Smashing Buttons
Some games come unheralded... This is the case of Neon Reign, which surprised us so much that we almost missed it. Designed by Manny Trembley as the premiere title of his newly founded game studio, Neon Knight Games (in the meanwhile acquired by Chip Theory Games), it launched on Kickstarter last Tuesday and will be live till May 14.
Neon Reign offers as its theme a neonized spin on arcade fighting games and pits two fighters one against another, exchanging kicks and blows until one is knocked out or both get too exhausted to keep going. Mechanically speaking, you have a finite deck (once it's depleted, it's depleted!) and start with a hand of 7 cards drawn from it. On each round, you can play up to three cards to attack, hopefully arranging them into a combo to get additional bonuses (extra damage, "shield" tokens to parry future damage, "star" tokens to activate your character's special attack). Combos are specific combinations of cards, such as one joystick and two buttons, as seen below. Alternatively, instead of attacking, you may recover and draw up to 7 cards, otherwise your hand will soon be depleted.
However, your opponent can now play two cards to defend! These defense cards may break your combo, discard a button or a joystick card, and even deal damage to you. Only then do you resolve your attack. This core loop keeps going over and over until one player has no HP left, or both players run out of cards, in both their deck and their hand.
In solo, you play against a bot that relies on a dedicated deck of cards: each card is either played in attack or defense and specifies the corresponding effects. The special "star" skill of the bot can also be triggered, just as in the normal game.
Personal opinion: I never played arcade fighting games and am not interested in doing so. Yet for some reason I enjoy their board game adaptations. I own several of them already, including Combo Fighter and Pocket Paragons, the two games that may be the closest to that one (both include a way to play solo against a bot as well).
Neon Reign checks all the right boxes for me. It has nice art, and although I am far from enamored with it, I appreciate a lot that it is not gross. It's (relatively) cheap, it plays fast, and the rules are really simple, which is a must in this type of game in my opinion (you want action, not thinking too much about convoluted rules). I also like that the Deluxe version is just that - a deluxe version.
I happily backed the standard version, because a) it's substantially cheaper and b) I dislike the smell of plastic cards.