Super Battle Mon is a sort of micro-TCG, where decks are 7 cards (10 total if you have a sideboard), games are 6-7 minutes long, and you can play without a table. More on that last one later. I quite like it!
It’s also in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign for a pair of mini-expansion structure decks. So if any of this sounds fun, I’d encourage you to go check it out and consider pledging.
The goal of Super Battle Mon is quite simple. Each player starts with their entire deck in their hand, and each turn both players play a Mon. After resolving each Mon’s abilities, you compare your total Mons’ power to your opponents’, and the player with lower power discards a card. This continues until both players can’t play any more cards, and the player with the most Mons in play wins.
So what’s the catch? Well, there are quite a few. Many Mons can be cheated into play. Mons also have costs that have to paid by discarding cards, and each card spent paying those costs is one less Mon in play in the long run. There are mind games on what your opponent’s next Mon will be, and there are counter plays to overly devastating strategies. (Looking at you Capybara.)
And all of it is packed into a very short game that can be played in just a few minutes. And honestly, that form factor is a large part of my enjoyment. Games are so short that even when I did get blown up, I just dug into my collection and built a new deck.
Overall Thoughts
TCG’s as hobbies are notorious for being time and money sinks, but with Super Battle Mon, every booster pack is a deck. It’s possible to build a deck, play it, rebuild it, play it again, and then scrap it and build a new one in less time than a single game of Magic.
Is it a perfect game?
Well, no. Not yet. There’s a fair number of errata for the first set, and the ability resolution system is a bit clunky. Not a bad system. Just a bit tricky to parse correctly.
Still, Super Battle Mon does an excellent job of delivering on what it’s trying to do: the bite size TCG experience, without the pain points of most modern TCG’s.
And since they managed to fulfill their first crowdfunding campaign, I feel pretty comfortable pointing folks at the second one. So maybe if you want to play a card game with more playing and deck building then just buying cards, check it out.