UK Games Expo - Flesh and Blood

 

A friend of mine is really into the CCG "Flesh and Blood", and the UK Games Expo was the only place a particular promo card was going to be available... If you played in certain tournaments. So I agreed to sign up to play a tournament for a game I'd never played, and thought it'd be interesting to document the process.

The tournament was on the Sunday, so on the Friday I headed to the stand for Flesh and Blood and asked for a demo. That went well, but the free deck you get for having a demo wasn't tournament legal, so I picked up a pre-constructed deck for a character called Victor.

The premise of Flesh and Blood is that you're playing a hero with weapons and armour, fighting other heroes with weapons and armour. You select your hero first and equip them, then the deck you build represents the attacks and defences you have, whether that's fighting or magic.

There's two major tournament formats. The first is called "Constructed", and its broadly expected you'll build your decks yourself, with only one pre-constructed deck available at the moment. The second is called "Blitz", where your hero has to be a "young" version of themselves, but they sell a significant number of pre-constructed decks that you can use out of the box to play.

In this case, it was a "Blitz" tournament, which I'd picked as it meant I could use a pre-constructed deck.

My first game was against a hero called Vynnset, a "Runeblade" who uses a mix of magic and fighting. Victor is a Guardian, whose basic premise is taking a lot of damage and then hitting like a truck. Unfortunately, "out of the box", he doesn't really have much defence against magic, so I was very quickly smushed. But I felt like I was getting the hang of things!

I was handed a few extra promotional cards for playing. This is apparently quite a common thing. The players were all really welcoming and friendly. It reminded me quite a bit of how the Infinity scene is - competitive, but friendly and welcoming with it.

My next three games were against Blaze (a wizard), Nuu (an assassin) and Emperor (another wizard). Remember how I mentioned that the out of the box Victor deck doesn't have any defence against magic? Blaze even exploded Victor for all 20 of his health during my turn as some kind of instant interrupt... That said, I'd gotten Blaze down to 3 health so I could see how you could win with a slightly more prepared deck.

All in all, I really enjoyed this game! I could see that the different hero classes create plenty of different play styles. I did dive in the deep end with my first non-demo games being at a huge event where rare promo cards were being given out, so there was always going to be a disparity in the space. When I get a little more time I'll probably pop down to my local store and give some of their gaming nights a go.

If you like card games, I'd definitely give this a go. It probably requires a bit of investment of time and money to really get something out of it, but you could also absolutely buy a few "Blitz decks" and play at home with friends with the pre-constructed decks out of the box and nothing else.