The Key of Avalon

Tracing Cards + 4-player board game! Now the arcade is the new battlefield!

JP release: 31st July 2003
NA release: N/A
EU release: N/A
Developer: Hitmaker
Publisher: Sega
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Not Played

In terms of Triforce arcade games, this was one of the huge successes of the platform, yet because it’s a Japanese-only arcade game, it’s difficult to find much information about it. I did manage to find some direct footage of a couple of matches, alongside some camera footage of it, but I still have no clue what the core mechanics actually are. On top of that, while the games have been backed up online, there’s currently no way to run or emulate the game, due to the unique inputs and networking.

A single setup for Key of Avalon comprises of five machines. Front and centre you have the main screen, something that all players can easily see. Then each player has their own screen to play their game from. Each of these individual units are separate Triforce arcade machines, so this setup is five specially configured GameCube-based arcade machines. On top of that, there’s a card reader.

This isn’t a swipe-slowly-and-hope-it-scans GBA eReader type device, but a large device for scanning a deck of 40 cards. On top of spending money on the machine itself, The Key of Avalon is also a collectable card game and the machine could supposedly scan a whole deck in seconds. I don’t think they have any special technology in them or anything, it’s just scanning the card visually.

The main part of the game is a board game, with the objective being to visit three our of four towers to get the key before making your way to the central castle to win (I think, anyway). Once you get the key, any player can take it off you by beating you in a fight. You can join a game part way through, so I guess this is how it makes it so you still have a chance to win. Battles seem to be a turn-based RPG style combat, with your cards coming to life as huge monsters.

To play, your deck is loaded into one of the user machines. This has a touch screen interface (which looks very smooth in videos). The cards have values for attack, defence and movement alongside different colours and rarities. There are monster cards, cards to support the monsters and cards to support your character. This screen seems to have multiple viewpoints (either a close-up of your character or a view of the whole board), your current hand and a load of extra information.

The game had many revisions over time with different subtitles: 1.2: Summon The New Monsters, 1.3: Chaotic Sabbat, 2.0: Eutaxy and Commandment and 2.5: War of the Key. I’m not entirely sure what these changed, but all the footage I could find looks the same, so it was likely new lore and new cards being added. The last four player version of The Key of Avalon was available in the BigJoy store in Suzuka up until its closure on the 30th July 2017. It definitely seems like an interesting arcade game.