More Fighting Card Games

if there is one major advantage WotF has over BattleCON, it is character names that sound like they were invented by a human, instead of by a Markov chain generator

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Hepzibah. Culotre.

To me it feels like you could remove the dice with 2-value chips and it would make no difference. I always feel that dice are used as a crutch sometimes so that you don’t have to do the hard work of balancing the characters properly.

Yeah the dice are throwing me off on this one. I keep going back and forth on it. I’m hoping to be able to play it tomorrow and be able to get a better idea if it is a game worth getting.

High priority stuff is just so strong that it throws the whole game off. You want to play fast stuff because it gives you a big edge, all the fast stuff are attacks so it throws off the whole triangle. Blocks don’t auto beat attacks but have to win on priority so that makes blocks bad, which then makes throws bad. Leaving players to spam fast attacks and there seems to be enough of them to allow the spam.

The catch up mechanic is too much. If you combo you’re now down a bunch of dice and the opponent is now up a bunch of dice so they pretty much have free reign to hit you back.

The more I’ve thought about the game the more it seems like the whole game is the initiative card. This is the best way to bluff the opponent and set stuff up. Being able to change your position after cards are set is the thing that changes up the game. It still doesn’t solve the problem of throws and blocks being bad and the heavy handed catch upness of the game.

according to the designer the dice element is supposed to represent the dexterity element of playing a fighting game. Which is really silly imo. Apparently you aren’t your fighter you are some person playing that fighter in the game. And you aren’t good so sometimes (often?) you just whiff your moves.

At this point if I had to decide to back or not based on not playing the game I’d chose not back. Let’s see if playing the game changes my mind.

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I think my biggest issue with the game is the that the randomness is 3 layers deep and not only that, it suffers from post-decision randomness. The three layers as I see them are:

  • You don’t know what your opponent has played in terms of cards
  • You don’t know the number of dice your opponent has picked (you only know the total number of dice he has)
  • You don’t know if you are going to roll poorly or badly.

The last one is the worst because there is no further decisions to be made post rolling the dice: you can’t use those dice to dice to perform actions, they simply dictate if your action fails or not (compared to what your opponent is playing).

There’s a good reason why in Yomi, EXCEED and BattleCON you only have one layer of randomness (which in the end, is only termed randomness because you can’t 100% predict your opponent). You make the decision to play a card (or set of cards), then you reveal and immediately determine if you have been outplayed or not. Let’s imagine that you totally outplayed your opponent in WotF but then you roll a 3 on 3 dice and he rolls a 9: To me, that would feel deflating because even though my opponent guessed wrongly, he got a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card.

The additional problem is that you are never going to roll enough dice to have meaningful distributions. You have around 24 rolls per game on average and no more than 48/47: you could end up with an entire game filled with you rolling low and your opponent rolling high and it’s not that statistically improbable.

I’d still be interested in hearing thoughts about it: you can’t understand all the nuances of a system without having at least given it a go, but there just seems to me to be so many red flags with this particular design.

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These are both good things for me. The rolling is one of the things that gets me. As said above I wonder if some sort of bidding or flat number for the resources could have been implemented. With more games in the genre becoming a thing I guess it was only a matter of time before some one added dice rolling to the equation. I would have thought it would have been on how much damage does your move do not how fast is your move.

I could accept the game using dice rolls but the biggest thing for me is a lot of the cards not being viable and a card that is always in your hand is something you almost never want to play. If they could make the game where you want to play block/throw/mode cards I could possibly be okay with dice rolling (but maybe not? been awhile since I’ve played a competitive game that had dice rolling).

That’s another thing I don’t care for, the Mode cards. They have these cool lasting effects but they have to win priority and since they don’t hit the opponents move still goes off and then they get to pound on you and then if they play a KD move you just lost the Mode card you played.

I listened to one of Sirlin’s podcasts talking about how he would potentially do a fighting board game and his ideas sounded really promising/fun/interestin. I don’t think it will ever become a thing but I hope it does (maybe like a 0.1% chance).

Agreed with all of this. On top of the problems this game seems to have it is being developed by a company that is known for making games with problems.

SDE 1st ed - took forever for a game that was supposed to be an arcade beat 'em up. More importantly status effects completely destroyed mini bosses and bosses. The game had other problems as well but it’s been awhile so can’t remember.

SDE 2nd - never played it but have heard it has a monster farming problem

NAS - Broken combat system that was fixed in the Kickstarter, don’t know about the rest of the game.

and now WotF seems to have a lot of problems. Seems like they’re just a group of people that have some cool ideas and good imagination but no sense for testing and developing games.

Typing this up has pretty much convinced me not to back the game. So unless I’m just blow away when playing the game tomorrow I’ll be dropping my pledge.

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Yeah, choosing the card and then choosing the number of resources you use is not a bad thing, it’s just that when your player has to take into account so many different layers, it becomes impossible to make a reasonable choice based on information you have.

You begin the resolution phase of the game without any information. Once a card is chosen, you still have no information about the game state, and the game forces you to make another choice. Then when the number of dice are picked, you DO have information but it’s immaterial by this time because you can’t really react to it unless you have initiative.

Maybe if you picked the number of dice and rolled them you could have a lot more, but even then there isn’t a lot of counter play beyond ‘I just need to play something even faster’.

It’s a shame that priority is so important: the way the game is setup seems to exclude ‘on reveal’ powers or armour/invincibility frames/stun protection like BattleCON has. I do like the hit matrix the game has, its an interesting innovation.

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So I got to play the game and it kind of stinks. Here are my quick thoughts on it that I posted on the KS page and am copy and pasting here:

Well I was able to play a game today and unfortunately I really didn’t like it. It feels like a game that has potential but should still be in development.

Blocks weren’t as bad as I thought but the bar was set really low. I’d say blocks were so-so to bad. This makes throws (which generally have really bad priority) not worth the risk of ever playing them. And whats with the throws that move the opponent so far away? I spend all this time getting in on them to just throw them 4 spaces away?
With blocks being such a low % chance of being played it also makes Mode cards super risk to even attempt.

I’m not sure how the other characters perform but Kasi’s deck felt clunky. Jumping was very strong vs her because I had so few cards that could hit jumping opponents. Also characters having 22 different moves/attacks makes the draw luck greater then other games in the genre. put the dice rolling on top of that and there was too much luck for me (a like a bit of luck but not a lot). The game wasn’t any simpler to teach then the other games in the genre so it didn’t have that going for it either.

Combos were really hard to do because you have to get high priority to even win the combat. When playing Kasi I was never able to use my UA once and never even felt like I had the opportunity to play it.

Lumi seems like she is supposed to be THE fireball zoner of the game but she plays more like Dhalsim. Since her fireballs move so far they just hit if they win combat. They don’t really stay on the board too often to create obstacles.

Maaaaaybe my mind would change (I think really same % here) if I was able to give it more plays but I’m not a professional reviewer and I have limited gaming time. So a game really has to light me up (or at least have a decent chance at cool potential) for me to really want to give it more plays. This is especially true with its hour playing time.
Some cool ideas it just doesn’t quite come together for me (my opponent felt the same way). It pretty much lived up to my suspicion of just play fast attacks (also demonstrated in the play videos) Sorry but I’m going to have to drop out.

In addition to all of the above the game didn’t really have hype moments. Was just a dull slog. I think it could be really cool if they put it back in development and really polished the game. But that seems really unlikely to happen.

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The designer assures me the game is not played this way once you’re experienced/good at the game. But with the company’s track record, what I’ve seen/played, and the only game play videos available tell otherwise. I’d be happy to be wrong but at this point I have nothing to go on but the designers word and that isn’t close to good enough. If they put out a video of high level play and it showed interesting game play that would be something but I don’t think they will do even that. It’s a bummer because the designer seems like a super nice guy.

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I just don’t see it myself. I’m sure there are some intricacies of the hit-grid system that I might be missing but I still don’t see how just basing the outcome on priority alone is going at high level. The only ‘On-reveal’ effects seem to be priority increases (this is purely based on the p&p files), which only reinforces the issue. Yomi has the RPS system so that speed is not the only thing that affects if you win a hand or not. BattleCON/EXCEED have armour/stun guard/etc so that you can potentially get hit but get a hit in after that: WotF has none of that. It’s a resource manager where if you get lucky, your dice actually did something and your opponents did 0. From all I’ve seen I just can’t trust the designer on his word alone, no matter how excited he is about the design.

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There’s one game in the genre that you’re forgetting/missing. Showdown: Icons is the least know of the genre but it has it’s own way to give use to low to mid numbered cards.

This game is like Yomi in that it only uses a deck of cards for play, so no board. In the game you play one card face up (alternating) and then one card face down. You then reveal your face down card and add up the total with the higher value winning the combat. However, if the face down cards share the same discipline the lower value wins the combat. Also, there is incentive to playing a face down card of the same discipline as your face up one. Because if you win a combat and both your cards are of the same discipline you get a strong bonus.

So in all the previous games in the genre there are mix ups and incentives to playing all the different options which opens up reads and makes all the different cards have practical uses.

You are right that WotF it only ever cares about speed which just makes the game be “play your fastest thing”. I guess I’m not surprised that ND/SPM was the company to mess up my 100% enjoyment of games in this genre.

The reason I bring this up is because the game just re-launched on Kickstarter. They’ve made it cost less and it needs less money to get funded. But they left the most important part of the game untouched. The game still plays the same way which even with the cheaper price isn’t worth backing, imo.

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It turns out there was at least a couple of changes. All blocks in the pnp got +1 speed and Kasi got a buffed UA. So the blocks are better now (Lumi’s still feels bad). If it’s enough I don’t know but, maybe it is.

Keep in mind that currently, at the time of this post, 23,000 of the money pledged for the new kickstarter is for the Miniatures version of the game. I’ve noticed this trend for a long time: there are a lot of people that don’t really care about the quality of a game (good or bad) as long as it has nice looking minis. Compare this to the fact that the original KS only raised 27,000 and it is clear that the reason why it failed previously was the lack of miniatures: there wasn’t enough interest on the game itself and it wasn’t drawing in the crowd that buys into miniatures no matter what.

The changes to blocks might make things a little bit better, but I still don’t see the benefits of making blocks work or not based on priority. Why not make them win against attacks, full stop? It would make throws that much more powerful. I mean, the game already has ways to ignore priority order (throws will always beat blocks even if they are lower priority), why not handle blocks in the same way?

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I think this really slices to the heart of the matter. Its sad, for me, how little minis people care about game quality.

There was a Kickstarter I was backing (but dropped) that was heavily minis focused. I was the only one asking game releated questions while everyone else was asking minis related and more bang for buck questions. My questions ignored. I’m not sure if it was on purpose or if they were just buried in a sea of minis questions. But I did ask my questions in the updates section so I’m thinking they were just ignored.

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Yeah, people REALLY like minis… I don’t want to yuck people’s yums, but I just don’t get it. I think it comes down to the fact that I don’t like toys. 99% of the radness of miniatures is available to me by doing a google image search of miniatures - the thought of having a bunch of little dust collecting objects that will take up a ton of space somewhere in my house kind of makes my skin itch.

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Just wondered if anyone is familiar with Cardfight Vanguard. It has roughly the same complexity rating at BGG but is a TCG. Is the gameplay satisfying or is it just get the legendary card to be a winner?

I have only played up to 3 “seasons”

  1. limit breakers with break ride
  2. legions and mate
  3. grade 4’s

Those above I mention are the powerful cards for every “season”. They are always double or triple rares. And the newest abilities or “gimmicks” are always powerful compared to the old ones.
You always need double or Triple rares in your deck and you always need 4 copies of each.
BTW, A “season” corresponds to a story arc in the Anime.

@RayLancer
What are your current thoughts on Way of the Fighter? I backed at $1 just so I could decide on it later. I haven’t been following it have they released any more videos or information that shows it in a better light? or does it still just appear to be always play fast cards if you want to win?

@ClanNatioy I’m not even sure if I still want Way of the Fighter anymore. I was initially impressed and excited but now I’m not so sure. You seem to have a better grasp of the system than I do from what I seen with your interaction with the creator. I’m probably better off going with EXCEED Season 2 since the Kickstarter is tomorrow and I at least know what I’m getting into.

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Just got Way of the Fighter recently. Review coming at some point (hopefully some time next month). Blocks got better which is good.

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