Description

The Combatants

(Les combattants) This is the story of the back alleys in the big cities, the grasslands at the outskirts of the rural areas, the field of the duel at dawn, the meetup of fighters in the park. The game of swashing blades, rivalling schools and swordplay and the bash of combatants in battle. You are the duelling gentlemen, the nobles, the privateers, the henchmen, the thugs and fighters of the streets. Trying to defend your honour, prove your loyalty, do your master’s biddings or just to survive. Pick up your sword and roll your dice.

This is the narrative of duelling. Duelling in the sense of swordmasters, fighting styles, sunset duelling and honour. You are a fighter with a specific style and your school. Combat is both luck and skill.

Manage your opportunities and movement, and you will come out on top. Whittle down your opponent's stamina in order to score hits, chase your opponent away from the battle, knock your opponent out and win the duel.

Base concept

Combatants in a melee or a duel are constantly manoeuvring, in and out of each other's range, accelerating, slowing down, changing directions. Swordplay is like a dance in that you are moving and responding to your opponents, but you also try to outsmart them and to hit them or to keep them far away. The combat, distance, and turn order in this game is an abstraction. There is no fixed amount of time per round or turn, nor a fixed distance between players. The aim of this game is to both be a tool in a narrative and like a game of duelling, you would even be able to play this as a regular board game, player versus player, teams versus teams or in a Battle Royal style.

Gameplay

In this game of duelling, your goal is to knock out or chase your opponent away from the battleground. Various stories may drastically change winning conditions and combat is not always the answer. But this time and in this story, it will solely be a story about the duels.

Once each turn, players will simultaneously roll several six-sided dice and allocate these as the attack, defence and action values. One selected die, and in addition to this, dice combinations will give a final combat value. To aid you during gameplay there will be cards displayed as a playerboard, to visualize and present your decisions, both to yourself and other players.

Each combatant will have a combat skill level and each skill level will gain you one combat die to roll. The combat skill will range between zero and nine and the most common level is between two and four. In addition to this, there may be bonus dies, and sometimes dice are removed from play or temporarily locked down.

Independent of how many dice you roll, only ONE of the combat dice is chosen and with its full value be used as the base combat value. The rest of the dice will be used in dice combinations, to either increase this base value or be used for actions. When you choose to perform any one of the various actions instead of, or at the same time as your general melee, dice will be used for action quality instead of as part of the final combat result.

The combat value is used both as your chance to avoid being struck by ANY opponents and as your chance to land a blow at ONE opponent. These values are compared between players to see who succeeds. The difference between values is the quality of the blow, and are used for fatigue and damage.

When a combatant is attacked by several opponents, the combatant’s combat result will count as the defence value against them all, fully or partially lowering potential damage, regardless of it is a successful or failed onfall against any of the opponents.

If you are up against and is attacking several potential opponents, you have to declare who is your main target, as you could only have one main opponent each turn. As a combatant is attacking for damage, gets a higher result, and thereby succeeds with the onfall against one, lower this opponent's stamina by the difference between the two results minus any penalty from distance. Turn order and actions may interfere with the attack, distance and protection may change the level of fatigue and damage.

To be used as fatigue and damage level trackers, there will be three blue health dies placed on your character card. As your combatant gets hit, reduce the value on the health dies one at the time, equal to the quality of the blow. Starting with the topmost die, continuing until the whole value is accounted for. The difference between combat values are the quality of a blow.

As soon as a die is down to zero you remove it. A removed die will reveal a penalty written on your character card. The values of these health dies will differ between characters and are based on a combatants’ constitution. Your combattant will be knocked out if all of your three health dice are removed.

At the beginning of every new turn, you reroll all of your available unlocked combat and bonus dice. Change your turn order. You allocate your dice as combat value and dice combinations. Priority of placed dice, onfalls, defences and actions are resolved in an order determined by a cycling sequence of timeslots. These timeslot sequences are determined by fighting styles and timeslot positions range between one to nine. Higher timeslot number is later in the turn.

Each fighting style sequence does not consist of all available timeslot positions, only a few and it varies between styles. You may voluntarily choose to act later within your own fighting style sequence for a bonus; as recovering stamina or focus and gaining additional combat dice.

There is no death in this game if you not specifically choose to incorporate this. If you want to tell a more deadly story, you may allow for serious consequences, as permanent injuries, maiming and coup de grâce.

—description from the designer

-Quotes

Inigo Montoya wrote:
My name is Inigo Montoya. This is a good game. Prepare to roll a die!

Fiore de'Liberi da Premariacco wrote:
This is the flower among games!

Jörg Wilhalm wrote:
You can not beat me in my own game, but you could in this!

George Silver wrote:
This game is as good as my own manual, a good introduction to the Art of Swordplay!