Review: Superfight

Some years you hit on the perfect gift.

I gave my kids the card game Superfight for Christmas this year. It looked interesting. You build superheroes using character and attribute cards and then argue why it would beat your opponents' characters in a fight. I dealt out some cards to show you:

So let's say player one picks three character cards and three attribute cards and from those cards he picks "Macgyver" and "Shoots lightning". He then discards the extras and draws a random attribute. The random attribute might be useful, not-so-useful, or a weakness. In this case, player one picked "can control hair." Player two does the same and creates a pterodactyl who can duplicate one opponent attribute and shoots glitter (I'll let you figure out which attribute the pterodactyl picks). The players then argue for their character and why they would win in a battle. We did have a need to put a time limit on the arguments, since some family members can go on indefinitely. The winner is chosen when either one player concedes or by vote of other players. In the event of a tie, each player draws one character card with no attributes and they battle it out with those cards, but the winner keeps his original character. The winner plays against the next player. After a character wins three rounds, it retires, because it is obviously too powerful and someone else should get the chance to win.

We have had so much fun with this game! Sometimes the character and attribute combinations are hysterical, and the arguments are even better. We've played it the original way, but it is easy to vary it and play it other ways. We did a Dating Game version where the first person creates the date, then everyone else creates characters and argue why their character would be a perfect match. The date chooses. We played with my parents using the geek expansion deck. They enjoyed it, but I might use the original deck next time since there were a lot of characters in the geek deck that they didn't know and we ended up arguing for them. My kids played with their friends without keeping score, so the game was one battle after another until it was time to leave. You can also play to create the funniest character, the scariest character, etc.

One of the best things about it is that it teaches you to argue effectively. You don't win just because your character is Batman or Superman. You have to explain how they would win and consider the character's abilities and the attributes. There are expansion packs for different genres, if you want even more cards to work with. I got the geek deck, that includes a lot of sci-fi references, and the anime deck, which made us realize we really need to brush up on our knowledge of anime. I also picked up the kids' pack to try out at my storytelling group. It includes a lot of classic characters and people young children can understand, like a cop, a genie, a fairy godmother, etc. Every pack also includes three blank character cards and three blank attribute cards, so you can add anything that you feel needs to be included in the decks. In a nutshell, this is a great game, and I highly recommend it.