A Gamer’s guide to Board Games – Part 4: Team Management and Fighting Games

We’ve already established how vast the world of board games for video gamers who like strategy, RPGs and adventure games can be.

But what happens if you’re more of a fan of a genre that doesn’t translate to the table as intuitively as those genres above?

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some special board games out there that are mechanically or thematically unique enough to scratch your itch for a certain kind of game.

Here are a few surprising suggestions:

The ‘I’ in team

Blood Bowl: Team Manager

Love juggling rosters and building up player talent in games like Football Manager? Blood Bowl Team Manager gives a new meaning to the term ‘fantasy football’, replacing the likes of Ronaldo and Messi with orcs and dwarves.

The game lets you customise your team by choosing and upgrading the star players.

If the only thing you love more than soccer are superheroes, it’s time to take your Starlord-quoting self down to your local board games shop and start playing Marvel Dicemasters.

Pick your own ultimate superhero roster from the likes of the X-Men and the Avengers.

Living card games (LCGs) let you choose from an even more expansive list of options for the ultimate in team management mechanics. Forget Magic.

The new breed of card games don’t need you to spend thousands of rands just to get hold of that one rare card that will make your deck viable.

Games such as Android: Netrunner and A Game of Thrones: The Card Game let you mix and match decks to make the ultimate fighting team.

Deck ‘em

Puzzle Strike

Yes, fighting games are all about the furious button-mashing, something which you won’t exactly find in board games.

But they’re also about something just as addictive that board and card games have in spades. Can you say c-c-c-c-combo?

For gamers who play beat ‘em ups partly for the satisfaction of stringing together several combos in a row, deck builders can provide the same visceral thrill.

These let you build up your own decks of cards so that you can pull together impossible combos and counteract your opponent’s own impossible combos.

There’s more of a build-up here as you have to use the early parts of the game to choose the right cards for your deck, but the payoff once you do is sweeter than a Falcon Punch to an opponent’s face.

Striking out

Smash Up Cards

In our opinion, the best implementation of a fighting game is Puzzle Strike, which makes the most advantage of the natural similarities between beat ‘em ups and deck builders.

The game lets you choose a pixelated fighter with its own special moves, and you get to buy chips with different powers on them to help you bring down your opponent.

There’s quite a variety of alternatives to choose from depending on the kind of fighting you want to do. Marvel vs Capcom or Injustice: Gods Among Us fan?

Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game and the DC Comics Deck Building Game scratches that itch, whichever comics universe you prefer.

Smash Up answers the question of who would win if zombie bears went up against robot aliens once and for all. And if you’re a hardcore Street Fighter fan, look no further than the Street Fighter: Deck Building Game.