React the arts of war in about 3 minutes
Transcript
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G'day culture and welcome to React: The Arts of War in about 3 minutes. Review copy used. It has no solo mode. It's a game for two players. Playing time is short and it's a moderately complex game. You are an amazing and talented artist and this is a bit of duel against a rival. Instead of flailing fists and high kicks, you'll be fighting with paint, clay, and your own creativity. The game ends once one player has taken three damage and you track that by changing your masterpiece from color to grayscale. The winner is the player with health remaining. Variable player powers. Each artist has a unique way of playing the game. Action programming. Actions and reactions are placed and then resolved in reverse order. Card management. Most, but not all characters will have action cards to manage. Player turn. Start by selecting which one of the eight artists you will play as. Each artist has their own unique style and rules. For example, the painter uses dice instead of cards. For our examples, I will use the dancer and the graffiti artist. Both of these characters use a deck of cards. While one has graffiti tiles and the other has tokens and minions. Start the turn by placing one of your masterpiece cards onto this board. Over a number of turns, your goal is to have all three parts of it in sequence. If the board is full, you may swap cards positions. Once it's complete, flip your artist card to its ascended side. You'll now have a one-off powerful ability to use. You can re-ascend your artist later. Next, both players draw a card. Your hand limit is six and if you run out of cards, it's game over. The core of the game is the main phase where the acting player plays a blue action. If the non-acting player passes, the action resolves. Otherwise,
you can each react to this card, playing reaction effects until you both pass. Here that sequence plays out with the artist making two swaps with pivoting step. Then the graffiti artist reacts and moves away and then finally the diving step action resolves. Each character will have unique ways of moving, defending, and attacking. Here the graffiti artist jumps from one mural, triggering its move ability, and then jumps to another mural, triggering its damage ability to hurt the artist. The graffiti artist has the dancer where he wants him, so he uses their ascended ability to move off the mural and back on, doing more damage. The graffiti artist now descends to their normal state. Once you have played all the actions you want, end your turn and your opponent becomes the active player. Get ready to react to them. Why would you like this game? Dueling games like this aren't really my jam, but I decided to take a look at React because it did things a little different. First of all, it's that central metaphor of competing art styles instead of the usual big guy wrestler versus anime schoolgirl stuff you see in many fighting game franchises. Frankly, it felt fresh. It also leads to the characters having dramatic asymmetry. My first game was with the painter who used dice instead of cards and relies on minions a lot.
And each time I played a new character, there was stuff to learn. This made the game feel deeper and more unique than other fighting games I've played. I really like that each character comes with an advice card on how to play them and another card for your opponent. But the real spice here is the reaction system of knowing when to play a reaction and keep track of where all the pieces will be once they resolve in reverse order. It's a very sharp system. All up, this game will suit a group that's going to play it enough times to really get the best out of it. The best thing about this game is the use of art as a combat metaphor. This is why I said yes to the review copy because I think that idea is just neater. However, dueling games like this require a good degree of commitment and if you just play the game a few times and move on, you're never going to get the most out of React. And being a dueling game, it's not necessarily an easy one to table at a gaming group. You kind of need to have a group of players committed to this.
For a more normal fighting game, try Guilty Gear Strive. And for a different take on art, try Canvas. React. It's this.
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