by Mrs. Saint
Sorry for the hiatus on our Board Game Bites posts, the Saint household has been embroiled in a few hectic months of holidays, a teething toddler, and general life craziness, as I’m sure many of your can relate. Our first B.G.B. post of 2021 is going to be focusing on a genre that is near and dear to my husband’s heart and most certainly one I’ve come to enjoy since he introduced me to it: Fighting Card Games. Before I met Brad and the world of hobby board games, if you had asked me what a fighting card game is, I probably would have wrongly answered with a puzzled expression, “War?” because I did not know about the wide selection of fighting card games.
Let’s jump into what a fighting card game is. If you take out the “card” in fighting card game and leave it “fighting game” or perhaps replace “card” with “video”, then you would probably think of Street Fighter or maybe Mortal Kombat. I grew up on Mortal Kombat and Brad grew up a Street Fighter addict. I remember when we purchased Mortal Kombat for our Sega Genesis (yes, I’m aging myself right there) and I also purchased the game guide book so I could learn all the special moves, just so I could annoy my big brother when I beat him by turning him into a baby.
Fighting card games work along the principle of those same fighting video games. You each select a character deck and face off with your opponent’s character deck with the goal of trying to reduce your opponent’s life to zero. However, each fighting card game does this slightly differently.
For this article, I’m going to touch on a couple examples of fighting card games that I’m most familiar with. Let’s start with the one my husband first introduced me to: Yomi by Sirlin Games. Yomi’s characters are unique but the playstyle of Yomi feels very static (read Mr. Saint’s review here) because there are actually only three actions you can take in Yomi: Attack, Block/Dodge, and Throw. Depending on what action you take, that affects the cards you’re playing that round and your opponent’s ability to respond. For me, Yomi felt like a fighting card game where you’re not really moving but just standing still trying to mentally determine if you should block or perhaps attack.
I did however enjoy the genre, so we decided later the same year after I played Yomi to put Exceed Fighting System by Level 99 Games on our Christmas list. We must have been good because we were gifted two boxes of 7th Cross characters from Season 2. Exceed is probably for me the closest you can come to taking a video fighting game and putting it to paper. Like video fighting games, each character does have static abilities (every character in most fighters can punch, kick, or block) but then each character has a unique set of abilities that interact with the board, other cards, and their opponent in ways that make it feel as if the character is alive and the playmat is an arena where the two opponents are dancing around one another in a vicious battle to the last hit point. Exceed rewards players for intimately knowing not only their own character but their opponent’s as well. Some of the characters are incredibly complex, and even a little over a year later, I’m still trying to master many of them (our collection now has every character but the Season 5 ones which are on pre-order).
There are many different fighting card games out there. These are just two examples. Tell us what is your favorite!
Saint Gaming 