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Overview & How to Play

This is Re;ACT: The Arts of War. Uhhh yeah semicolon, freaking anime styled name, let’s just call it React for the rest of the review.

You’re trying to kill your opponent’s artist by hitting them 3 times, then you win the game. To do that, you have 2 types of abilities in the game: Blue, or Intention abilities, and Orange, or Reaction abilities. So to do anything, you must first play a blue card, then your opponent has a chance to react with a Reaction card. If they don’t, then you have a chance to react.

Then they do. Then you do, I think ya get the point.

Whenever both players decide to stop reacting, or the chain of cards hits 5, the card sequence resolves, but backwards, meaning the blue Intention card played first, will happen last.

Simple example of stuff happening backwards: paintbrush standee declares that its attacking a space. Then enemy artist plays a reaction spell to swap positions with that standee, and since the paintbrush dude already wanted to attack the space it is now standing on, it ends up killing itself!

All you need to know on your turn is that you can either play a blue card from your hand, or play a card with a blue ability from one of the cards in front of you, which will either be one of your character’s special abilities, or using a standee you’ve summoned to the board. Sometimes by triggering a blue card, you’ll be forced to exhaust standees as a cost- that doesn’t mean they can’t do anything- like they’re still gonna attack and move, it’s just that you can no longer play its card that asks you to exhaust them.

When you’re all done with playing blue cards, pass your turn, unexhaust all standees, then both players draw a card. On your opponent’s turn, just play reactions on their cards! Both players keep passing off turns of starting action chains with blue cards, then seeing what happens with the chain reaction, typically resulting in some blend of moving, attacking, or spawning more standees.

One last thing: your M-m-m-masterpiece! This is your ultra charged form of your artist, where players get one masterpiece advancement every turn to place a card of their masterpiece of 3 cards. If the masterpiece is in the right order with all 3 cards, you flip over your character card, and they get a cool new ability! Another way to advance this masterpiece is to use a character special ability.

Pros

So quick disclaimer as we start the component pros: we’ve been sent both the deluxe version and normal version of this game for the review. So, featured are acrylic standees & playmats, which will run $40 more than just getting the cardboard standees and no cardboard mats.

Cardboard or not, the standees both look great, with the full art anime characters especially looking and feeling good to move around. Speaking of art, man is there so much of that on the cards. Whether its your character doing leaps, transforming into new forms, or painting their MASTERPIECE, there’s art everywhere. And not just that, the game put in the extra effort to have the backs of cards have a unique look!

Speaking of cards, the fronts are super easy to keep track of with the color coding of blue versus orange, and are easy to read the abilities with bolding, good spacing, and even basic symbols. And if you wanna know probabilities of cards, each card even has a really nice included probability on the bottom left corner. If you take damage you flip over a masterpiece card, which is a great double usage of cards.

Plus, picking up a new character is quite smooth, since every single character sheet explains EVERYTHING you need to know when starting out. What’s more, the asymmetry is easy to learn because each character only has 4 different cards in their deck, just a bunch of copies of them! This makes the REACTING part of the game very easy to grasp, where simpler characters have only 2 reactions, meaning that you’ll pretty quickly grasp what your opponent is able to do to counter you. If you play against the fish dancer guy, you’ll see that OHH, either he can:

1. Remove scales to spawn a fish to interrupt my movement.

2. Perform a repositioning frenzy to swap with things adjacent to him.

Let’s go to gameplay pros, where we have to talk about the asymmetry we’ve been hyping up! So once again with the disclaimers, we got sent a bunch of stuff, but only 4 characters were review ready.

The front of the box artist, the Calligrapher, is all about spraying ink on everything like an octopus, especially her on summons which do most of her heavy lifting! See, once one of her summons has an ink on it, it can do an attack on something next to it, and guess what, you have 4 separate summons you can have on the board for 4 possible attacks a turn! She’s really about executing big attacks by setting up the board, using Reaction cards to exhaust or refresh standees, or move everything on the board!

Or we have my favorite, a shirtless fish dancer man, who poops out scales every time he leaves a space as he jumps around the board. Scales are super good, because whenever there’s 3 of them on a space, that spawns a fish! But these fish don’t do anything except jump around… except for when you masterpiece to get “Frenzy Tokens”- then each of his fish can jump THEN attack as a single action!

Oh yeah, the specific masterpieces are key in understanding the asymmetry. Like the Painter, who is already super weird because she has no hand of cards. Instead, she has a bunch of really strong armaments standees diagonal to you with abilities, that MUST follow your painter’s movement. The moment you MASTERPIECE, to become an entirely new form, these standees no longer are tied to the painter, and can run around and slice or twang your opponent! Every time these armaments do something, intention or reaction, she’ll have to pay dice that you roll at the beginning of every one of her turns, WOW, this is a mana system introduced for the painter!

And then her second mana-esq system is called Inspiration, which she gets anytime she would have drawn cards, and she can just spend those one at a time to inspire, to do anything on one of her spam-able character abilities, like moving, rearranging her armaments, spawning a new armament, wow, the options. Wrinkle with her, is that since she doesn’t have a hand, she can ONLY react with her armaments abilities, meaning that her capabilities are always public to everyone.

Each character has a way to spawn things on the board, so matchups are different… but we have to move onto the REACTING to the game, like literally this game’s name. There’s a lot to praise here, so let’s start with how React has its reaction chain usually update the board in an interesting way.

Orange react cards are NEVER hard negates, or straight cancelations of other cards. Rather they’re more open and free flowing to encourage creative play by thinking backwards in a stack. They usually end up doing something to shake up the game board, through moving things, giving them attributes, or preemptively attacking before your opponent can. Since many cards, blue ones included, have you lock in some type of outcome when played, this causes both players to think on their feet whenever playing cards or seeing their opponent play them.

Simple example is, want to attack the space I’m in that would damage me? Well, I’m going to swap places with your character, so that your character ends up being in the space you targeted!

Bigger example is: oh you say you’re gonna swap places with my character, well I’m going to move everything 1 space in one direction on the board, ahaha you can’t swap with anything anymore!

The cool sequencing is rather hard to show via text form, and is more accurately shown in our video review below, but the fact is that Chains can get built up to have abilities constantly playing off of each other in cool ways until you can’t play anymore Reacts at the 5 card chain limit.

Really, half the game is reacting to yourself to get more use out of your orange cards. Like, how about saying you’re gonna attack, but that attack will only actually go through if you’re inked. So announce the attack, then react to yourself to ink your standee!

This stuff CAN get pretty wild with the mind games, as you can play an initial intention card that seems to make NO sense at all with the current board state, but you MIGHT have some reaction cards to eventually make that initial move make sense. So then your opponent might just start dropping reaction cards to try to stop you, afraid of what will happen if you get your combo off.

Sometimes your opponent doesn’t react, then you decide to react to yourself! Then your opponent doesn’t do anything. Then you react to yourself again! Then THEY react to that, blowing up your entire sequenced plan! The decision to commit cards into a stack can be tense as long as you think your opponent has orange cards, and no one is excluded from playing cards from the stack until it caps out at 5.

All of that reaction really makes the positioning meet card play well. Pretty much every reaction card affects the board in some way, with the game having a big emphasis on moving. So, you’ll be constantly worried about which unit is where and how that interacts with their unique movement patterns. The Dancer guy can move infinite amount of spaces in a line like a rook. Or the Tagger character can constantly teleport to his Murals he’s placed on the board!

Or how about making your opponent move? There’s a shield armament that forces something next to it to move. Or the Dancer can pull someone towards him.

Depending on your matchup and opponent playstyle, you might play offensively on the board and leap towards your opponent, or maybe you’ll play defensively and just move back and forth and poop out scales with the Dancer. Like, you might want to be super wary about the Tagger having a BUILT in Reaction for his character to dodge, so he doesn’t need to rely on his hand to draw dodges!

Playing around the Masterpiece is also a fun push and pull, because you will usually have a decision to use a character ability to play for tempo now, or use the other character ability to play for the long run in investing in a part of your Masterpiece to later have really strong turns. You’ll want to setup the Masterpiece in a way to block your opponent’s Masterpiece, as there’s only 5 slots in the Masterpiece area with 3 cards per player. And the masterpiece isn’t some cool thing you’ll rarely see- its a factor every game as the Masterpiece advances every turn.

Cons

We here at Shelfside were only sent a review copy, so we didn’t get to see a physical rulebook and general information player aids that we’ve been told are coming.

The normal version cardboard standees were also needlessly big, and were often hitting each other when adjacent, making exhausting irritating. This will probably get fixed in the main printing, but the pictures shown are these large standees for reference.

Something we’re more apprehensive about is the cardboard standees not being see-through, which can make the board sometimes tricky to see when you start dropping tokens down. This isn’t egregious, as you can usually fix this with some slight bumps to pieces mid-game. With the acrylic standees, no problem whatsoever, and the pieces can even go on the standee base for less fiddiliness when moving standees.

Next, the masterpiece is not quite a masterpiece in visual design, where the masterpiece for some characters is pretty hard to tell how it syncs up, with thin outside lines and usually pretty abstract imagery. It just needs a thicker outline of the borders, or maybe even arrows.

Let’s get into gameplay cons though, namely how the Calligrapher, the main waifu on the box, is actually underpowered. See, she REALLY needs to have her paintbrushes on the board to do things- they’re the only way she can do damage. So, opening at least one summoning ink is pretty necessary, since if you don’t have more than 2 on the first turn, where you get one from using your character ability, you feel pretty behind.

This also goes in hand with how she’s practically immobile, where the ONLY way she can move is through a Reaction called Flowing Ink, which not only requires her to be inked, also moves everything else that is inked! This usually ends up moving your opponent’s pieces too, because the most tempo efficient play for her right now is to use her character ability to ink everything on the board. So while Flowing Ink can buy you some time by escaping a single attack, it won’t necessarily improve the Calligrapher’s positioning.

To make her less dependent on starting with summoning ink, we would prefer to just have 2 paintbrushes start next to her early game, and then take out the summoning ink card for some other tech card to make her less immobile. Maybe even give her another way to spend ink on herself to do something.

Like, we compared the Calligrapher every single other review ready character in this box, which all have a way to move as an intention on their turn, which the Calligrapher doesn’t have, PLUS they have more flexible reaction moves. Movement in position-heavy gameplay is really good, okay.

Nitpicks

There’s a couple of quick nitpicks about components we’re sure will get solved with the final printing, like:

1. The Painter having weird inspiration tokens that don’t fit on the card, but can be just used as tokens and entirely forgoing the card.

2. The Dancer’s Masterpiece that gives “Frenzy Tokens” doesn’t actually refer to any tokens that are included.

Let’s go to gameplay nitpicks! This is the fun one in deciding if this game is for you: React can suffer from a little unhealthy RNG because the cards are typically single use. If you don’t draw ANY reaction spells, most characters are literally defenseless during your opponent’s turn, in a game that is expecting you to be able to play at least some reactions. We suggest a free mulligan for each player at the beginning of the game to get around this, or you could play the painter who DOESNT ever have a hand of cards! I mean she doesn’t have zero randomness either, because she rolls dice to fuel her weapons, but if you’re not the type to enjoy bluffing whether or not you have reaction cards in your hand, she might be up your alley.

Speaking of the painter actually, she is the only character that has a mana system tied to the playing of cards, and so the game can sometimes feel victim to: if you have the reaction spell, you’re just almost always gonna play it to not get hit. The nuance there is in choosing where to move as you trigger the ability, and they’re usually flexible in some way when actually triggered, so its definitely not brain-dead. But there’s just usually little reason to not drop a react, especially when you factor in that everyone has a max hand size of 6, draw a card on each player’s turn, and so are just discouraged from hoarding cards. With only 3 health in the game, and no way to heal, losing 1 health is HUGE, and its gonna be rare that you’ll situations where you’re willing to take damage to save cards. This is a REALLY minor nitpick, and mostly the nature of the game, at least for 3 out the 4 characters we’ve played, but hey, for those with a lot of card game experience, this might be pretty nice to know.

To wrap up, the art… while we were previously praising it there are some areas it does seem kind of lazy. Like the Tagger’s masterpiece is the exact same as his murals… thematic but a little more difference would be nice. Or how 3 of the Calligrapher’s cards are just words on a scroll.

Or actually, in some areas, like for the Calligrapher whose art is front and center, has just overpowered umm… let’s just say body proportions. This didn’t affect scoring, like how the dancer is proudly shirtless for no reason, and the characters never do anything inappropriate, but we’re curious if toning these ‘artistic decisions down’ would help React appeal to more people.