Each player gets a player template. On the template, from left to right, is chi, stance and weapon. Chi starts at 20 and can never go above that. When it goes below 1, you’re out. Stand is a style of fighting you can play through the cards. Weapon? Yeah, that’s another card. The game comes with six of those little transparent red gemstones that you use to keep track of your Chi.
Components
Goal of the game? Beat the crap out of the other guy using innovative attacks.
Each player starts with seven cards. Card range from evasion and blocking to fighting stances and weapons. The most commonly played cards will be the Attack, Attack Enhancement, and Block. There’s even one make up your own card so those with the innovation to be true rules masters may go to town!
You get to use one Attack card a round and can beef it up with as many Attack Enhancement cards as you want, but no duplicates. There are exceptions to that, but the rules are spelled out on the cards for what to do when that happens. For example, Split Attack lets you hit two opponents at once as if it were two separate attacks but in a two player game it’s a +1 Damage bonus.
Some of the stuff pulled in the game include the following; Running Up The Wall! (+1 Damage), Flying (+2), Wild (+1) Punch (2). Now at the time dude had Dragon Stance, +3 damage when using Flying attacks. So it was like (1+2+1+2+3) 9 points of damage. However, as we quickly discovered, if you block the base attack, the whole thing is nullified. So that damage goes to zero.
In your round, you can play as many weapons and stances as you want, just as long as you’re not in the middle of an attack. Why would you do that? The stances have a lot of neat bonuses but they also have a, well, a nemesis stance. For example, the Dragon Stance I mentioned gets a +2 Damage against any player with the Crane Stance. But it suffers against Drunken Stance, who gets a +2 Damage against any player with the Dragon Stance. So for your turn, you might want to bust out a stance, play as much of your damage that’s augmented by your stance, and then get rid of the stance. For weapons, you might have one, like the Fan, that provides a defense so you can use one weapon to attack, discard that, bust out the defensive weapon, and end your turn.
Cards are replenished at the start of the turn.
There is another type of card that comes up but isn’t in large quantities and in the six games I played, didn’t influence the game that much; chi restoration. Most of these are small quantities from 1 to 3 and some of them effect all of the players.
The instructions read pretty easily and we only had to refer to them a few times in terms of just how many Attack Enhancement cards you could play at one time. Part of this ease of use is the numerous examples listed in the instructions. We found that some of the big combos could be devastating if not blocked but if blocked, rendered the point mute. Most of our games went less then twenty minutes, averaging more like fifteen. One of them thought went almost forty as we just kept blocking and even had to reshuffle the deck.
There are enough cards in the core set with enough variation that the replay value is high. For example, when busting out the Table as a weapon, it’s a base damage of 4, but the table is discarded afterwards. When being attacked, if you have the Counter Attack! Block card, while you still take the full damage from the attack, you can bust out your own attack in answer against the player who hit you. Unless you have something like Split Attack.
The line art is simple but effective. The cards held up to our greasy hands with no problems. The little Player Templates are well sized. My favorite part about the card game though is it comes in a box. I love some of the other card games out there but man , putting them away, like Gloom after the game is done? Major suckage. This is a nice box with two sides to break the deck into, a spot for your chi tracker beads and the player templates fit right on top of that.
The flavor text is evocative of the old 70’s Kung Fu movies and includes some of the old catchphrases. For example, Your Kung Fu Is Weak. This Block Card allows you to block any one attack. The attack enhancement Magnificent grants +2 damage. The stances are all classics form the genre like Dragon, Drunken, and Snake.
If you’re looking for a quick card game that captures the fun furious action of old Kung Fu movies, Kung Fu Fighting is right up your allye.
