Guardians
A downloadable game
Guardians is a rules light dice and cards role playing game of multicoloured heroes that defend earth from an evil enemy trying to steal their power and take over the world. It is inspired by Power Rangers and Voltron.
Play is separated into two phases:
In the social phase the teenage characters go about their normal life and the monster secretly messes with them, during which the players amass friendship tokens and the monster amasses power tokens.
In the battle phase the guardians fight the monster, playing cards from their hands and spending friendship tokens to draw new cards.
The battle phase gets better when the monster is supercharged and the guardians have to call their mechs, massive mechanical weapons they control to defeat the monster. The mechs can even join together to power up.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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Guardians is a short but neat Power-Rangers-inspired one-shot or serial campaign RPG.
Its PDF is one page, with a clean layout and solid use of a rainbow graphic to frame the text. The text *does* feel like it could maybe be broken up into sidebars to make the page more visually interesting, but I do not have a graphic design background and I can't say that with authority. Plus, everything's perfectly readable as is.
Gameplay-wise, Guardians is played with d6s, tokens, and a deck of cards.
Play is divided into two phases, one of which is a social phase where the players explore the world like a standard rpg and occasionally make rolls to overcome obstacles. This phase is open-ended, and lasts until the players decide they're done with it.
The second phase is combat, and in it everyone plays a narrative card game that's informed by the resources the party generated during the social phase.
Honestly, this structure is cool, and it does a good job mirroring the format of a Power Rangers episode. It does assume there's only one combat per episode, but you could change this pretty easily by looping back from combat to social play.
The combat phase is also a fully detailed minigame, and the suits of the cards are used to trigger different effects. At the same time, the numbers on the cards to decide whether the scenario's monster can counter them, and this is solidly fun. It makes for an interesting back-and-forth, but while the game doesn't explicitly spell this out, the players can't lose. If the team is about to get knocked out, one of the rangers instead develops a new power and overwhelms the monster.
Overall, I think Guardians is a cool game with a strong mechanical foundation. It does a great job reproducing the source material, but it doesn't necessarily deliver a lot of narrative tension, so you may need to tweak the rules in a few places if you want, ah, Kamen Rider Amazons or Gaim instead of MMP. You also might need to read the PDF twice, as in some places the rules are kind of densely packed, but this is not a huge burden for a one-page game.
Ultimately if you like Power Rangers, if you like games that are quick to pick up and play, and if you like games that feel both mechanically lose and mechanically solid, you should check this out.
Minor Issues:
-3rd para mentions that there are tables to help if you get stuck, but I couldn't find any.
-4th para, "Character, guardian and mech" this might be a bit unclear without an oxford comma
-Can you start stats with 0 points? If so, that zero stat will make for rolls that have no successes and no failures and can theoretically force the game into a neutral state.
-6th para, "the player or the GM then describes the action based on the number of successes and failures." This could use some guidelines on how to interpret it. What does one success mean? One failure? Multiple successes and failures?
-There's also some secondary weirdness with the dice in that having more dice doesn't necessarily make you better. It just amplifies the magnitude of your successes and failures. Is this intended, or would you rather a pool with 3 successes and 2 failures mean a success by margin of 1?
-What happens if the players run out of friendship tokens during the battle phase?