ReAct - How to Play Re;Act Board Game

0:00 hi it's Taryn and Stella from Maple University today we'll be teaching you how to play react game by Chris Lin and published by Brother Ming games let's get to the game in react players take on the roles of different artists fighting against each other in a field of combat players will program their intentions and their reactions with the aim of placing their tokens summoning support standees attempting to complete their own personal masterpieces and ultimately take the Tactical advantage to defeat their opponents in combat the first player to hit their opponent three times or drain them of their deck of cards will win the game to set up lay out the main board and then on one side in the five slots place the five react chain markers each player chooses an artist character known as an entrant and takes all of its matching components this includes your entrance large standee your large information card which includes any passive abilities and some information on how you should play your smaller reference card which should be flipped to its unascended side and three cards which represent your Masterpiece and they'll make up a continuous picture these should be flipped over to the colored side up other components will depend on your

1:31 character most players will have a deck of cards which is shuffled and the rules we'll explain first apply to characters who have decks you may have some special summons sandees and the cards which go with them and you may have a collection of tokens which combos with the cards in your deck and characters place your standee on the start starting space of your side of the board and follow any other setup instructions on your entrance card both players draw four cards from their decks choose a player to be the turn player on the first turn and you're now ready to play react is played in turns and on each turn one player will be known as the turn player and you'll take turns back and forward with alternating players being the turn player both the turn player and the non-turn player will be able to take actions during each turn but the turn player has more options available each turn is played in four phases first is the Masterpiece phase where the turn player gets to attempt to progress their masterpiece if they successfully complete the three-part masterpiece the player's entrant will Ascend to its stronger self second is the draw phase both players draw one card into hand up to a maximum of six third is the main phase and here the players will use cards from their hands or cards belonging to their standees

3:02 to program different combinations of intentions and reactions each set of these is called a reaction chain and will represent a sequence of actions which are resolved from Back to Front the turn player is the only one who can initiate a reaction chain and may initiate any number of such chains in a turn while both players are prevented to play reactions into those chains these are the actions which will move standees around the board Place tokens and ultimately launch attacks finally comes the end phase in which you'll refresh for the next turn play Then passes to the next turn with the other player as the turn player react is a duel and your aim is to Target and damage the opponent's entrant entrants have three Health if you suffer a damage flip one of your Masterpiece cards over to its black and white side if all three cards are flipped you immediately lose the game you can also lose the game if your draw deck is empty and you're instructed to draw another card so now let's look at each phase of a turn in detail the first phase of each turn is the Masterpiece phase and this is done only by the turn player your aim is to get the three segments of your Masterpiece adjacent to each other in the right order in the five Masterpiece spaces at the side of the main board for the purposes of this phase and this

4:34 mechanism it doesn't matter whether the cards are colored side or black and white side up flipping a card to its black and white side purely tracks your health for all other purposes the card is treated the same regardless of which side is up in the Masterpiece phase the turn player progresses their Masterpiece once this means move one card from your Masterpiece onto one of the five slots of the Masterpiece Zone if all five slots are full then you can replace one of your opponent's Masterpiece cards with one of your own and if you have no Masterpiece cards off the board then you can swap any two Masterpiece cards that are on the board when you complete your Masterpiece remove all three cards from the Masterpiece Zone and then flip your entrance reference card over to its ascended side this will have more powerful abilities on it note that each player also has a way of progressing their Masterpiece a second time on each of their turns using one of the intentions on their entrance reference card the action that allows this will be weaker than the other action in terms of the effects it has on the main board and only one of the two effects will be usable each turn the second phase is the draw phase and here each player both turn and non-turn draws one card from deck into hand maximum hand limit is six and if your hand is full you do not draw

6:06 otherwise drawing is mandatory and if you have no cards left in your deck to draw you automatically lose the game third is the main phase and here the turn player will start off react chains which will trigger actions on the main board there are two types of effects in the game intentions which are shown with blue text and reactions which are shown with red in order to start a react chain you must do this with an intention you may use an intention card from hand or your entrance reference card or the reference card of a summons which is on the board take the intention card and play it in the one slot of the reaction chain if it has multiple options declare which one you're using then pay its cost which represents any text in the blue box for this bottom action for example the cost is to exhaust me that is exhaust the standee represented by the card and Target an orthogonally adjacent Zone when you exhaust the standee it rotate it 90 degrees from all the other standees leave it in this orientation until the end of the turn it's to remind you that you're not allowed to exhaust that standee again if the cost is to Target a Zone then you'll take the number one token and place it into a valid Target Zone

7:36 the orientation of the arrow doesn't matter if the cost is to choose a direction then rotate the current slots token into one of the four cardinal directions in this way most of these costs mean that you'll be choosing a Target zone or Direction before you've seen what reaction cards are going to occur cards are ultimately going to be resolved in reverse number order meaning that your intentions may not be the outcome of your action once the intention has been played the non-term player now has the first opportunity to play a reaction card that is any card with a red effect into the number two slot of the reaction chain as for the intentions this could come from hand or it could be a standees card if that standee has a reaction effect if the reaction has a cost in the red box that cost is paid now opportunity then passes back and forward between the turn player and the non-turn player each having opportunities to play reactions but not intentions bear in mind that it is only the opportunity to play a reaction which passes back and forth not the requirement to if the turn player plays a reaction in slot 3 then the non-turn player has the opportunity to play a reaction in slot 4. if they pass that up it goes back to the turn player who can in effect play a reaction to their own reaction the reaction chain is complete only

9:08 after both players pass in sequence or after five cards have been played in the sequence you'll now resolve that reaction chain starting from highest number and going backwards to the lowest number some of your most powerful turns in the game are going to be about making these reaction chains work for you that is stringing a couple of actions together to get in the best tactical position to damage your opponent and it can be as important or even more important to react to your own intentions as it is to react to your opponents but be aware that it's not uncommon for many intentions to pass in the game without being reacted to and it's key to find the best tactical moment to play your reactions most of the actions available to the different entrants are unique there's really only four standard actions that everyone may have move simply allows a standee to move one space orthogonally adjacent or into some other destination if the effects of your cards say so a particular special move common to a couple of entrants is Jump meaning to move to the next open space in a certain direction for example this would be a jump as would this only one standee may occupy each Zone if this one were attempting to move in this direction for example then the movement would be unsuccessful and the standee's movement would simply be ignored

10:38 some character actions allow for summoning which brings one of that character's secondary summon standees into play once in play that summon's reference card can be used for its actions once again there can be only one standee per zone so if a sum and were to occur but a stand e were already present the summon fails the third General effect is damage and generally speaking your action will tell you to damage a Zone and it may be a zone that you've chosen by a Target earlier damaging a Zone damages the standee in the zone if the standard is a summons it has only one Health and is removed from the board but can be re-summoned later on if the target is an entrance then lose one Health by flipping over a masterpiece card be warned that Friendly Fire is possible if you target a zone for damage and then the opponent's reactions puts your standee in that zone it is you who will suffer damage at your own hand the last of the general actions which we described before was to progress your masterpiece and once again this will be attached to the weaker of your entrance actions on the board the target token from the reaction chain once it's been placed into a Zone doesn't get moved while resolving that chain similar to the example with damage before whatever was going to happen in this targeted Zone will always happen in

12:08 that zone even for example if a standee had targeted an adjacent Zone and is then moved away before the effect in that zone is resolved how to treat the tokens belonging to the different entrants on the other hand depends on the rules for that entrant which can be read on the information cards the dancer for example has scale tokens which are placed in zones and they never move even if characters move out of them while the calligrapher has ink tokens which are used to ink standees and so these tokens will be placed on the standees and would move around with them many entrants have passive abilities and if you're resolving the sequence of a react chain and one triggers interrupt it to resolve the passive effect before continuing finally do note that many effects in the game do not differentiate between your standards and opponents the calligrapher's summoning or flowing Inc could equally ink their own standees or the opponents and will be able to combo with other cards in different ways depending on which is chosen once a reaction chain has been fully resolved from right to left players retrieve their cards from the chain and reset the tokens cards from standees come back into your Face-Off display you won't be able to use them again this turn because the standards are exhausted but you'll be able to use them again from subsequent turns cards from your deck go into your discard pile when they return never to

13:40 be used again then the turn player has the opportunity to start off another reaction chain using another intention card available to them resolve that chain in the same way and continue resolving chains until the turn player either cannot or does not wish to start another reaction chain then it's time for the end of turn phase if your intern has a passive ability which resolves at the end of the turn then do this now and refresh all of both players standees that were exhausted during that turn back to the conventional orientation play Then passes to the next turn with the opposite players serving as the turn player continue taking turns in this way until one player's entrant has lost all three health or until a player must draw a card and has none remaining in deck the uniquely designed characters in react all represent different areas of the Arts and are designed to play quite differently they'll often move deal with their standees and place tokens and damage in different ways but critically players aren't overwhelmed with choices or combos each of the entrance deck is composed of copies of only four different cards forcing you to understand how those cards work together and how to make the most out of that limited range of actions players should also be aware of the special character known as the painter

15:10 while we won't cover her rules in detail in this video the painter has no deck of cards and instead has an inspiration resource which is drawn in place of cards and a set of dice which are rolled and then spent to resolve the actions on all of the different standees cards and that's how to play react we hope that you enjoy the video we are using a prototype copy of the game and so the rules and components may not be final and do check out the project page for the game we'll put a link to that in the description below and if you find this video useful please help us by hitting the like button subscribe to us you can also hit the Maple in the corner to do that and hit the Bell icon so you'll know when we have new videos you can also follow me on Instagram for my board games Journey comments suggestions and feedback are all welcome in the comments section below watching and see you next time