Title should be updated with (2023) as the article states and the original(French) URL[0] refers to, the translation shows today's date.

0 https://xvw.lol/pages/tetra-master.html

I remember trying to decipher the rules of this game, back in FFIX prime, with a whole lot of frustration. I probably still have a paper notebook full of schemas and notes somewhere in my atic.

A few years later, Square published FFXI, a Final Fantasy MMORPG. And to play it, you had to go through PlayOnline, a walled garden supposed to gather all the future online Square games. Spoiler, it didn't happen.

The first game published in PlayOnline was...Tetra Master! A standalone version of it, where you started with a random cards set and challenged other real players to win cards from them or lose yours to them.

The game was never a success, because people would rather play FFXI of course, but also because the rules were even more cryptic. There were situations were people would beat all their adversary's cards, but then lose the game for no reason. You could also lose the first card you put on the field, before your opponent even played.

I'm thinking the game was bugged, on top of having weird rules.

PlayOnline's tetra Master was shutdown in the 2010s iirc.

But is it worse than Triple Triad with random, elemental, same, plus, combo, and wall?

While it's definitely more complicated than necessary, and silly that the game doesn't explain it at all, it also... doesn't really seem that complicated? Certainly not enough to live up to the amount of text spent building it up, or the amount of text explaining it, for that matter. You've got some offense and defense stats, each card draws a random number from 0 to its applicable stat (determined by type), highest number wins.