Flesh and Blood Review – Olympic Wrestling and 64-Point Strikes

Disclaimer: Flesh and Blood was provided for free by Legend Story Studios, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Flesh and Blood is a lot like wrestling. Not the type with pompous introductions or ridiculous larger-than-life characters. Olympic wrestling.

Two people grappling each other using their weight, strength, and everything else to gain a slight advantage. One slip in technique or concentration is all it takes to lose it all.

You’ll feel this as you play. During your turn, you’ll need to pitch (temporarily discard) cards to gain the currency on the card. This can then be put towards paying the cost of other cards in your hand.

This creates questions about how best to use your hand of cards, while also providing tension between what to play and what to discard.

This mechanic has been used to great effect in games like Jump Drive. But here in Flesh and Blood, it goes a step further, since cards can be used for attacking, pitching, or defending.

As a result, Flesh and Blood is turn-after-turn of tactical decision-making.

Each turn, you need to weigh up the damage you’re doing, attacking cards, versus the damage you’re taking, defending cards. Then, when the dust settles, you draw back up to your hand limit and go again.

Going on the Offensive

Flesh and Blood is a game of heroes who’re already maxed level. So during the game, you don’t spend time levelling up and getting stronger, you skip all of that and jump straight into punching your opponent’s face.

One way it encourages you to use combos and go on the offensive is the Arsenal. A facedown pocket space where you can reserve one card from your hand for the next turn. But only if you’re playing the cards. It can’t be used for pitching or defence.

This allows for surprising moves and powerful combinations, and putting these together was the high point of the game.

For example, the character I played was Ira, Crimson Haze, a ninja capable of chaining multiple weak moves together. She had a distinct playstyle that felt like Neiji Hyuga repeatedly pulling off his 64-point strike.

Because of this lack of growing more powerful throughout the game, Flesh and Blood encourages you to build decks around key combinations.

Rather than usual deck construction strategies like focusing on attacking the face, or being an economic powerhouse.

The upshot of this is that the game is super simple to put a deck together and start playing.

The last CCG I owned was Android Netrunner. While I loved it, it took a four-year university degree to learn the rules. It succumbed to its theme and lost itself. Because of this, I could never consistently get it to the table and ended up selling it.

Flesh and Blood doesn’t have this problem. It has just enough rules to make sense and then lets the cards do the talking.

Play Your Way

Flesh and Blood revels in the tempo of heavy attacks, and staunch defence. You’ll find yourself pulling off a great attacking round, forcing your opponent to spend all their cards defending. However, the second you let up, you can be sure they’ll return the damage with interest.

Controlling this tempo and making sure to only take good trades will be the difference between winning and losing.

Now, before this review wraps up, it’s important to talk about Flesh and Blood‘s purchase model. They’ve split the traditional pack-based model, so you can still booster packs if you want, but you can also buy character sets. Therefore, less competitive gamers like myself can still have fun without spending half my salary every month.

For this review, I was only provided with a couple of starter decks. Only one hero and it was missing equipment cards. There also weren’t enough cards to truly dive into deck creation. This is unfortunate because TCGs live and die on personalizing your deck and modifying it to suit your playstyle.

This puts me in a weird position, where I liked what I played. Everything about Flesh and Blood is well thought out and it’s everything you could want from a tactical card game. But because I didn’t get that deck construction experience, I can’t give it the glowing two thumbs up. Instead, I’ll say it’s worth more investigation.