February 24, 2015
The Superfight!
As soon as you’re old enough to understand things like Superman and Wonder Woman and Batman and Wolverine, you’re old enough to know the horrible battles which must ensue for total hero(ine) dominance. Who would win in a fight: Batman or Superman? Godzilla or The Toxic Avenger? Bambi or a photography intern? Finally a game harnesses this inborn desire to argue about fictional battles, and this game is called Superfight!
- Mr. Rogers (who is made of sand and armed with a rotating machine gun turret) vs. Stephen Hawking (who is armed with a baguette and 3 stories tall)
- A Woolly Mammoth (that is literally afraid of its own shadow and throws knives) vs A T-Rex (that uses the force and has one million twitter followers)
- A Senior Citizen Bowling Team (that is on a jet ski and armed with nunchucks) vs. A Kindergarten Class (that just drank 5 energy drinks and sprays neurotoxin)
Superfight went through a major reprint in late 2014. The rules and about 30% of the cards were refined to improve the game after it sold out of the first five prints in preorders alone. The CAH/Apples mechanic has been replaced by a table vote and one-one one battles, but the battle royale and villain rulesets keep the old single-judge mechanic.
I looked up some advanced rules for the game last night. I was concerned about the advanced rules where you have 3 white cards and 5 attribute cards. This setup kind of behooves you to not use the negative cards and then just dump them. There’s an option for this to dump your hand by losing one of your victory cards but this means you won’t have the funny negative cards.
So here’s my plan. You get 3 white and 5 black cards or however many, it’s not as important. After the random enemy is created by the judge, each player plays one white and one black card. Then the judge chooses left or right and each player is allowed to play one black card on the player in that direction. This will do a couple of things. It will mean that positive and negative cards are both valuable since you want to play positive ones on you and negative ones on the other players. It will also make for funny contradictions as players try to disable others’ heroes. Also, nothing is stopping you from playing positive cards on other players if you think it will be extra funny.
From what I can tell The rules that made it to the Basic Rules status are just that. They are meant for players who play this stuff just to laugh at it. Players who often don’t even keep score.
- Separate the white cards from the black cards.
- Everyone draw three white cards and five black cards.
- Pick a player to be the Ref of the first fight.
- Ref: Draw a white card and two black cards from the decks, and place them on the table.
- Let’s say it’s a T-Rex with a lightsaber who throws grenades. Two powers almost totally erased by those ornamental arms.
- Okay, everyone else, there is your Opponent. Choose one white card and one black card from your hand as your Fighter to beat that T-Rex.
- Let’s say you play a Samurai who can clone himself. That TRex is screwed.
- Okay, Ref, now pick a direction, left or right.
- Everyone then plays one black card on the player next to them in that direction, skipping the Ref.
- This is your chance to get rid of the… less desirable… black cards. And to really make some people angry. Do it.
- Make their flying kindergarten class afraid of heights. They deserve it. They locked your fire-breathing chimp in an antique diver’s helmet last round.
- Okay.
- Now Ref, pick which Fighter would do the best against your Opponent. The Fighter you pick takes your white card as a Trophy.
- (That self-cloning samurai had a fighting chance, but someone put him in a giant hamster ball.)
- Argue with everyone else about why they lost (they’ll start the argument for you). Listen to them argue with each other. Laugh as friendships are permanently destroyed. This is the best part.
- Now change Refs somehow and do it all again. Always have a hand of three white cards and five black cards.
- Play until you are sick of playing, and whoever has the most Trophies wins.
where to buy? follow this link