Re;VIEW:
Re;ACT
The Arts of War

Re;ACT - The Arts of War is a massively asymmetrical 1v1 tactics game. Each player takes on the role of a master Artist (one who’s so awesome that their art is literally magical), and you duel until one of you falls.

The Artists

When I say Re;ACT is massively asymmetrical, I mean the characters don’t just have different abilities, they run on totally different mechanics. At times it almost feels like you and your opponent are playing two different games at each other—and that’s a compliment, because it makes things very interesting.

Briefly, the characters and their gimmicks are:

• The Tagger: Places Murals on the board that provide bonuses to any character who steps on them.
• The Dancer: Highly mobile. Deals damage using Scales that she leaves on the board wherever she moves.
• The Sculptor: Bogs down the enemy with little summons that combine into big summons.
• The Calligrapher: Controls the board with summons and forced movement abilities.
• The Tattooist: Invincible, but loses if her summons are destroyed.
• The Painter: Uses dice instead of cards, uses rolled resources to fuel her abilities.
• The Animator: Has animation “Frames” in place of a deck. Places Frames on the board to plan actions, then his summons perform those actions.
• The Fortune Teller: “Predicts” the opponent’s moves by playing reaction cards facedown, and before reactions could normally be played.
• The DJ (expansion character): Attacks from long range using Speakers. Gains extra actions by playing Beats.

Of course, having so many different mechanics raises questions of balance. I haven’t played enough to make a personal call on things being perfectly balanced or not, but popular opinion is that Re;ACT is tuned pretty well. Sure, there are bad match-ups (The Painter’s defenses are a nightmare for some characters to get through, for one) but no one Artist is clearly dominating the meta. It means that if you are planning to buy this game for its aesthetics and style and just to try out different characters against friends, you'll be just fine.

How to Play

Going over the specific rules for each Re;ACT character would turn this into a 10k word article, so I’ll just give the broad strokes (pun absolutely intended).

You start by setting up the board. I would love to give more details here, but each Artist has such a wildly different setup that there’s really nothing else I can say about it.

However, the rules of the game require the Artists to have a few things in common: They all die after taking three damage. They all try to control the board in some way by summoning their artistic creations as backup—although those creations range from actual minions, to graffiti tags, to reproductions of holy relics. Finally, they all have a Masterpiece that functions sort of like the super meter in a fighting game, or the Gauge in Exceed. Each Masterpiece consists of three cards, and once you’ve got all three in play and arranged correctly, your Artist will Ascend to unlock their most powerful abilities. For example, the Sculptor brings out a massive clay golem to dominate the field, while the Painter… uh… turns into the archangel Gabriel and beats the hell out of everyone.

Along with your Artist, you’ll have a unique deck of cards. One thing that really struck me about Re;ACT is that each character deck only has four cards, with many copies of each. That seems like it would be really restrictive, but the cards (along with the Artist actions) are flexible enough that the simplicity is a blessing: you only need a few cards to do whatever you want to do, and there’s no need to memorize dozens of different cards per character.

Each turn starts with the turn player Progressing their Masterpiece, which means placing one of their Masterpiece cards or moving a card that's already placed. The interesting thing is that there's only one shared Masterpiece zone, so the players have to block and outmaneuver each other even here. After the Masterpiece phase, both players draw a card and play begins in earnest.

The game plays out through a series of React Chains, which is functionally the same thing as Magic: the Gathering’s stack. Every React Chain starts with the turn player using an Intention: a type of action that can only be used on your own turn. Their opponent can choose to respond with a Reaction (the only other type of action) or simply let the effect happen. If they choose to React, the turn player then gets a chance to React to the Reaction, and so on until someone chooses not to respond anymore. Everything in the Chain then resolves in reverse order, from the last Reaction played all the way back to the original Intention.

So it's a tactical dueling board/card game, which seems a lot like one of my favorite games of all time: Exceed Fighting System. However, the two games actually feel totally different - if Exceed is Street Fighter, then Re;ACT is more like Final Fantasy Tactics. Re;ACT does a fantastic job of drawing out exciting action and tactical depth from a fairly basic ruleset, thanks in large part to how different each character is and how flexible the actions tend to be.

My Demo Game: Wubs vs. Ink

My first time playing Re;ACT was when I got the chance to demo it with MingYang Lu—Brother Ming himself—at PAX Unplugged. I learned very quickly that Re;ACT is tougher than it looks, and definitely rewards repeat players who learn their characters inside and out.

This is more or less how our game went:

Ming chose The Calligrapher and gave me The DJ, who’s one of the simpler characters to play. I also saw the DJ’s potential for AoE damage, which would be the perfect counter to Ming’s waves of weak Sealbrush Spirits. So, clearly, I had the advantage. …Right?

Well, the first round played out pretty much how I envisioned it: I brought out my speakers, lined them up so they’d destroy some of Ming’s Sealbrush Spirits and hit his Artist, then fired. I was already a third of the way to victory.

On my second turn, I realized Ming had let me have a freebie. When I tried the same tactic again, he responded by forcing one of my speakers to move out of position. So, instead of clearing the board again, I just shot myself in the face.

I wised up a bit after that, started playing more defensively and actually engaging with the react chain. Even so, things did not go well for me from that point on: I never landed another hit, Ming dominated the board with summons and movement tricks to counter my attacks. A few turns later Ming completed his Masterpiece (you know, just to really show me how it’s done) and landed the killshot.

I don’t want you to come away with the impression that I didn’t have fun, or that Ming is a jerk to newbies—I had a lot of fun despite getting steamrolled, and he's a great guy. The point of this story is to show how much Re;ACT rewards you for knowing your character and planning ahead. Even though the DJ seemed like a hard counter to the Calligrapher, my AoE spam was just no match for Ming’s superior tactics. It's been almost a year since then, and the more I've played, the more I figure out new strategies, tricks, plays and counters. I don't know whether I'd win a rematch, but PAX Unplugged is coming up in a few weeks, and I'd love to find out!

Support Local Magical Artists!

Re;ACT is that rare kind of board game that takes half an hour to learn but countless games to master. The relatively bare-bones ruleset creates a strong foundation for insanely diverse playstyles, unique mechanics, and characters that somehow break those rules without breaking the game. It’s tightly designed and well balanced, and overall a great tactics game that you can really sink your teeth into.

Re;ACT is available on Brother Ming Games’s website. $59.99 gets you the Standard Edition: eight characters, plus all of their unique pieces and everything else you’ll need to play. It’s well worth the price for how massively replayable this game is. The only thing the base game doesn’t come with is the DJ, which you have to buy separately for another $20.00. This is the copy I was given in the help of writing this review, and it's been more than enough to enjoy the game.

On the pricier end of things, there’s a Re;ACT Deluxe Edition for $99.99, which gives you a bigger box (room for later expansions) and much nicer components. Supposedly there are also a limited number of special Kickstarter Collector’s Editions available for $149.99—I haven’t personally tried getting one, but the site says they still have some!

And, finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Brother Ming’s upcoming Kickstarter for Re;MATCH. This is a Re;ACT spinoff where you battle by using your character’s unique abilities to match and clear marbles in ways I don’t fully understand. However, I intend to find out when I go to PAX Unplugged in a few weeks time. It looks like a more unique take on this duelling board game genre, and I'm excited to see where he goes from here. If you are a fan of anime and good art design, Re;ACT is worth looking into, as well as this upcoming kickstarter. A fresh take on the duelling genre of board game is always a good thing in my book.