Hi! I've been a somewhat intermittent poster on these forums, and was very nervous about posting this, so I made a point to get a moderator's permission first. But I did get that permission now, so here goes!
I'm obliviondoll, and I'm a big geek when it comes to fighting, both unarmed and with swords/lightsabers or other weapons. I've been very into both combat and dancing with weapons, particularly swords, and have grown up on Star Wars and Zorro and other fictional reproductions of weapon-based combat. I've also spent the vast majority of my life as a gamer in both tabletop and video games. I've loved a lot of fighting games, though I tend to be bad at them (with a few exceptions), and I've always loved games about swordfigthing or other weapon-based combat. That said, with swordfighting-themed videogames, I tend to prefer ones with unique and distinctive mechanics, OR ones with a smooth and consistent animation style. Over the years, I've wanted to be a videogame developer, along with other things I've aspired to, and had intermittent experiements adapting boardgame and miniature-based rulesets to be "more fun" or just different and unique. I've recently combined many of these elements of my fandoms and desires into actually creating something. Not a videogame as I originally planned to do as a child, but I've made my own card game themed around the idea of a sword duel.
https://tabletopia.com/games/clean-cutThe game is a very small and streamlined one. It has a total of 15 cards included, nothing more. There are only 8 unique cards, with 7 of them having 2 copies - one for each player. Instead of having a deck of cards to draw from, players just have 6 cards in hand to start the game, and play them to create a timeline of sorts. This essentially produces what I'm pretty sure is the first card game with frame data, though it is a very primitive implementation of the concept. But to better explain, have a few pictures. The link above is for a free online version of the game, but it has a "buy" link where you can get a physical copy that looks like the one in the first pic below. The other images are from the online version available directly in that link. It's on Tabletopia, which is a free browser-based app similar to Tabletop Simulator. There's a downloadable version of the app on Steam, but it has serious performance issues, and the web-based version runs better, so it's not worth wasting disk space on the Steam version.
This is a photo taken at my parents' place, while I was teaching Dad to play. The cards on the far right of the image are basically how the game state is tracked. The "high" and "low" cards are used to show a player's stance. When the card is upright, with the text lined up to the players on opposite sides of the table, you are in that stance, while the card being turned sideways indicates that the player is off-balance. This not only limits your offensive options (most attacks require you to be in a stance in order to resolve), but also means you're vulnerable - when you take a hit while in stance, you get knocked out of stance, but when you take a hit without a stance, you lose the game. The other card on the right is the "sword" - the reason for that name should be obvious. It's used as a "tiebreaker" when both players would normally be playing a card at the same time, and the player with the sword places their card first, which lets them essentially set the pace of the fight for that exchange.
The timeline I mentioned above extends from these cards, in this particular case going across the table from right to left (from the opponent's view it goes left to right, of course). The picture shows the whole timeline - 3 cards per player - with the cards face-up, but usually that isn't the case. On revealing your newest card, you normally pick up the oldest card from the timeline, keeping 4 cards in hand and gradually moving across the table (shifting everything back to the stance cards if you run out of space). This next pic shows how a normal game turn plays out, and is from the online version I linked above:
In this image, the latest cards haven't been revealed yet. Normally, each player places one card face-down, and once both players have a face-down card, they reveal them together. When you place a card upright (narrow edge into the timeline) it's a fast action, while placing the card sideways makes it a slow action - the lines on the cards mark out what the rulebook calls "beats" - upright cards take 2 beats, while sideways cards take 3 beats. These sections the cards are divided into are what define the sequence of events, alongside the rules for when each action takes place within the card it's part of.
I mentioned that the sword card is a "tiebreaker" - that's because it's only used when the timeline is matching in length on both sides, as it was in this picture. If one player's previous action is ending before the other, they play first regardless of who has the sword. In the above example, both players should be playing their cards simultaneously, but it's not practical to do that without giving away the orientation of your card before you play it. To address this, the player with the sword plays their card first, face-down, and the opponent responds with a card of their own - once you play your card as the first player, you pass the sword to the opponent so that in the next exchange where your timings are tied again, they go first. The player acting first has less information to work from, but is the proactive party forcing the opponent to react to them.
And this image is from the end of a game, where I've just won. I had the timing advantage, playing my cards first and setting the pace. With the oldest pair of cards, I had played a sidestep, but my opponent thought I would attack. This essentially acted as a feint, where they played the low stance card as a defensive action, which is now unavailable for a couple of turns. My next card was an attack, but because of a lack of proper defensive options, my opponent tried to force me back to the defensive with a lunge - this card is the only attack that can still resolve while you're out of stance, so it acts as a sort of "counterhit" where you take damage from the hit, but put the opponent into a defensive posture when they want to keep attacking. The problem here was that the slow action of the lunge put the opponent further behind in the timeline, giving me 2 beats of advantage - enough to play a "free" fast action. This meant that I could resolve a second attack immediately into their lunge, winning the game by doing so. My winning hit played out in the same instant as I took a hit from the lunge, so the end of the game would actually have me losing my stance as I land that final hit.
So yeah, this is me being super excited about something I made. Anyone curious, feel free to try it out, have fun, and let me know what you think! And feel free, of course, to ask me if you want an opponent. I'm a big fan of my own game (I'm probably biased), so I'm always willing to face off against a new person who's interested in it!
