History GameBreaker / TabletopGames

** Saeryn of the Legion of Everblight has a feat that keeps every warbeast in her battlegroup from being targeted by melee attacks for one round. Which by itself just sounds incredibly powerful, but it really becomes ridiculous in the details. It effectively means that warbeasts are also immune to free-strikes which are all melee. The Legions specialization in fast, often flying, warbeasts means that they are completely free to position themselves INSIDE enemy ranks without issue. Which synergizes perfectly with one of her spells which creates a large AoE around a friendly Warbeast which Auto-hits any enemies caught inside.
** Epic Lylyth (Shadow of Everblight) is rather infamous for absolutely crushing new players. In any army that largely ignores stealth, she provides Snipe to everything in her battlegroup, and a free additional shot. Combined with Ravagors which have a powerful, already long-ranged attack which leaves a damaging AoE and continuous fire effects and Bolt Throwers which push targets back. Lylyth's strategy is to completely shred the opponent from across the board while completely ignoring many forms of defense against ranged combat.

* ''TabletopGame/Werewolf1997'': in setups with a Cop (who investigates players for whether they're Mafia or townsfolk) and a Doctor (who cancels out Mafia kills targeted at a specific player) with no way to counteract them, the Cop can just claim their role while the Town refuses to eliminate anyone and the Doctor stays in the background. The Doctor stops any Mafia kills from reaching the Cop, the Cop keeps gaining results and the Town can eliminate anyone who's picked up as being a Mafia member. By the time the Mafia kills the Doctor, there will be enough results for the Town to pick out the remaining Mafia anyway. The Mafia could try to counterclaim Cop to get the real one eliminated or confuse the Doctor into protecting the fake Cop, but either way they'll lose at least one member.

* ''GameBreaker/YuGiOhDungeonDiceMonsters''

** Sneasel from the Neo Genesis set was simply banned because it was too powerful offensively; by the second turn of the game, its Beat Up attack allowed the user to flip up to six coins (one for each benched Pokemon and one for Sneasel), netting 20 damage per heads, and + 20 more damage due to the two Darkness energies that were on Sneasel in order to use the attack. Along with broken trainers like Computer Search and Professor Oak, this was easy to accomplish, and from the second turn on it was easy to AVERAGE 80 damage per turn; considering the maximum HP for any Pokemon was 120 at the time (and 120 was a rare trait, the average for a fully evolved Pokemon was about 80-90), it's easy to see why this was banned; you simply didn't win if you didn't play your own Sneasel deck. Sneasel has actually been reprinted in a recent set, but it seems that this is really a matter of the rest of the game catching up to it. It's virtually identical to its old version (resistance is now Psychic -20 instead and it has a Fighting x2 weakness), and still a great card, but at 60 HP it's a bit fragile, and there are a number of not-especially-rare cards in the game with more than 120 HP.

** Lysandre's Trump Card from the Phantom Forces set allows all the player to shuffle all cards in their discard pile into their deck, it is one of the very few cards to be banned as it basically allows the player to quickly draw through their deck without any negative effects and increased the length of battles significantly.
** One of the most broken strategies possible is to use two cards in tandem: Darkrai Lv. X and a certain Shiftry. Darkrai had one attack that made the strategy work, which put the defending Pokemon to sleep. However, unlike normal sleep, there were two coins flipped, and if both were tails, the Pokemon fainted (both had to be heads for the Pokemon to wake up.). Shiftry's Poke body made it so that all coins flipped were treated as tails.
* 1000 Blank White Cards is entirely made out of cards created by the players. As such, anyone can make potential game breakers. Finding game-breaking combinations of cards is how the game is usually won. In most games, some cards with ridiculously powerful (or boring) effects are banned:

* In the wargame-deckbuilder hybrid ''A Few Acres of Snow'', the intended cost of besieging a city is losing cards from your deck, but that turned out to be a ''benefit'' because it lets you see your best cards faster. Both sides of the board can temporarily trim down their deck and keep only the useful cards. This way, the French player gets the deck reduced to just 4 cards (while a single hand requires 5): 3 fur cards and a trader for instant pay-off, while the 5th "slot" will always be filled with a freshly added military card, always getting money for another draw next round and removing RNG from the equation. Meanwhile British player can reduce the deck to otherwise finnicky to use cards and encroach French heartland ''overland'', either raiding Montreal to the ground (a severe blow to French player) or even block entirely French expansion over St. Lawrance river, going as far as ''settling down Detroit'' in the far corner of the French side of the map, a feat normally considered impossible

* The ''TabletopGame/{{Digimon}} Card Game'' for the most part remained a relatively balanced game for many months of its conception, until that is the release of [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-016 Jesmon]] in Set 6: Double Diamond. While Jesmon by itself allows you to play any of the Sistermon cards [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-082 Blanc]] or [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-084 Ciel]] from the hand or the trash, doing so also gives it a sizeable power boost and piercing, allowing itself to attack the opponent's security (the main life source of a player) while also getting rid of a Digimon on board. These effects are already powerful on its own, but combine this with an inherited effect from [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-015 SaviorHuckmon]] allows it to attack again simply by having one of the aforementioned Sistermons on board, which Jesmon can do easily. So this effectively means two Digimon from your opponent are gone, you attack the security twice, and if you add on cards like [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/ST1-07 Greymon's inherited effect]], [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT3-097 A Delicate Plan]], and Digivolving Jesmon into [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT5-086 Omnimon]] after attacking, you can end most games in just one turn without any repercussions. This archetype single-handedly defined the Red meta and other metas to come in Japan for months that ''Creator/BandaiNamcoEntertainment'' had no choice but to [[https://world.digimoncard.com/rule/restriction_card/ limit SaviorHuckmon to just one copy per deck]], and even then Jesmon still remains a powerful force to be reckoned with.

* In the wargame-deckbuilder hybrid ''A Few Acres of Snow'', the intended cost of besieging a city is losing cards from your deck, but that turned out to be a ''benefit'' because it lets you see your best cards faster. This ties into the infamous "Halifax Hammer" strategy, where the British player besieges three cities and then storms down the French player. This is easy to execute and all but guarantees a win for Britain. The designer tried to patch up this problem, but eventually deemed the game unfixable. In the end, the game was CondemnedByHistory, being remembered almost entirely for its balance issues, with few people still playing it or defending it, and almost no one being interested in getting into something that imbalanced.

* In the wargame-deckbuilder hybrid ''A Few Acres of Snow'', the intended cost of besieging a city is losing cards from your deck, but that turned out to be a ''benefit'' because it lets you see your best cards faster. This ties into the infamous "Halifax Hammer" strategy, where the British player besieges three cities and then storms down the French player. This is easy to execute and all but guarantees a win for Britain. The designer tried to patch up this problem, but eventually deemed the game unfixable. In the end, the game was CondemnedByHistory, being remembered almost entirely for its balance issues, with few people still playing it or defending it, and almost no one being interested in getting into something that imbalanced.
* ''TabletopGame/TheWitcherRolePlayingGame'': Witchers themselves are a case of PurposefullyOverpowered, considering they are gamebreaking in lore as well. They are definitively the strongest class at chargen. Being capable of adeptly using both combat and magic, as well as having natural boosts in their stats and lifepath options for boosting those even further. And in case they needed more power, a supplement was added which allowed Witchers to start with special armor from their school which came with a special ability to push them even further. A combat-optimized Witcher at chargen is capable of soloing some of the game's Medium difficulty monsters.

* In the wargame-deckbuilder hybrid ''A Few Acres of Snow'', the intended cost of besieging a city is losing cards from your deck, but that turned out to be a ''benefit'' because it lets you see your best cards faster. This ties into the infamous "Halifax Hammer" strategy, where the British player besieges three cities and then storms down the French player. This is easy to execute and all but guarantees a win for Britain. The designer tried to patch up this problem, but eventually deemed the game unfixable. In the end, the game was CondemnedByHistory, being remembered almost entirely for its balance issues, with few people still playing it or defending it, and almost no one being interested in getting into something that imbalanced.

!!Subpages for this section:

* The Aqueduct in ''TabletopGame/SettlersOfCatan'''': Cities & Knights'' is a potential game breaker. It allows a player to draw ''any'' resource they choose if they receive no production on a turn. If a player only has a few numbers to draw from, the Aqueduct is even ''better'', because it allows the player to take advantage of many custom draws, charging for whatever item they wish to build. Combined with a 2:1 port, a player can gun for commodities too, further increasing their advantage. This is taken UpToEleven when a specific resource in the game is extremely scarce, because the player with the Aqueduct may be the only one who can get it easily.

* In the wargame-deckbuilder hybrid ''A Few Acres of Snow'', the intended cost of besieging a city is losing cards from your deck, but that turned out to be a ''benefit'' because it lets you see your best cards faster. This ties into infamous "Halifax Hammer" strategy, where the British player besieges three cities and then storms down the French player. This is easy to execute and all but guarantees a win for Britain. The designer tried to patch up this problem, but eventually deemed the game unfixable. In the end, the game was CondemnedByHistory, being remembered almost entirely for its balance issues, with few people still playing it or defending it, and almost no one being interested in getting into something that imbalanced.

** Franklin's Gull and Killdeer let you discard an egg to draw two cards, which provides valuable card advantage that gives you access to more options. On top of that, these birds are cheap and require minimal setup before you can use their power.

* The ''TabletopGame/{{Digimon}} Card Game'' for the most part remained a relatively balanced game for many months of its conception, until that is the release of [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-016 Jesmon]] in Set 6: Double Diamond. While Jesmon by itself allows you to play any of the Sistermon cards [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-082 Blanc]] or [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-084 Ciel]] from the hand or the trash, doing so also gives it a sizeable power boost and piercing, allowing itself to attack the opponent's security (the main life source of a player) while also getting rid of a Digimon on board. These effects are already powerful on its own, but combine this with an inherited effect from [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-015 SaviorHuckmon]] allows it to attack again simply by having one of the aforementioned Sistermons on board, which Jesmon can do easily. So this effectively means two Digimon from your opponent are gone, you attack the security twice, and if you add on cards like [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/ST1-07 Greymon's inherited effect]], [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT3-097 A Delicate Plan]], and Digivolving Jesmon into [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT5-086 Omnimon]] after attacking, you can end most games in just one turn without any repercussions. This archetype single-handedly defined the Red meta and other metas to come in Japan for months that ''Creator/BandaiNamcoEntertainment'' had no choice but to [[https://world.digimoncard.com/rule/restriction_card/ limit SaviorHuckmon to just one copy per deck]], and even then Jesmon still remains a powerful force to be reckoned with.