Base price: $XX.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: 15 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Tournament Arc was provided by Little Creature, LLC. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Some games just make me laugh, and I think that’s a critical part of actually having fun with games. Yes, there are serious strategies and tournaments and there’s money involved and there’s a multibillion dollar industry under a lot of stress because some idiot has a 1980s understanding of global economic policy, but sometimes I just want to play a game because it’s funny or charming. And so we’ve arrived at a game launching on Kickstarter this week: Tournament Arc! Naturally, I’m writing this after midnight because I’m always a little behind on reviews, but what can you do.
In Tournament Arc, players manage teams of athletes playing … some sport! You don’t know yet, but you’ve got a lot of heart to compensate for the lack of athletic specificity. Get your team, figure out the locale, and then train train train to prep for the final showdown! The problem is, the episodes can have an impact on your athletes’ development, and who knows how this series is going to go? Will you be able to make your anime a sports-filled spectacular? Or will it just end up a comedy of errors?
Contents
Setup
Surprisingly very little. There are a few decks you need to shuffle. Character Cards:
Episode Cards:
Region Cards:
Sports Cards:
Set aside the Main Character token:
You should be ready to start! Deal each player three Character Cards and reveal a Region Card.
Gameplay
This one’s not too challenging. First you build your team, then you train your athletes, and then you compete! Just be careful: like any good sports anime, there might be some late-game changes to the sport.
To start, each player chooses one of their three Athletes and places it face-down, passing the remaining two clockwise. Do this until each player has three face-down Athletes, then each player reveals them! Take the opportunity to tell each other about your team. How did they met? What keeps them together? Add some narrative.
Then, each player draws 5 Episode Cards and the Training Arc begins. Each turn, players play two Episode Cards on their Athletes or opponent’s Athletes (or just play and discard them, as some don’t attach to Athletes). If any Athlete has more Episode Cards tucked below them than anyone else, they are the Main Character! Their Athlete Score will be doubled later. Note that this can change as Episode Cards are played. After two rounds, the Sport is revealed! Draw the top card of the Sports Deck and play it. That will show the special rules for this Sport and which Athletes’ Traits contribute to their overall scores.
Play continues for two more rounds of Episode Cards, and then move on to the finale! Choose the number of Athletes indicated by the Sport and total their relevant stats to get their Athlete Score. The team with the higher total (usually) wins! There may be Sport-specific rules. The game also has additional variants to highlight strategy or narrative, so check those out if you want to change things up!
Player Count Differences
Not a ton, but a few key differences. With more players comes, necessarily, more play time. There’s also a bit of risk that as players are playing Episode Cards that other players might gang up on you. With two, it’s zero sum, to some degree. With more, you might find that more players just go after you if you’re already ahead. I don’t love that kind of thing, in games, but it does seem like that’s less of an explicit risk here if you’ve got a group who are just playing for the storytelling elements. There, you might actually find players who want to construct something funny together. If your group leans that way, more players is going to be more chaotic, with more stories and more fun. If you’re leaning more towards the strategic, you may want to either use the more strategy-focused variants or play with fewer players.
Strategy
- Don’t necessarily play your best cards before you know what the Sport is. You might be buffing the wrong stats or overshooting a limit (if you’re playing Golf or Blackjack). It’s potentially better to hold on to those, but don’t make it super obvious; players can very easily steal your cards or your hand.
- You might be able to convince some players to not go after you if you appeal to it being funny or plot-appropriate. Do it for the plot and you’ll be able to make the case that you’re not being malicious, hopefully. If you draw the ire of too many players, you run the risk of them teaming up to wreck you.
- Don’t get too attached to things; they’ll be moving around a bunch. The Region can change, the Sport can change; hell, even one of my athletes became a vegetable by mistake. It happens. You have to stay tactical and flexible if you want to land a win.
- Only the skills listed on the sport count towards your Athlete score; you may be able to ignore the others. Sometimes that pays! Often the Episode Cards are uneven benefits, so they’ll boost some stats and lower others. If you lower dump stats that don’t matter, you can get some pretty solid gains.
- Feel free to change up the Region or the Sport as it suits you; just remember that some Sports have very specific win conditions. You really don’t want the Sport to shift to Cheerleading if your Athletes have low Teamwork, and you don’t want high stats for a Golf Tournament, for instance. Keep an eye on what the requirements are; sometimes just chasing the overall high score isn’t actually the right move.
- Spreading yourself too thin (by getting too many Athletes) is possible, and also bad. You’ll need to present a certain number of Athletes for each sport, so if you’re wasting time buffing more Athletes than you need, you’re missing out on making sure your major players are at their peak in time for the game. Stay focused.
- Don’t forget to tell a story when you play cards! It’s important to the gameplay experience. Is it necessarily a good idea from a strategy standpoint? Not necessarily, but sometimes the best strategy is to have as much fun as possible.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Very fun art. It’s quirky and hand-drawn and really speaks to the game’s goal, which is to have as much as possible over the course of the game. I think that’s great. It’s nice when a game has a consistent ethos to its presentation, and I think that’s very much the case here.
- Also a lot of fun references, from Pokemon’s bad initial dub to maybe Kingdom Hearts? I’m not an expert, but I definitely saw something equivalent to truck-kun. There’s almost certainly more to explore, and I imagine even more is going to make it in as the Kickstarter progresses. Seems like a great game to sell at anime conventions or PAX-adjacent things.
- I like that several of the characters are just weird, from an actual bear to a literal baby to a dude with almost entirely broken bones. The literal baby is one of my favorites; who knows what he’s going to do. I also appreciate that all of the characters have sub and dub names, and the dub names are as egregiously bad of puns as you’d expect and hope.
- If you have a group that is excited to play for the plot, they’re going to love this. This is just barely on the line between strategic and storytelling. Yes, there’s scoring and yes, it all matters, but there’s nothing wrong with letting the player with the best overall team or best story win if you want. Points are just another way to decide a winner.
- Inherently, the game is just pretty funny and charming; I chuckled several times just doing the photography. A game that makes me laugh is always a good thing.
- A nicely-sized game; very portable. It’s not necessarily a small-box game like Wind the Film or the Oink Games or the Allplay tiny boxes, but it’s small enough that if this is the game you want to bring somewhere, you won’t have much trouble transporting it.
- Honestly, you could probably deal out the athletes at random if you wanted to deemphasize the drafting element for new players. Random is, gameplay-wise, almost always an acceptable substitute for drafting when playing with new players, since they’re not necessarily making informed decisions when drafting anyways. It adds a bit of luck to it but lets you skip a confusing decision for very new players (especially if they’re not familiar with drafting).
Mehs
- Having the sport shift on you late-game can be frustrating if you’re playing to win. I think if you’re that invested in the game strategically you should probably lean more into the narrative and try to focus on having fun, but I can see how it would be annoying.
Cons
- From a strategy standpoint, there’s a lot of opportunity to gang up on players, which I don’t love. You can kind of just play all your Episode Cards on anyone unless otherwise stated, which might lead to frustrating gameplay outcomes for some players. Try not to do that!
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I liked Tournament Arc quite a bit! I think it’s a little on the lighter side of what I would normally play, but it builds enough joy and charm into the game that I’d be hard-pressed to be too upset about that. It definitely tries to have its cake and eat it too by blurring the line between “strategy game” and “party game”, but I think it provides enough entertainment that I’m not looking too closely at that, either. Part of the charm is just that the game is clearly well-informed on its subject matter, to the point that even a casual fan can catch references or notice fun tropes appearing throughout gameplay and find something to latch on. Even if you haven’t watched a single anime in your entire life (which, if you’re under … 50, that’s suspicious), you can still appreciate building up a team of randos to play some sport and having it all go to complete chaos as soon as cards are drawn. A lot to get excited about along the way. I think leaning into telling a story and letting players craft their team’s narrative is a way to really get players excited and invested, and I think it was a smart choice to keep the game simple and tilt towards what people are looking to the game for. And that’s the key word here: simple. You’re not going to necessarily see a complex or super-strategic drafting game like Stonespine Architects (or even 7 Wonders) here; you’re looking more towards Sushi Go (and even a little less complex than that). You’re here to have a silly time, and Tournament Arc accomplishes that goal quite well. If that sounds up your alley or you’re looking for a fun story game with some drafting, I’d recommend checking it out! It’s quite pleasant.
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