Demoed the board game with the arcade flair!
For those who don’t know, PAX East has all kinds of games to check out. It isn’t just video games. They have PC games, Trading Card games, as well as board games. However, for this instance, the board game is very similar to a video game. Allow me to introduce to you Re;Match. This board game takes on the role of an arcade cabinet, and it’s a really cool design. The game also has red, yellow, and blue marbles, which allow you to attack your opponent. I had been following this game(available on Kickstarter currently) through emails and knew I had to see it for myself.
Watching videos online doesn’t do Re;Match justice. If you go off of what the videos show, the game feels very complicated and tough to understand. I can say that when playing, you play off of the other player, and your moves feel more fluid and less complicated. There were still a couple of gameplay mechanics that I felt were complicated, but I’ll get to those shortly.
For the demo, we played a shortened game. I played as the DJ, and my opponent was the Firefighter. Each character you play as has different skills that can make the game easier for you. The DJ has “beats” that she can drop during the match that do different things, like being able to do more damage when you drop a beat. You have discs that move up during gameplay, and when one reaches the end of the row, you can drop the beat and do what the ability is.
You have a character sheet, similar to the likes of Dungeons and Dragons, that gives you a lowdown of what attacks and skills your character has. You perform these attacks by taking out colored marbles and putting them back into the arcade cabinet. The character sheet tells you what attacks you have and how many marbles you need to take out. An Interesting mechanic is that you only have access to the middle row and the row on your side of the board, and the opponent only has access to the middle and the row closest to them. It makes for an interesting game. You have three discs, colored the same as the marbles: Red/Blue/Yellow. Those have health, and when that health runs out, it could be curtains because you’ll have to pay currency to get them back after they’re knocked out for the first time. If you don’t have the currency, the game ends and thus what you’re trying to do to your opponent. Now, I mentioned there were a couple of gameplay mechanics that I thought were still a little complicated during the match. One was a maneuver called shorting, I believe. What that does is when a disc is out of commission, you can use the shorting out mechanic to still use attacks from that color. You need to have the proper color as well as the shorted-out color to make this work. That gameplay element took a little getting used to. The other one is where you can get fans during the game. These fans will give you the advantage in battle. The fans are colored to match Red/Blue/Yellow to go along with the character sheet. Every time I thought I had a fan of one color, it was another one because there’s an icon on the sheet that I thought was the color associated with the fan, but the row is the fan’s color. That takes some getting used to.
Re;Match is a very interesting take on the board game genre. It has a lot of great ideas and some that will take playing the game a few times to get the hang of. I’m glad that I got to have some hands-on time with it, and BONUS, I won my match at the booth!