The Last Brave is a hand management, hidden role game.

Title: The Last Brave

Year Published: 2018

Designer: Seiji Kanai

Publisher: Japanime Games

Players: 3-7

Game Time: ~10 mins

Set-up Time: ~1 min

Ages: 10+

Theme: Fantasy Japan

Mechanisms: Hand Management, Hidden Role,

How to win: Be the last player standing.

Game Description

A group of heroes battle to the last — can you survive?

How to play The Last Brave

A quick how-to-play video for The Last Brave.

Main mechanisms

For the basic game, we’re looking at hand management. You need to decide how you’re going to use your cards to take damage.

For the allied combat game, we bring in hidden roles and a bit of social deduction.

USP

The main USP for this game is the randomising of the 3 cards. The combat and hidden team elements have been done before. But I’m not aware of a game where you have a hand of 3 different cards from 3 different decks as your starting hand.

Theme

Yeah, faction leaders and stuff in japan. I mean, sure… The factions are Red, Blue and Grey. hardly inspiring

Setup & Rulebook

The setup is simple, get the right cards for the player count and deal one from each of the 4 decks to each player.

The rulebook is OK but could really use some flushing out and more examples. I feel that it was written by someone with very good English, but it maybe isn’t their first language?

Components & Artwork

The cards are that nice plastic cardboard that I like.

The art is that style that Japanime Games likes, the same for the Kanai factory edition of Love Letter.

Ease of Teaching

So, this is an easy game to teach… mostly.

The issue is the number of keywords which are individually fairly intuitive but can catch people out. The two costs, Fatigue and Forfeit sound like good words. But they could have been Rotate and Flip, or Exhaust and Forfeit… Just something to make them look and sound less similar.

The fact that reflect can’t be reflected should be on the card too.

Similar Games

Good Cop, Bad Cop, Bang and many others have that hidden role element.

Any player elimination card game is comparable. Go for Dead Last, or even Love Letter again.

The Last Brave Summary

I do like Seiji Kanai games like Love Letter and Chronicle but there have been misses as well.

This one falls in the middle, maybe to the upper end of his games.

Once you get playing and everyone knows the keywords and how damage works it is a really fun game. It’s just getting to that point takes a bit of time.

But, the allied team game is where it’s at. It means that each attack early on in the game is tense. You can’t be 100% sure who you are attacking. It’s only as people are eliminated or reveal their secret skills do you start to see the game open up. But that cagey start is a lot of fun.

Round-Up

A decent game that needs the hidden role element to add jeopardy to those early-game attacks.

Rating

I give it 6/10