Draft a Team of Challengers to Capture the Flag

by W. Eric Martin

In my preview of Splendor Duel, I wrote, “The two games I enjoyed most (that I can talk about at this time) are Splendor Duel and Sea Salt & Paper.”

Today I can talk about the third game that I enjoyed the most at Gen Con 2022: Challengers!, a 1-8 player game from Johannes Krenner and Markus Slawitscheck that Austrian publisher 1 More Time Games will debut at SPIEL ’22 and that licensee Z-Man Games will release in English in October 2022.

Your goal in Challengers! is to capture the flag — well, the flag will change hands between you and your opponent multiple times over the course of a duel, so you want to be in possession of that flag when the duel ends. If you win the duel, you collect a trophy, with trophies worth a varying number of “fans” — which are the game’s points — and with trophies being more valuable in later rounds of the game. After a round ends, you probably switch seats to face off against a different opponent, so in a game with eight players, you will have four duels taking place simultaneously, and you will play against each other opponent once. (With an odd number of players, a robot competes against the lone player so that nobody has a “bye”.)

To grab that flag, you employ a team of humans and other assistants, with you modifying that team at the start of each round. Here’s your starting crew:

In the bottom right is one of the tournament plan cards for a 7-8 player game. The icon and color show which field you play on in each of the game’s seven rounds, with the game including four playmats for the fields. The icons in the center show how many cards you will draft from which deck, with some rounds giving you an option to draft from one of two decks.

When you draft in the first round, for example, you draw five cards from the A deck, keep 0-2 of those cards, then discard those cards. If you kept fewer than two cards, draw as many cards from the A deck as you discarded, then keep enough cards to add two new cards to your deck. After drafting, you can remove from the game as many cards as you wish from your deck, then you shuffle up against that round’s opponent and play.

The starting player in a duel reveals the top card of their deck, carries out the special power on that card (if any), then claims the flag, placing it on that card. Then the next player goes on the attack, flipping cards from their deck one by one until the combined strength of the revealed cards equals or exceeds the strength of the single card that currently has the flag. When this happens, the player on the attack claims the flag, placing it on the card most recently revealed (and sliding their other revealed cards underneath this one), then the starting player moves all of their cards from the field to their bench, with each card that has a unique name getting its own seat on the bench. (Defeated Newcomers, for example, would all be placed into a single bench seat, whether they were defeated the same turn or on different turns.) The starting player then goes on the attack.

Midgame

A duel ends one of two ways:

• If you can’t reveal enough strength on cards to capture the flag, you lose.

• If you have to move cards to your bench, which has only six seats, and don’t have room to place all of your cards, you lose.

The two duel-winning conditions pull you in conflicting directions. You want a thick deck so that you don’t run out of cards and can always steal back the flag, but if you have a wide variety of named teammates, then you run the risk of filling your bench quickly. You can remove cards from the deck at the start of a round, but then you tilt in the other direction.

Thus, when you draft, you’re trying to find cards with high strength or powerful special effects, but you’re also trying to find cards with the same name so that they can be benched together. Do you want a Movie Star that can return up to two Newcomers from your bench to the top of your deck? Maybe you want Skeletons because the A deck has eight of them (as opposed to four copies of most cards and only 2-3 copies of rare cards), which means you’re less likely to run out of bench space? They have only a strength of 2, but when they have the flag, their strength is 3. Maybe you want Jugglers or Reporters so that you can manipulate your deck and win without “wasting” strength. (If your opponent has a 4, you don’t want to flip a 2, then a 1, then a 4 because you’ve just spent three cards, wasting the first two.)

To set up, you always use the basic city set, then you choose five of the other six sets in the box, splitting the cards into A, B, and C decks, then shuffling them. Each set includes a card or two that encourages you to emphasize drafting from that set. The Merman, for example, is only strength 1, but if you have an anchor card on the bench when the Merman comes out, it has strength 4 instead. When Vendor is on the bench, all of your circus cards have +1 strength, and effects multiply so Vendors would power up one another, while also boosting other circus cards in your deck.

Some cards go the other way, though, with Mascot granting +1 for each different set icon on your bench. The basic city set uses the same icon as your starting team, so if you draft multiple Mascots (which are themselves a city card), then you’d want to draft for variety and strip out starting cards to boost their power, but without stripping out too much, right?

Maybe you want Clowns. They have only 1 strength, but if they gain possession of the flag, you gain 2 fans immediately. Several other cards make it possible to gain fans during duels, so maybe you want to push in that direction, with the trophies being a side bonus.

Victory! (and bad lighting!)

A game lasts seven rounds, then in a game with three or more players, the two players who have the most fans compete in a final duel, and the winner of that duel wins the game. With two players, whoever has the most fans after seven rounds wins, although the game includes a mercy rule granting immediate victory if you have 11+ more fans than your opponent.

I played five rounds of Challengers! with eight players at Gen Con 2022, so I didn’t go through the full game (due to other appointments I had scheduled), but I loved pretty much all that I did experience — and not only because I won all five of those rounds.

The card drafting is minimal, yet important, with your deck slowly shifting over the rounds as you add more parts to the machine or, say, realize that your lone Talent is not worth the space when you consider its 2 strength versus its non-synergy with your deck and bench. (The basic city set contains more Talent, though, so maybe you’ll lean into Talent or, based on other cards, strength 2 or the city icon.) The choice to draft from deck A or B (and B or C) allows you to choose between consistency and power. Do you want a chance at more cards of the same name to lessen your odds of a bench bounce, or do you want stronger cards that will force your opponent to flip more or give you some other benefit?

All of the components in a space where someone hates books

You don’t have a hand of cards, but instead shuffle your team, then let them go at it, so you need to think holistically. Pretty much every card that’s not vanilla — that is, that has a special power and isn’t just a number on a card — has better or worse times to come out, but you don’t know what’s coming when, so you get to be surprised in both good ways and bad. In two of my duels, for example, my first card was one that lets me move a card from my bench to my exhaust pile, which is just a space for defeated cards that aren’t on your bench, so I whiffed on its power, but my Gangsters (which have a +2 on attack) hit over and over again at just the right time, defeating someone with just enough strength so that I didn’t waste anything.

You’re flipping randomly, so yes, chance plays a role in the duels, but you also have choices during the duel: what to remove from your bench or your opponent’s, how to manipulate your deck…hmm, that’s mostly it from what I’ve seen, but that’s enough for me — little tweaks to your overall plan created via drafting, similar to a coach who has to hope that all of the planning pre-game will lead to victory through the actions of their team.

I love chance elements in the games I play, and Challengers! leans into that aspect of game design. Sure, sometimes things don’t go your way, but maybe next time? A similar feeling runs through Carlo Bortolini‘s Riftforce, the first release from 1 More Time Games, which I cover in detail here. Unlike that earlier release, Challengers! works with up to eight players (instead of only two), and the playing time should stay the same no matter the player count, so it seems ideal for convention play or a store event, with friends or random people coming together for a one-off event or a full-day series of tournaments.