Final Round Fighting Card Game

I'm impressed that this game is not as popular as it deserves.

Designed by G. Ian Templer in New Zealand.

The idea of this game is to have a match between two players, as in an arcade fighting game, like Street Fighter. And guess what? it does perfectly!

As in the arcade where you insert a coin, and fight against your friends for just a few minutes and have lots of fun, this game achieves the same concept. When both players are already familiar with the rules and mechanics, a match can be as fast as 15 minutes.

The rules and mechanics are simple and easy to understand, even for those who are not familiar with fighting games / video games. Also for the ones not familiar with card games like Pokemon or Magic and etc, which is my case.

My favorite mechanic is the combo. Once you confirm your attack, you can add cards to combo with your attacking card, as long your card matches the Combo Speed number from the previous card.

The game offers you five decks, one for each character. The decks are divided into basic attacks (no special abilities) and special attacks (with special abilities to buff or nerf players' attacks/defenses), blocks, throws, and two Ultimate Attack Powers. Quite tty simple and familiar for those who played any fighting games like Street Fighter or KOF.

The idea is to break your opponent's defenses and attack him reducing his life, which is the player's deck until no more cards are available.

There is a good balance of strategies of holding your defenses, attacking, and building up your Ultimate Metter to buy and use your Ultimate Attack Power cards, reset your game, combos etc. Very often intense moments with comebacks with long combos that you were not expecting, leaving you bleeding with just one single card in your life /deck. If you follow Fighting games scene you know what I'm talking about.

There are five characters which are very different from each other, every matchup is unique. You have characters with low base damage but very good for combos, another one is capable of regenerating life, a grappler with bad combo opportunity but high damage, another one with very aggressive and bad defenses but capable of passive damage and so on.

My partner doesn't play video games or ever played fighting games, and she just loved it! Last weekend we brought it to a friend's house and he and his partner were not familiar with fighting games either. However, they loved this game. In half an hour they already understood the mechanics and were already on the second match having lots of fun.

The only thing that could be improved or reviewed is the rulebook. Some rules are not so clear at the beginning and we had to guess and read the rules from other sources, I believe from concept time or initial revisions.

Other than that, I'm happy to give it 10 stars. Nice artwork, nice and simple mechanics, perfect playing time that keeps the hype and fun long enough.

Hopefully, new characters will be released soon.