Street Fighter’s precise combat doesn’t exactly feel like a natural fit for a tabletop game, but one Kickstarter project that turns the franchise into a board game with collectible figurines has proved a huge hit with would-be backers, bringing in nearly $750,000 in its first four days. In Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game you battle across a number of grid-based stages, each of which has destructible terrain and can support versus, free-for-all and team battle game modes.
Every player begins by drawing two cards from their fighter’s battle deck and moving around the board. The distance they can travel depends on their character’s movement value. Then, the fun starts: you have two extra actions per turn, which you can use to move again, draw a card, or play a card. Cards can be strike attacks, projectiles, special attacks, or an event, and you roll dice to determine the success of your cards. If you get your angles right, you can bash your opponents into parts of the terrain, causing extra damage.
As a defending fighter, you can choose to block or counter-attack, again rolling the dice to determine whether or not you take damage. And as you play, you build up a gauge that can enhance certain attacks or let you unleash combos. Basically, it’s Street Fighter distilled down to something that’s easy to pick up and play.
The base version of the game, which you’ll get for an $80 pledge, comes with 8 fighter figurines, and if you pay $140 you’ll get any fighters unlocked through stretch goals. For the moment, that’s three extra—Guile, Blanka and E. Honda—but the team at Jasco Games have nine more planned. If you’re willing to stump up $280 or more, you’ll get all of those plus four expansion packs, each of which contains four additional characters relating to a specific Street Fighter game.
The pre-painted figurines will undoubtedly be a bigger draw than the actual game for some people. Jasco Games has deliberately made them slightly bigger than normal collectibles (they range from 6cm to 9cm tall) so that they’ll feel like “small collectible statues” that you can display when you’re not playing.
The Kickstarter page is full of information about the four arenas, the figurines, and their respective battle decks, as well as gameplay videos, so have a gander if this is your thing.
And as it happens, PC Gamer has just launched a board games channel, so you can expect more news, interviews, diary features and longer pieces spotlighting specific games to pop up on the site going forward.