Tournament Arc

This is a game about preparing your team of anime characters for a tournament. Everyone has a team of three characters. During the game you get to train them, modifying their stats. You can mess with your opponents by modifying the stats of their characters too. When the game starts, you don't know yet what the tournament is going to be about. It will only be known by the mid point of the game. The tournament card when revealed specifies how many characters you get to send, and which stats are taken into account. Some tournaments have special rules. During the game, the tournament card may change, and suddenly you may find that your team has all the wrong skills. The whole game is about manipulating the characters and also the tournament. The game culminates in that one grand tournament which is resolved at the very end. 

Everyone starts with three characters. You choose one then pass the other two left. From those two given to you by your neighbour, you pick another character and you pass the one you don't want left. Everyone will end up with three characters. 

You have a hand of five cards. Every round you get to play two cards. The cards have all sorts of powers. Some modify the stats of characters. You can play them on your own characters or on those of other players. There are fancy powers like swapping characters with others, drawing a new character, and so on. 

Cards modifying stats are tucked under character cards. Every character has four stats. 

This is one of the tournament cards. If this is the tournament in effect, all four stats of characters will count (all of them have plus signs). You only get to send one character to compete. The character with a strength closest to but not above 21 wins. 

This is a pretty chaotic game. There is a lot of attacking your opponents. Generally you try to boost your characters, but in the early game you don't really how which stats are important. It is fun to see all the nice anime characters in the game. The card effects are funny too. There is not a lot of control. You are rarely able to protect your own characters. You can save some of the powerful cards for the right moment, or till late enough that it's hard for others to stop you. 

The game didn't work for me. The setting is entertaining. The art is nice. I don't like that this is a pretty random game with lots of attacking. I find that the stats are tedious to keep track of. When I have a bad card I want to play on an opponent's character, I need to examine all these characters one by one to see who is the strongest in a particular stat. That means I need to add up all the numbers attached to the characters. We had 5 players, and thus around 15 characters in total. It felt like a lot of work for me. This is a light game with much player interaction which works better with a casual crowd.