in a queue for a dungeon…