Why I felt in love with Buddyfight

After the news of Buddyfight's end. I went back to my blog to write the article to encourage everyone to keep playing the game casually. I found this article that was in the draft.
I finished it to be able to publish it.
In this article I am only talking about Buddyfight while I was still playing competitively, before 2017.
Enjoy !

I want to take the time to remember the good time I had, and why I loved Buddyfight so much.


Reason 1 : It is not a ressource based games
Many games use a ressource to balance the game : Magic, Heartstone, Shadowverse... Because of the mana. This means every duel will always start will small cards to ramp into bigger cards.
In Buddyfight, there is no mechanic like that. Like Yugioh, every cards can be played on turn 1.
The speed of the game will never be the same from games to games, sometimes you will start hard then go slower, sometime you will start slow before going hard late game.

Reason 2 : The gauge
The gauge is such a clever mechanic.
Because of the lack of ressource, Yugioh falled into a very annoying trap : it is very hard to balance card effects. If a card has an immense effect, the only way to balance it in Yugioh is to restrict it, put a life cost (which is mostly negligeable, look at Solemn judgment) or make it a card cost (discard, tribute) but this quickly makes the cards not worth it anymore.
This is where Buddyfight's gauge comes into play, it creates a way to tune cost/effectiveness more precisely.

Gauge also solves a fundamental issue in card game's randomness : randomness means no game will look the same. But that also means a player can get bad luck. It is hard for a game designer to balance randomness and stability. Which gauge does very well :
It is always frustrating to know you have lost the game before it evens start, by just looking at your hand and seeing you drew the wrong cards.
By ditching your useless cards you can build a good hand and come back into the game throughout multiple turns. Having the ability to get ride of useless cards while not waisting them is a privilege only Buddyfight can give you, and you will miss it when you will play other games.


Reason 3 : Life points
In every card games, life points don't matter until they do.
Which means as long as your life points don't reach zero, it doesn't matter how much life points you have. Board control and ressources are more important.
This is true in Buddyfight, but not as much as in other card games. Because of how accessible life points are (just get ride of the monster in the center or use penetrate), you are never safe. No matter how much ressources you have.
You may have 5 more cards than your opponent, if you only have one life point left you are still on your toe.


Reason 4 : Monster, field and size
The more I think about it, the more I am amazed at how smartly monsters are handled in Buddyfight.
Every cards game need to have monsters of different sizes to create a feeling of power when you call a big monster. If every monsters had the same power, it would be a very boring game. But you have to balance those monster of different strenghts. If there is no reason to play small monsters, everybody will play the big ones and we fall back in the problem where every monsters have the same power.
Most card games take the Magic approach : the longer the game goes, the bigger the monster. Small monsters are good early while big one are good later in the game.
Yugioh has it's unique approach : big monsters need tribute (tribute summon, fusion, synchro...). Which I like a lot.
But Buddyfight, it is the game that handles monster size the best in my opinion, and by far. Everything is tight together to let the player express what monsters he wants to have : flood with size 1s ? Or put a one man army of size 3 ? Or put both in the deck, adjusting your board set up on the fly ?

Wow, the more I think about this game, the more incredible I find it.
If you have never played Buddyfight, you should consider trying the game casually, it is a real breath of fresh air in the world of TCG.