A party game about a bar fight. You play a regular of Joe's bar, you swing whatever is within reach, and the song on the jukebox decides how long the fight lasts.
Everyone is drunk in the same bar and everyone is holding a fistful of punches. On your turn you hit the person next to you, they have to hit back, and the exchange runs around the table until somebody runs out of cards. When the song ends the round ends, and whoever collected the fewest punches that round takes the smallest hangover.
Your Booze Level is both your health and your hand size. Getting hit sobers you up, and a sober patron holds fewer cards, which means fewer punches to throw next round. Drinking is how you heal.
Card counts as printed in the beta rules. The full card list is not written yet, so the Cards tab covers the icon language and the special cards rather than the individual 110 cards.
The bread and butter of the mayhem. Hits, combos, gulps and the utility cards that let you rob, poison and interrupt everyone else's turn.
The furnishings. Smashable décor you can pick up and fling: the stool, the bottle, the cue, whatever the bar left within reach.
The quirky regulars, each with their own traits. Your patron card carries your Booze Level, and a second one is slid behind it as the tracker.
BL is printed on your Patron card and it does two jobs at once:
You track it by sliding the face-down Patron card behind your own to cover or reveal the current number.
The jukebox was screaming an old song, too loud, too out of place, like a drunk trying to crack jokes at a funeral. The speakers crackled with the notes of a ballad that might have made someone cry in another life. Now, it was just there to drown out the sound of violence.
A slap of neon flickered across the greasy, sticky floor, littered with broken glass and cigarette butts. Someone had just been knocked down, hard. A body hit the ground in front of the jukebox, the impact sending a half-finished drink flying off a nearby table. The glass spun in the air, catching the light for a moment before shattering into a spray of jagged shards.
The camera, if there had been one, would've pulled back just in time to catch another guy lunging forward, a bottle raised high above his head. The man on the floor groaned, trying to push himself up, but the bottle came down before he had the chance. A dull crack, and a fresh burst of blood joined the sticky mess on the floor.
Chairs scraped, fists swung, a table went over with a crash. The air was thick with sweat, booze, and something metallic, blood, probably.
And then, there was Joe.
Behind the bar. Unmoving. Unimpressed.
He wiped the inside of a glass with a rag that had probably seen better days, staring at the wreckage of his bar with the kind of resignation that only comes from seeing the same disaster unfold a hundred times before. The counter was his border, his last line of defense. On his side, calm. On the other, chaos. Someone screamed. Another glass broke. Joe just kept polishing.
Deal the patrons, shuffle the two decks, put the furniture where everyone can reach it.
Choose the first player by your preferred method. Play then runs in clockwise order.
Every round is three phases: put a song on, fight until it ends, then count who came off worst.
Pick the song. Reset the bar. Replace anyone who was knocked out.
Turns, action chains, utility cards. This is the game.
Count the hits in front of each player and pay the Booze Level.
First round: just select the song and skip the rest of this phase.
The duration of the chosen song is the maximum length of the round. When the song ends, the round ends, unless it finished earlier. Pick anything you like, but if you want a brisk brawl, avoid excessively long tracks like Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
Take every Bar Card back off the table and redistribute them as in setup: one in front of each player, and as many in the centre as there are players.
Gather everything in the discard pile, shuffle it back into the Action Deck, then rebuild the starting discard pile as in setup.
If your character was knocked out in the previous round:
The round ends the moment either of these happens:
A brawl is a chain. Somebody throws a punch, the target has to answer, and the answer creates the next target. The chain only stops when someone cannot respond.
When a HIT card successfully strikes a player, that card is placed face-up in front of them. It stays there for the rest of the round, as the record of the damage.
The targeted player may respond in one of three ways:
Hit the attacker. This is mandatory if this is the first time you are hit during this round: no dodging your first punch of the round.
Use a HIT card against an adjacent player, or against anyone already in the brawl with you.
Discard a card to redirect the HIT to the next player in turn order. The discarded card goes face-down to the bottom of the discard pile, its identity hidden.
If a targeted player has no cards in hand at all, they draw the top card of the discard pile:
Any player may play a Utility card at any time, which temporarily pauses the Action Chain. Playing one triggers a chain reaction of its own: every other player may then play one Utility card.
Resolution. All played Utility cards are placed face-up on the table. Once no additional cards are played, they resolve in clockwise order starting with the player immediately after the initiator. The initiator resolves last.
Once every Utility card has resolved, the Action Chain resumes where it stopped.
Hits do not remove you on the spot. They pile up in front of you, and the bill arrives when the song stops.
Count the HIT cards in front of each player.
| Situation | Booze Level lost |
|---|---|
| The player, or players in case of a tie, with the fewest HIT cards | 1 BL |
| A player with no HIT cards at all | 0 BL |
| Everyone else | 2 BL |
If a patron's BL reaches 0 or below, that patron is knocked out and its player draws a new one in the next Jukebox Phase.
The game ends when the total number of knocked-out patrons equals the number of players. Not one each: the total, however they are spread around the table.
The player with the highest total points wins.
The tied player with the fewest HIT cards displayed in front of them is the winner.
The icon language and the special cards, straight from the beta rules. The individual cards are not written yet, so this browser covers how a card is read rather than which cards exist.
Each card carries one or more icons that state its effect. If an icon appears more than once, the card produces that effect as many times as it is shown.
Everything you need at the table that is not printed on a card.
Jukebox. Song on. Bar Cards back out. Discard pile reshuffled and reseeded. New patrons for anyone knocked out.
Brawl. Play a HIT at an adjacent opponent, or at anyone in your brawl. They must hit back if it is their first hit of the round, otherwise they may hit someone else or discard a card to dodge and redirect. Utility cards can interrupt at any time.
End. Fewest HIT cards loses 1 BL, 0 if untouched, everyone else loses 2 BL. At 0 BL or below, the patron is knocked out.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| BL | Booze Level. Both the damage you can absorb and the size of your starting hand. Printed on the Patron card, tracked with the face-down card behind it. |
| Adjacent | The player immediately to your left or right at the table. Until you are in a brawl, that is everyone you can reach. |
| In a brawl | You have exchanged blows this round. Inside a brawl you can target anyone else in it, seating no longer matters. |
| Action Chain | The unbroken sequence of HIT cards and responses that starts when someone throws the first punch of a turn. |
| Knocked out | BL at 0 or below. The patron is gone and the player draws a new one in the next Jukebox Phase. |
| Out for the round | The state of a player who failed the last resort draw. They lose 1 BL and cannot be targeted or act until the next round. |
Bar Cards on the table at the start of a round: one per player in the centre, plus one in front of each player. Cards removed from the Action Deck to seed the discard pile: one per player.
Team notes. What is canon, where the older draft disagrees with the beta, and what still has to be decided before this can go to a full card list.
Each of these is a decision waiting to be made. The beta is what this page prints.
| Subject | Beta v0.1 (printed here) | Older draft |
|---|---|---|
| Winning | Game ends when total KOs equal the player count. Points: 10, minus 2 per lost character, minus 1 per missing BL. | Game ends at 4 KOs total, and the highest BL simply wins. No points at all. |
| Dodging | Discard any card to redirect the hit to the next player in turn order. | Same, plus a limit: a HIT can only be dodged once, the second player targeted has to take it. |
| Swoosh cards | Not mentioned. Dodging costs a card, any card. | A dedicated SWOOSH card that cancels the attack outright, discards the attacker's combo with it, and ends the chain. |
| Hand limit | Not mentioned. BL sets your starting hand only. | BL is also a hand limit: discard down to your current BL at the end of your turn. |
| Utility timing | Any player, any time, pausing the chain. | Restricted: never immediately after your own card, another player has to act in between. |
| Sand timer | Not mentioned. | A stalling target can be timed out by any player, and loses 1 BL when the timer runs out. |
| Gulp cap | Recover 1 BL, then the card becomes a Bar Card in the centre. | Same, capped at your starting BL, and placed in your own bar slot first. |
Setup hands every player two Patron cards, one character and one face-down tracker. The box holds ten.
| Players | Cards in use | Spares left | Replacements the game needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 6 | 4 | 2 |
| 4 | 8 | 2 | 3 |
| 5 | 10 | 0 | 4 |
Replacements needed = one per knocked-out patron, and the game ends on the KO that makes the total equal the player count, so the last one never has to be drawn.