Tournament Arc - Official How to Play. A Board Game Tutorial

You're a coach training questionable skilled students to win the ultimate sports competition in Tournament Ark. Well, good luck. And today we'll be teaching you how to play Tournament Ark game designed and illustrated by Skyla Badalam and Terrell and published by Little Creature. And do check out the link to the game's page in the video description below.

And hi everyone, it's Stella and Tarant. Welcome to Mele University. And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do right now. Let's get to the classroom. Tournament Ark is the ultimate sports anime party card game. Each player controls a team of student athletes, each with their own special strengths and weaknesses.

And over several rounds of card play, players will build up their own students or perhaps do their best to break down their opponents. After several rounds of episodes, players will pick their teams for the big tournament. And unless you're playing one of those weird sports that works differently, the player with the highest score wins.

To begin this video, I'll take you through the standard single season mode of play. This is a standalone game where each player builds their team of athletes and uses them to compete in a single sport. To set up, shuffle the four decks of cards. the sports episodes, athletes, and regions. You'll also need the times two token.

This is known as the main character token. The season then plays in three phases: drafting, training, and competing. In drafting, the first step is to flip one of the region cards face up. This is the location where this season of the tournament takes place, and some athletes will have a home field advantage in this location.

Then you'll gain athletes. Each player draws three cards from the athletes deck. Simultaneously, all players look through the cards they've been dealt and choose the first athlete for their team. It can, in particular, be good to choose one who has a home field advantage. Place it face down and then hand your other two cards to the player on your left.

You'll receive two cards from the player on your right. Look at those and again choose one athlete to keep and hand the other to the player on your left. You'll receive one card which you keep simultaneously. All players now flip and reveal their three athletes face up. This is your team of athletes.

Feel free to give them a backstory if you're playing the game with storytelling, but for game play, take note of your athlete statistics. There are four of them and they're the same four for each athlete. Teamwork, focus, body, and underdog. Depending on which sport ends up being played, one or more of those statistics may be important.

Next, you'll move to training. To begin training, each player draws five episode cards from the deck, then choose a first player. The rest of this phase is resolved in turns, starting from that first player and going clockwise around the table. On your turn, you must play two episode cards from your hand.

You can think of these as being individual episodes in a teen sports drama, and they're going to have either a positive or negative impact on the athletes. There are three types of episodes. The majority has this star icon in the back of the heading. And this card is played underneath any one athlete on the table.

It remains there unless removed. And in most cases, it's going to add or subtract from that athlete statistics. In some cases, the card will have a text effect which applies to that athlete instead of an adjustment to statistics. When you play an episode card, you can play it on any athlete, whether it belongs to you or another player.

And so for episodes with negative effects, it's best to play them on your opponent's athletes. There's no limit to the number of episodes a single athlete can have. And the single athlete on the table with the most episodes claims the main character token. That means they're the main character of this teen drama.

And for better or worse, their score will be doubled in the final tournament. An athlete loses the main character token as soon as it has equal or fewer episode cards attached than any other athlete. The second type of episode card is an immediate effect, which shows this rubbish bin icon. When you play this card, resolve its text effect.

Here, for example, it's drawing a fourth athlete, and then discard it. The third type of card you can play is a persistent effect showing this padlock. Place the card in front of yourself. It is not associated with any single athlete and whatever's printed on it remains in effect for as long as the card is in play.

Remember that you must always play two episode cards on your turn. And when you're finished, redraw up to or discard down to your standard hand of five. The training phase is resolved in four rounds. That is, each player will take four turns in turn order. However, it's not until after the second of those rounds that you'll find out which sport your teams will be playing.

So, after the last player's second turn, flip over the top sports card. Check the sports effect. This may have some passive impact on the next rounds of play or it may have a once- off immediate effect which all players must resolve now or the effect may be related to how the scores are resolved at the end of the game.

Whatever it is, after you've resolved any in-game effects, players should take note of the team size and statistics, as this is how the game is going to be scored and therefore what you should base the rest of your strategy around. Now, continue taking training turns as before until each player has taken a total of four turns.

Now, you'll move to competing, and this is where players add up their scores and determine the winner. At this point, you'll have some number of athletes with episodes attached. Through various effects and episode cards, you may have more than three athletes. Now, choose the depicted number of athletes, picking the ones which best suit the statistics for this sport.

For example, baseball is a game of focus with an underdog story, which are Tempest Freight's worst statistics. So, my team would be the other three athletes. add up the values for those stats. So for someone's dad, it's 1 + 1 is two. For Rebecca Pinefield, focus is zero and underdog is four, a total of four.

And for Drake Tanaka, focus is two and underdog is three, a total of five. Then for better or worse, double the score for any athlete who is in their home field advantage. And for an athlete with the main character token, if an athlete has both, you double then double again. In other words, a total of quadrupling.

Therefore, in this game, my score would be 2 + 16 + 10, a total of 28. In all standard cases, the player whose team has the highest score wins. If the sport has a special win condition, make sure to take that into account when determining the winner. Once you're familiar with standard play, you can play one of the games variants.

In the competitive rule set, players do not have their own personal hands of episode cards. Instead, lay 10 episode cards face up on the table. And on your turn, you will play two of these cards from that choice of 10, replenishing at the end of your turn. So, each player has 10 to choose from. All other standard rules apply and you'll still reveal the sport after two rounds of episodes.

You can choose to play with extended gameplay. No longer is this building teams for a single decisive game. Now you're playing a full tournament across many sports. Immediately after the starting draft, draw the first sport. Each player now takes a single turn to play two episode cards. before you move to competing and whichever team has the highest score wins that sports card.

Then go back to training and do it all again. You'll reveal another sport and then take one more turn of episode cards again resolving the sport once you're done. Note that it's only the sport and not the region which changes at the start of each new round. Region will stay the same unless a card effect changes it.

The first player to win three sports wins the game. You can play graduation mode, and this resolves over multiple seasons. Regardless of which of the described modes or rule sets you've played, at the end of any given season, each player must choose one athlete who graduates from high school and goes off to college.

They now get replaced with new freshmen. Any player who has fewer than three athletes simply draws and adds one to their team. When you go to the new season, you do reset the region card, shuffling all regions together and drawing a new one. While discarded sports episodes and athletes are not returned to their decks.

After all, this is a teen television drama. It's all right to set every season in the same place, but it's not great to rehash the same story line again and again and again. This is, of course, unless you run out of cards entirely. Once a show goes long enough, eventually you're going to have to repeat some ideas.

The first player to win two seasons, whether you're playing the single sport mode or the extended play, will win the game. The rule book offers you some additional suggestions for house rules and encourages you to have some fun telling the story of your teen drama. As the episode cards include some classic tropes from sports movies or from sports animes or perhaps some more absurd cartoonish situations or even breaking the fourth wall and looking into how your show was produced in the first place.

Thanks for watching. And if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day.