Fight Your Friends Tabletop Review – Ready for this new Card-Battling Game?
Fight Your Friends Tabletop Review – Ready for this new Card-Battling Game?
Fight Your Friends is a new Tabletop One-on-One Card-Battling Game from Cold War, Inc. In Fight Your Friends, you’ll try to build the ultimate crew from a deck of cards, play them against your opponent, who is trying to do the same and then see what insanity ensues as your crew’s abilities stack.
How-To-Play Fight Your Friends
Fight Your Friends Casual Playthrough
The very core of Fight Your Friends follows a very simple rule. The high card wins the round. Additional rules add complexity to the game to allow for layers of strategy. For instance, each card has a Friendship Bonus that may add extra conditional value to your current card’s stats or to the stats of cards you will play in subsequent rounds. If the right conditions are met, card bonuses will stack across rounds. Each card in Fight Your Friends is also assigned a Gold value. Winners of each round add gold to your pile. Whoever has the most gold after 4 rounds of play wins.
To start, both you and your opponent will pick ten cards from the deck of available cards. You may pick whichever 10 cards you wish, so long as the total gold across those cards does not exceed 30 gold. My opponent and I found it faster to sort the Fight Your Friends deck by gold value before deciding which cards we would pick for our respective hands.
You may want to choose cards that get you as close to that 30 gold as possible, to potentially increase how much gold you could win per round. Or, you might want to come in under that 30 gold limit and select your Fight Your Friends cards based on Friendship Bonuses. Or, if you’re like me, you might want to select members of your crew because they’re a dinosaur or a squirrel.
Each card in your crew is assigned an Attack, Magic and Defense Stat. When your card is put into play, your attack stat is played against your opponent’s, your magic stat against theirs, your defense stat against theirs. The winner in each stat comparison gets a point for that high stat. So, if your card has the higher Attack and Defense stats, you would get 2 points and win that round. But wait, before you calculate your points for that round of Fight Your Friends, both you and your opponent will want to check your respective in-play and previously played cards’ Friendship Bonuses. You might win on base stats, but your opponent’s Friendship Bonuses may change that. If the fight ends in a tie, you’ll each play another card.
All of your crew members belong to an Order. This is indicated on the bottom right of your card, along with their Class and Type. The Fight Your Friends Orders include The Network, The Society, and The Tribe. Primary Classes include Rogue, Warrior, and Witch. Primary Types include Enhanced, Natural, and Supernatural. Friendship Bonuses may increase your Attack, Magic, Defense stats, or Gold value based on your card’s or other crew members’ Order, Class or Type, giving you the edge and propel you to victory in your all-out, four-round brawl.
During your first couple of Fight Your Friends games, you and your opponent might debate how some of the rules should stack. But, the overall intent of the game is to have it played quickly. So, don’t overthink it.
How To Play Fight Your Friends Examples:
Fight Your Friends Card Art
The art on the Fight Your Friends cards is really pretty. I’m a sucker for good comic art. They worked with a whole bunch of Indie Comics, and their artists, to bring a nice variety of characters and styles to the final game. This is how you might have Colonel Cobb from The Avengables vs. Naomi from Ursa Minor, or Sachie from Fields of Eleria vs. AOC from AOC and the Freshman Force or King from Squarriors.
Each card has creative and copyright info for its character. Using this, you can hunt down the artists and comics to learn more about these characters and their stories. You can also head over to the official Fight Your Friends website to find out some of the Indie Comics and Talent behind the card art of Fight Your Friends.
Art Time-Lapse – Tazy Crazy from Fight Your Friends
Even though the card art can range from incredibly stylized to hyper-realistic, it is all tied together by the game’s graphic elements. I’m incredibly curious to see what they include in any expansions they create for the game.
The Final Call
My opponent and I discussed the Fight Your Friends after playing it. We spent too much time discussing stacking, but we almost certainly overthought it. The instructions weren’t as linear as I would have liked. I found myself flipping back and forth with the, “But, what ifs?..” that I had too often. Instead of being able to rely on only the text, I had to study the graphic representations of the gameplay examples as well.
During our games, we did not find any of the cards we picked to be too overpowered. The fact that you do not know if your opponent is about to play their most powerful card against your weakest card, adds to keeping the game even-handed.
We had a lot of fun playing Fight Your Friends, which trumps any minor confusion we ran into. The art is gorgeous. It looks like a lot of thought went into working out the stats and other attributes for each card. When all is said and done, I’d very much like to see more content put out for this game down the road. The Tabletop One-on-One Card-Battling Game 60-card core set is currently available through Cold War, Inc.’s official site for only $15.