Introduction

When playing an intense, realistic board or card game players activate a part of their brain that isn’t used for mundane daily activity. With the strategic juices flowing, hardcore board gamers can use enough brain power to make taking the SATs look like a Sunday stroll. But sometimes that on-going 36 hour wargaming marathon is just too much to handle after a long day, or too cumbersome to drag out of the basement and set up. In this case, a quick, light, and mobile card game is in order, especially if a few drinks at a local bar and some easy gaming are just what the doctor ordered. And when the doctor orders, one needn’t look any further than En Garde!

Set in a “more civilized age,” En Garde! offers humorous, quick gameplay that keep everyone laughing and entertained at the same time. The beauty of En Garde! is its simplicity, which comes without sacrificing interesting and innovative gameplay. Couple this with fantastically designed cards that have just the right amount of attitude and there’s a whole lot of fun with zero setup and, more importantly, not a whole lot of heavy duty thinking!

Geoffrey, Fetch My Sword

En Garde! comes with an 85-card deck, six player mats on which players can wield a weapon and a track to follow their poise (hang with me for a moment on that), six poise markers, and some colorfully written directions. The entire game is packaged in a 6x4 inch (roughly) box that can be taken anywhere and played on any surface by up to 6 players.

More importantly, En Garde! has been crafted with a lighthearted, easy-going play style in mind. The lightening fast setup and incredibly brief rules make for an almost nonexistent learning curve that will still provide hours of fun (even if the players are several beers deep). When I first took out the game I read the entire rule book, or pamphlet I should say, it took about 5 minutes; I taught my buddies the entirety of the game shortly after that. The En Garde! system is not glorified rock-paper-scissors, or menially simple – it adds just the right pinch of complexity with the right attitude to create a wholly playable, but slacker-friendly experience.

I Challenge You To A Duel!

En Garde! captures the amusing pompousness of a fancy French court run amok. As the title implies, En Garde! is not about all out war, but honor, poise, and tucked in shirts (you’ll see what I mean in a second). Rather than have a health meter, players have a “Poise level” which serves as a life meter (though the developers describe it as how unkempt a player becomes as he struggles in swordplay). Poise also can be used in exchange for a fancy or reckless move against one’s opponent. The intuitive idea behind poise, however, is that a player is not eliminated when they reach the “No Poise” level but rather they are at a distinct advantage in such a situation. Upon reaching zero poise, if the player receives one more poise point worth of damage they lose the game, however, special cards that normally cost poise points to deploy now cost nothing. In other words, the player can’t have the cost of a card lead to their undoing (like the checkmate rule in Chess, so to speak). The system makes sense. The game revolves around how composed and collected one’s player is and so when on the brink of defeat, hair ruffled, shirt untucked, and out of breath, what difference does it make how wild or undignified the move is? Manners be damned! Caution to the wind!

On the opposite end, there are also equally amusing ways for players to regain poise by playing cards. Cards like “Catch your breath,” “Wipe your brow,” “Tuck in your shirt,” and, my personal favorite, “I’m not left handed!” will grant the player poise and the rest of the players a good chuckle. These gentlemen are fighting to the death with razor sharp blades, but why should they look uncivilized while doing it?