Duelist’s Club: Concept And Rules

This is just a write-up of some card game rules I came up with. This is the easy bit. The tricky bits that come after this are playtesting and designing the art and characters to give this thing some flavour and style.

Framing Device

The game is a pair of duelists breaking out into fights almost anywhere. They like to fence; they fence a lot; therefore, the game is about two reasonably matched people trying to predict one another. Inspired in part by SNK fighters and Utena, the characters are somewhat queer in their demeanour, but they are still meant to be high schoolers from a club situation.

How To Play

Each character has a 24-card deck representing the reserve of moves a character has. Each deck is composed of three groups of eight; eight aggressive cards, eight defensive cards, eight taunt cards. Of each group, five are basic moves, with no special effect, two are advanced techniques, and one is a Mistress technique. The Advanced techniques have an extra rider to reward their use, and the Mistress technique is particularly swingy.

At the start of each turn, each player draws four cards and chooses one of them to place face-down. When both players have placed a card, they flip at the same time to see who has won or lost or if the round is a draw.

DEFENSIVE cards beat AGGRESSIVE cards. TAUNT cards beat DEFENSIVE cards. AGGRESSIVE cards beat TAUNT cards. If both players flip the same type of card, the round is a draw. The player who loses takes the card that lost and sets it to the side, turned horizontal, to make sure it doesn’t slip into the deck. This is a point. Players play, by default, to seven points. This means losing with a good technique card can knock that technique out of your pool.

Then each player does anything extra on the cards.

Both players then put their hands and any played cards that haven’t been set aside in their discard pile, and draws four cards again. This means that as the round increases, players are more likely to know what’s coming in their opponents’ deck. Whenever a deck is empty, the player who needs to draw shuffles their discard pile into their deck, then draws as many cards as they need to.

Secondary Effects

Each card type played has a common secondary effect:

• When you play a DEFENSIVE card, you get to peek at the top of your deck for the next turn.
• When you play a AGGRESSIVE card, you get to hurt your opponent’s hand size next turn.
• When you play a TAUNT card, you get to remove cards from your discard pile, deck, or hand.