This is a sponsored review.

Overview & How to Play

Pick your fighter, draw some cards, attack!

To pin your opponent down, and make sure they stay down, players will be playing all sorts of attacks from their hands of cards. By doing so, they want to eventually get their opponents’ health low enough, so that a successful ‘PIN’ attack has a higher chance of keeping their opponent on the ground.

All Time Wrestling is played through not rounds, but rather something called the Initiative. If you have the Initiative, its your turn, and you play cards from your hand to attack. The other player is the defender. When you’re the attacker, all you do is just play one card from your hand, and pay its stamina cost. Now for this attack card to succeed, you must roll a die that matches the threshold, like a 2 or higher. If you get that, the attack goes through and does damage.

Attacks that don’t hit, due to low die rolls, do nothing, and get shuffled back into the deck. The Initiative would then pass to the current defender. Another way to make attacks not hit, or fail them, is through ‘blocking’ attacks, where defenders discard 2 cards from their hand.

To pin an opponent, attackers must land a successful attack with a PIN on it. When these hit, the defender is pinned down, and has 3 attempts to escape in rolling at or lower than their current health, with 2D6. If they escape, game keeps going. If they don’t, the lose, the game ends.

Wrestlers just keep doing this initiative dynamic of playing attack cards, one at a time, spending stamina for each and inflicting damage on one another, until one player cannot come up from being pinned. Thematic, right?

Pros

All Time Wrestling, or ATW for short, just immediately throws you into the ring with the crisp art on all the cards. It really does feel like you’re attacking by playing punches, suplexes, or diving elbow drop finishers, as your fighter springs to action.

But we’re here for the actual mechanics of fighting, not just sounding cool. ATW happens to have a unique fighting system that deserves plenty of praise. As a huge, jacked fighter, you have to cleverly manage a lot of different resources and tracks in a duel that consistently feels crunchy and still clean to manage.

At its core, the gameplay is just, the attacker plays one card. Then the defender chooses to block. That’s it. But what to attack WITH is tricky from your hand, because each attack costs stamina, has a certain dice threshold, then could start opening you up for later combos as you connect bottom symbols that can give subsequent attacks MORE damage.

As this attacker, you have to factor in that doing damage at any time lets your opponent actually get something, that is, they can draw a card, or regain stamina. Then, by playing a card, you lost stamina and a card from your hand, remember cards can be used to block opponent’s attacks!

Players also want to be very wary of the ‘Momentum’, a tracker that goes up and down as players land attacks, or perform Taunts as a reward for landing attacks. These can eventually give players benefits to rolling dice on Special attacks AND Finishers… which are the attacks which have pins on them to win the game. With this ‘Momentum’, players have to always re-evaluate getting hit at all, because even though they may be drawing a card from that, the crowd is slowly getting swung in their opponents’ favor now.

The act of ‘pinning’ is also a SUPER awesome victory condition. It makes you approach combat very carefully, where the goal isn’t necessarily to drop your opponents’ health. Health is only a means to making someone’s Pin escape harder, you’re not trying to kill here! This is a fantastic way of adding thematic wrestling uncertainty to every match, since the act of pinning someone down, and escaping the pin is reliant on tense die rolls.

All Time Wrestling also has fantastic ways to play around luck. Although the game has top decks to gain access to new attacks and dice rolling for each attack, there’s plenty of little considerations here: from choosing your starting hand, discarding a card to re-roll once, or to dropping your energy low enough to get a -1 to dice rolling difficulty!

The asymmetry is also SO fun here. Each fighter has their own deck of cards, distinct starting health/stamina, a passive, then TWO once per games. Maybe you’ll play someone more tanky, like Mukumbi Shumbai, who takes less damage from opponents’ Special and Finisher attacks. Or you’ll play the aggressive British Bulldog, who can spend energy to make any of his attacks slightly stronger. Then he even has a once-per-game ability to Pin an opponent, when that opponent attacks him!

Gameplay just meets the theme exceptionally here. Having the ‘Initiative’ to keep attacking until you miss or rest makes sense. Andre the Giant is 400 lbs and thus a hard target for ‘Throw’ attacks. You’re trading off doing damage… then spending stamina, just like getting tired from throwing out punches in real life.

Cons

There are some real growing pains with the rulebook, which needed to clarify hand limits, and spending health to activate abilities. Then, some attack cards have the exact same art, but different names and/or abilities!

Additional Modes

We also got to dive into the solo campaign and 2v2 mode. The solo campaign has you controlling one wrestler to eventually win a tournament, progressing by getting new abilities as he leans into being good/bad, and can even get injured over time. There’s flavor text with decisions, a clean Automa system, and engaging abilities to help you overcome the obstacles the campaign throws at you. Just don’t expect fighting against the Automa to feel quite like fighting a friend, where the robot has unlimited stamina, and attacks randomly.

The 2v2 showed a LOT of potential on our end, but we only got to play it once. Essentially, players team up with a friend, trying to pin down one opponent, while tagging each other in after successful attacks of 2 or more damage, then getting to combo off teammates’ cards. There’s even special tag attacks that expend both teammates’ stamina, to ponder about. The 2v2 overall is just a fantastic idea to inject a lot of energy and replayability into the game, while still keeping gameplay clean to the fast and climatic nature of card play. There does need to be some more work on graphic design overall for it though.

Final Thoughts

All Time Wrestling really impressed us. We’ve given it the highest score EVER, to this day, on an upcoming kickstarter game, it is hype.