How a Board Game Did “Fighting Games” Better than Fighting Games
I’ve never been in a fight. Call it cowardice or call it forbearance, but that’s the truth and I have no plans to change it. I’m far too passionate a fan of not having fists enthusiastically introduced to my face, for a start. Neither am I keen on willfully hurting another person — basically, being in a fight seems like a true nightmare. In real life, that is.
When it comes to play, there’s no purer competition than the fight. Sure, you may be able to deploy workers more efficiently than me, or build a more profitable economic engine, or maybe even manage an army better, but what if I personally kill you with a goddamn sword, idiot? A play-fight is dirty, visceral, and merciless. Only one of us is getting out of this alive, and I’m putting in everything I’ve got to make sure it’s me. Think you can stop me? Prove it, and do it now, because I’m not about to hesitate.
Video games have long held dominion over fighting games with franchises like Street Fighter, BlazBlue, King of Fighters, Tekken, etc. All feature a colorful cast of characters with unique fighting styles that demand foresight and strategy in order to rip your opponent apart in a twinkling rainbow of carnage. On paper, it sounds great. In practice? A little less so.
It’s not enough to know what you want to do. You need to memorize which buttons you need to push to make it happen, and make sure you can press those buttons fast enough and without any mistakes. This makes for enormous and terrifying learning curves, and leaves new players physically unable to beat more experienced opponents, even if they can grasp exactly what to do strategically. I can speak from my own knowledge: it’s frustrating as hell to lose not because you were out-thought, but because your thumbs weren’t nimble enough.
Enter the stunning elegance of BattleCON.
Level 99 Games’ card-based BattleCON system should make video games ashamed of themselves. It’s absurd. It shouldn’t work this well. It shouldn’t be able to match a video game, and certainly shouldn’t be able to exceed it. The ruleset shouldn’t show off a nearly ideal ratio of simplicity to depth. Ain’t no way it should have Cosmic Encounter-level resilience to the countless ways different characters twist, bend, and break the system. For a game to have all this would be unfair. And it is. Oh well.
Gaming should be embarrassed that it took so long for a fighting game as elegant and wonderful as BattleCON to emerge. It’s exhilarating and peerless and wrecks the weak shit you like.
OK, so what is BattleCON anyway?
It’s a duel on a line of seven spaces on which characters can move, much like the screen of a 2D fighting video game.
Each turn, you construct an attack from your hand of cards (which you always have full access to — no deck, no shuffling, no unlucky draws). Your hand has a set of blue-backed cards with generic attacks on them. Every character has these same basic attacks. The player also chooses from a set of red-backed “style” cards, which are unique to every character. Think of it this way: Batman and The Hulk both know how to punch, but their styles of doing so are worlds apart.
The red “style” cards are adjectives to the blue “base” cards’ nouns in BattleCON’s bloody game of madlibs. Everyone can perform a “grasp” attack, but you? Oh buddy, you can do a magnificent grasp! And wow, is it ever fun to look your friend in the eyes and say “GET READY FOR MY MAGNIFICENT GRASP”
But yeah: you take one red-backed style and one blue-backed attack, and they “connect” into a full attack pair. WHOA IS THAT WHERE THE “CON” IN BATTLECON COMES FROM, IS IT SHORT FOR “BATTLE CONNECTION” BECAUSE YOU “CONNECT” TWO CARDS yes it is. You and your opponent reveal your attack pairs and resolve them. The cards you picked this turn go to a discard pile where they’ll stay for the next two, so you can’t do the same attack over and over. Repeat until one character is dead. And that’s it.
There’s more, of course, but it’s details. At the core, it really is as simple as picking one red card and one blue card. Easy. Clean. Intuitive. Impossible to mess up. You can fumble around and fail to execute a Dragon Punch in a video game, but even the most inept can pick two cards out of a pile.
What this means is that BattleCON instantly puts opponents on an even playing field. You know what you and your opponent are capable of. Your flashiest attack will happen if you play the cards, no need to remember any button combos. The competition, and the tension, is purely mental. A given pair of cards may represent your best option, but only if your opponent doesn’t move. Then you reveal attacks and gape in horror as your hated opponent dances out of your reach and buries you in projectiles. They cackle, having predicted your move perfectly. You fling expletives at them, as is right and proper.
Therein lies BattleCON’s incredible tension. What will your opponent do? This is a game totally free of chance, save for one goddamn doozy: the mind on the other side of the table.
Every Turn A Crisis
For such a simple decision (pick a red card and a blue card!), BattleCON makes every turn a frenzy of mental simulation, prediction, and the inescapable truth that your opponent will almost always have that one specific attack available that will counter yours completely. But what are the odds they’ll play that, right?
Hint: they will ALWAYS play that. OK, maybe not always. I may or may not be nursing some grudges from my own past matches.
Every turn you look at the options you have in your hand. You know what cards your opponent is holding (the game provides reference cards with summaries of each character’s unique cards, and the cards in each player’s discard pile are face-up), and they know what you have. Do you go for a fast grapple to toss them out of range? Or do you retreat in a hurry and strike from afar? Or do you rush and rush and attack? Or do you unleash your once-per-game SUPER AWESOME ULTIMATE MOVE that can only be triggered when your own death is close at hand?
Guessing right pays big dividends, while playing a poor attack could mean losing your metaphorical head.
So wait, why does this “do fighting games better,” exactly?
Fair question.
- You’re never locked in a combo with little recourse but to sit there and watch it happen. You never get hit so hard that you can’t respond before you get hit again. Even if you got hammered one turn, you can regroup, rethink, and gain an advantage the next. And if you can’t, you can at least buy time and prepare for two turns from now.
- Positioning is essential. The best fighting games make it a priority that you control where your opponent is, by either denying them the ability to move, or always moving to exactly where you want to be. BattleCON has this in spades. Faster, weaker characters can zip across the board, darting out of harm’s way while heavyweights lumber around hoping to trap their prey in the corner. Long-range characters can snipe across the board with ease but are torn to ruin if they’re caught with a melee character in their face.
- No randomness, no physical expertise required. In a real fight, the winner is usually who gets lucky enough to land the first punch in the face or kick in the groin. Thought and strategy have little sway unless a fighter is trained in martial arts, which is unlikely, and even then a good smack in the back of the head when they aren’t ready does as good a job as ever. WHAT I’M SAYING IS: a play-fight is entirely the opposite, purely mental, with all those impossible feats of physical dazzlement being nothing but the game’s representations of your tactical decisions. BattleCON distills this to its purest form. No luck, no random chance: there ain’t no deck to shuffle or dice to roll. No need to be a wizard with a controller. You can teach someone BattleCON in fifteen minutes, no muscle memory required. If you can out-think your opponent, you will win every time, guaranteed.
- Depth. Every fighting game longs for depth. You want to always have room to improve, to always find ways to surprise your opponent and yourself, and to always encounter new and exciting situations in a fight. BattleCON has the golden ratio of super-simple gameplay (pick two cards) to astonishing depth. At any given turn, you have 15 possible attacks you can play from your hand. Simply playing your strongest attack every turn won’t work — your opponent will see it coming and avoid it. You have to be unpredictable, and react to how your opponent plays, who in turn is adapting to you. And what works against one character might be disastrous against another. Oh, man, though, the characters!
- Characters for every playstyle. SO MANY CHARACTERS. There are 30 (!!!) in the game’s biggest iteration, Devastation of Indines (not to mention the TWO OTHER VERSIONS, each with their own casts of fighters), and each one is crazy different and is illustrated with truly impressive art. One character’s magic gauntlet grants her speed as she feeds it blood — that is, do damage and you’ll gain speed for next turn, ensuring you go first and do more damage, thus starting it all over. Another character is so strong that he holds himself back to ensure a fair fight — that is, every time he lands a (usually massive) hit, he powers up his opponent. Yet another character is held together by robot parts and powers up his clockwork body every turn, becoming a monster of defense and damage…only to crash completely every five turns, losing all bonuses and becoming unable to attack. THERE’S JUST SO MANY. I haven’t even tried half of them. I certainly haven’t mastered any.
Sounds fun!
Hey, glad I could convince you, header! Your opinion matters to me.
And it is fun. So much so that I doubt I’ll play a fighting video game ever again. Maybe this isn’t such a big deal, since the learning curve did a good job keeping me away already. But it’s part of a larger trend in my life of analog gaming steadily replacing video games.
Video games used to be a major part of my life, but it’s been nearly a year since I’ve fired up anything but The Binding of Isaac. When a hobby has a culture as toxic as video games and an obsession with churning out game after game about shooting people, it’s so much more pleasant to sit at a table and play a game at your own pace. I spend enough time staring at screens, I want a game that brings me back to the real world and lets me interact with my friends.
Even when that game involves beating them to death. Especially when!
