Senjutsu: Battle for Japan

Senjutsu is a duel. Each player controls one samurai miniature on a hex board and a deck of forty ability cards: attacks, blocks, meditations and special moves. The setting is the civil war that followed the fall of the Ashikaga shogunate.

Every turn both players place one card face down and turn them over together. Then the cards resolve by initiative, fastest first, and a lot depends on where the samurai stand and which way they face. Reading the other person matters as much as the cards.

The moments people talk about afterwards are the reversals: a block that lands exactly as the strike comes in, or a meditation that looked like a wasted turn and sets up the finishing blow. Five wounds and a samurai falls. A duel takes around twenty minutes, so a second one usually follows.