Fighting like Cats and Rats: A Warriors of the Four Circles test game

 I've been watching the reboot of Kung Fu. The only way in which it resembles the original with David Carradine is the title and the martial arts action. So what? I'm enjoying it just the same, and it has inspired me to dig out Warriors of the Four Circles by Avalon Games and finally try it.

I have had the game for ages but never played it. I don't know why, but print-and-play games never  really feel quite right or as exciting as games with nice, professionally produced components. One issue with all of the Avalon Games titles is the artwork. I don't like it. There are also issues with the proofreading at times. Despite this, when I have played their games, like Future Wars and Arcanum, I have enjoyed them. It has just been a case of being willing to find my own solutions to things that were not spelt out in the rules. I can live with that.

So, time for some kung fu fighting. The rules are 17 pages long. They outline a basic skirmish system and are easy to read. There are only a couple of typos, which was nice. The basic system is designed to work on a grid. Characters have Attack, Defence, Strength, Speed, Move, Adrenal, Will and Health stats as well as and Special Abilities.

• You add your Attack to your opponent's Defence and try to equal or exceed that to hit them. A successful hit reduces your opponent's Health.
• Strength is primarily used to pick up things and throw them or hit people with them. These things can include other figures, if you can successfully grab them.
• Speed determines when in the turn sequence you move. Some figures will activate only once. Others will have multiple Speed numbers, indicating that they activate at various times during the turn.
• Move indicates how many squares you may move.
• Adrenal is the number of points you have for using Special Abilities. Some abilities cost 1 point, others cost more, while a small number are permanent effects. You can rest to recover Adrenal points in the battle if you are lucky.
• I did not use the Will stat in my test game, and it is not specified where else it might be used in the rule book so I assume it relates to some Special Abilities.

The download also includes a number of characters, most of which are elementals of some type or another. I set up a fight between Cat and Rat, two of the characters in the book. These two hate each other and may not be in the same warband. Cat is characterised by leaping abilities (leaping kick, pouncing attacks) while Rat is characterised by speed and stealth. As I am not keen on the Avalon Games artwork, I bought some standees from Okumarts Games on DriveThruRPG and I printed out the Japanese Garden from Dramascape, which I already had. With a couple of standees printed out and built and the battle area defined, it was time to set things up.

The Battle

Cat was napping under the bushes in the garden again when something disturbed her. It was that infernal Rat, scuttling along down the wall. She hated him and he hated her. It was like they had been born to oppose each other.

Here comes rat scuttling along

Cat began the game using her Stealth skill. That meant that Rat could not see her until she attacked. Both figures have Stealth so I diced to see which of them would get to use it. Cat won the dice roll and used 1 Adrenal point to start the game near Rat's starting location but hidden.

The prey is on the move and Cat must follow

Cat used her bouncing move to race after Rat whose sneaky scuttling annoyed her so much. (And, yes, I also bought Sound Effect standees when I bought the Kung Fu standees. I like them.) Cat pounced, performing a Leaping Kick that missed (1 Adrenal point again).

Rat responds

Rat was taken unawares but his scuttling, sneaky, twitchy nature meant that he was not taken totally unawares. He turned on Cat in a blinding flurry of below-the-belt blows, and spending 2 Adrenal points in his turn. First blood to Rat.

Cat gets the claws out

Cat responded by slashing Rat with her claws several times while Rat failed to land another blow. The two combatants circled round each other, each trying to get the other off balance while also seeking to strike their opponent. They then broke apart to catch their breath and recover an Adrenal point each.

Cat strikes again

Unfortunately for Rat, this only benefited Cat, whose claws were well and truly out, while Rat seemed to be spending all his time looking for an opening that never came.

FINISH HIM!

Cat struck another couple of successful blows and that was it. Rat was out for the count. She licked her wounds and returned to her nap under the bushes.

Conclusions

This game was a simple test with little tactical subtlety. My goal was to try the system out and see what I thought. I particularly wanted to see if it felt right for Kung Fu or was too generic. So, I had picked two low level characters for a quick game. The game was fairly quick but not as quick as I had intended. Being low level characters, both of them needed 9+ on 2d6 to hit, which meant that there were a few turns where the figures scored no hits once their Adrenal points were all spent, and they had to break away from each other to rest.

One interesting effect of the game system was the way figures circled each other in the fight. You can move one square around your enemy as part of your attack. This meant, once I realised I could do this and what the effect would be, that a figure with two actions on its activation can move to the side of its opponent and attack from there, before moving behind them and attacking with an extra die. That kind of feels right for how things go back and forth in this sort of movie. I imagine this tactic would not work as well with multiple combatants though.

The Special Abilities felt right for the genre and were fun to imagine in my head. I'm going to experiment a bit more with this game to see what higher level characters are like, and I shall have to dig out the two supplements for it that I bought ages ago. I seem to recall one of those had Monkey in it. I loved that TV series and really enjoyed the book too, so it would be fun to use those characters.

I'm not sure that the game works for Kung Fu though. It's much more historical fantasy, unless there is a character builder somewhere that would let me create my poorly dubbed action heroes. At the moment, I am limited to the characters that come with the game and cannot be bothered working out how to cost figures myself. That said, my initial impression is of a solid game that will be worth digging out occasionally and playing. It's not hard to learn and plays relatively quickly, so perfect for those times when you just want something easy.

For the price, Warriors of the Four Circles is a fun game if you are willing to do the prep work or already have a gridded battlemat and some suitable figures. It will be interesting to see how it compares to A Fistful of Kung Fu.

Final note: The system used in this game is substantially the same as Avalon Games' Steel and Glory system as far as I can tell. The main differentiator is the Special Abilities, although a quick look at Steel and Glory shows that it has a basic morale system too, which is more appropriate to pseudo-medieval fantasy combat than it is to martial arts. I shall have to try this out at some point, as I have owned it for quite some time too.