Flesh and Blood Card Game First Impressions
Flesh and Blood is a player vs player trading card game.
Is there room for a game like this today?
Welcome to Flesh and Blood, the new hero-centric fantasy trading card game, designed for incredible constructed, booster draft, and sealed deck play.
Flesh and Blood Game Play
Note: This is a brief overview of how the game works without going into too much detail because it’s a trading card game so there is a lot of it.
For setup, put your hero card and their weapon card into the arena and shuffle all the other cards into your deck. Draw cards equal to the hero’s Intellect and you’re good to go.
Action Phase
You get 1 action you can use to play an action card from your hand or use one of your abilities that says action. Some of these actions say “Go Again” which just gives you an additional action point you can use.
Actions also have an additional cost shown in a red circle and you must spend that many resource points to use the action. You get these resource points by pitching cards from your hand to your “Pitch Zone”. These are placed face up and you get a number of resource points shown.
Attacking & Defending
When an action attacks, you’re attacking your opponent with the value shown in the attack box.
The opponent can of course defend themselves with cards from their hand. They can play any number of cards as long as they have a defence value on them. You don’t use resource points to defend.
Now you know the defence value you can play attack reactions from your hand and of course, your opponent can then play defence reactions. This continues until you’re both done playing cards.
Damage is just total attack minus total defence and this is how much damage the defending hero takes.
The attacker, if able, can attack again as long as they have an action point of course.
After each attack, all cards played are discarded by both players.
Ending of Turn & Game
You, as the attacker, puts any cards in your pitch zone on the bottom of your deck in any order. You can then put a card from your hand face-down in your Arsenal. This is like an additional card in hand but it can’t be pitched and you can’t use it to defend unless it is a defence reaction.
You then draw cards until you have an amount in hand equal to your heroes intellect. Note that the defender doesn’t draw so any cards they use to defend they don’t have on their turn.
Reduce your opponent’s life to zero to win.
Theme
There is a lot of lore and stuff on the website and a whole reason people are fighting. I’m sure it’s all very interesting but I’ve never been much of a lore reader
Setup
So this game also has armour and different weapons that you can use to construct your deck. As a trading card game, this would be very interesting to take part in. I could see myself back in the day checking spoiler lists and crafting the perfect fighter.
There are 19 different fighters I believe so I would have probably made 19 decks too!
Setup is just laying these characters out and shuffling the deck, something I’ve done 100’s of times in Magic the Gathering so I can’t say this would be an issue in any way.
Components & Artwork
They’re cards… Very standard cards.
The art is OK. Very “trading card game” if you know what I mean. If this art saw used in a Magic the Gathering set I don’t think anyone would complain at all.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
The downside to these games. Rules, timing issues, text-heavy cards and hidden information…
Flesh and Blood Summary
I already mentioned MTG but I mean Keyforge and Ashes if you want something more fun (and not as collectable) with a modern-day spin.
For me, it was just not interesting to play. I found chaining attacks decent and when you play card after card it is satisfying. But you can’t defend ’cause you need those cards to attack so you have to find a balance. But it’s not a fun puzzle to solve.
I just really didn’t enjoy this game.
Jesta ThaRogue
