Challengers! Board Game Review

Year Published: 2022

Players: 1-8 (I don’t know why you’d play solo)

Playing Time: 45 Minutes

Lemme check my biases at the door. Generally speaking, I don’t like deckbuilder card games, or even larger board games that include strong deckbuilding elements. Chaining together card combos via drafts just isn’t often exciting to me.

And the old card game War is one of the few games I rate 1 out of 10 over on Board Game Geek.

Challengers! (I’m going to omit the exclamation point from here on out) is a deckbuilder that’s basically a War variant…

…and I love it.

Challenging Norms

Challengers is not just goofy. It turns the dials on goofiness up to 11.

Yet, it still manages to retain some strategy. We’ll get back to that in a moment though.

The game plays out of a series of 1v1 challenges (simultaneously played if you have 4, 6 or 8 players). If you win with the top card in your deck, it stays, then I have to play cards until I match or best it. You can win a round by having “the win” as decks run out, or by having your opponent bust by having to discard too many disparate card types.

Between rounds, you can shed as many cards as you like, and have to draft from a pool of cards in a handful of decks.

The cards themselves are high comedy. By game’s end, your rubber duck might beat my T-Rex, but then lose to a sneaky Clown that nets me a couple mid-round points, only to be devastated when your Cowboy duo causes me to have to discard from the top of my deck, causing me to bust despite having the stronger head-to-head deck.

This isn’t outlandish for the game. If anything, it undersells the daffy chaos, and how powers and abilities of such cards will bounce off of one another in unexpected ways.

Finally, you’ll accumulate points, but most points after a set number of rounds doesn’t win. Rather, the top two point values after those rounds qualify for a sudden-death championship match. Yes, others are eliminated at this point, but rounds generally last 3-5 minutes at most, so the downtime isn’t onerous.

Squint For Strategy

If you only ever played this game to piece together the funniest combos of absurd cards, you’d be just fine. It’s a game I will never need to win, or even do well in, to enjoy. Some of the best games are like this, where the sheer joy of the thing outweighs any need to perform optimally.

But the two different ways of winning a round mean that there’s actually some nuance in how you build a deck, and what (and when) you shed certain cards from it. Build a deck to counter the massively powerful late-round cards? Or one that prioritizes opponent discards over winning individual challenges and hope to win by making opponents bust? Or slough down to a slim deck that could potentially be countered but will rarely, if ever, risk losing via discard busts.

The rock/paper/scissors nature of deck construction gives some meaningful choice to something that could also just be treated as a silly party game. As such, it’s forgiving of a lot of approaches and gamer types, with something to satiate each without sacrificing fun for either.

Further, you’re constructing a deck to fight other players. It’s not a lonely puzzle or math exercise to solve on your own. You’re actively having to consider what others may be bringing to the table.

To be clear, this codes more as a party game for me than a deep strategy game. But the latter is present to at least some degree, in ways that it might not be in other chaos-fests that share aesthetic similarities with Challengers.

The Brilliance of a Duel

Dueling-style games can be intense when executed well, but this pulls off the multiplayer duel, since you’ll face everyone at the table, but only ever in one-on-one matches. Grudges will form, players will warn others about the stupidly broken combo Natalie managed to put together, or laugh when Robert’s ominous rubber duck loses immediately in back-to-back rounds.

The championship round is also an inspired bit of game design, because in the right atmosphere, it creates something better than just a good duel: it provides an invested audience.

Mark’s cowboys annoyed you to no end, and he’s undefeated entering the final matchup. How sweet would it be to see him lose in the finals by a hair? Suddenly, even if you lost miserably, you have a rooting interest for the game’s final few minutes. And how much more intense is that match for the final duo, knowing that a loss will live in infamy for at least a period of weeks among the group’s storytelling?

Challengers! Conclusions

Magical Athlete is a “so bad, it’s good” game that I’ve covered before. It takes a sometimes-boring mechanic of roll & move, ramps the chaos and silliness up to a million, and lets players watch the carnage unfold.

Challengers feels like the Magical Athlete of deckbuilders to me, because it infuses the same unbridled joy into its mechanics that Magical Athlete does for its genre.

It’s a game that is clearly excited by its own premise, gleefully so, to the point where it also doesn’t feel the need to tack on a bunch of extra steps or mechanics onto its structure (a frequent malady of modern board game design). Yes, this is a complicated War variant, and a dumbed-down strategic deckbuilder. But it’s also a game I could teach to a child or non-gamer, with the full expectation that they’d be cheering and laughing with me soon into the experience, while also knowing that it will satisfy my gamer friends who need just a little more meat on the bones of their silliness to truly invest in the proceedings.