Daniel (@dungeondive) is openly smitten with Champions of Hara, a game he admits is completely outside his usual wheelhouse — not a dungeon crawl, not an adventure game, but a competitive arena race to fill three coloured energy meters and return to the dojo.
The structural trick that grabs him: the game is designed to be played back to back. The winner of the competitive game makes a wish, and that wish becomes the next scenario — solo, co-op or team-based — against one of the corrupted bosses. He hasn’t seen competitive and co-op stitched together this way before.
He compares it to Mage Knight as a puzzle of efficiency, then explains why he likes this one when Mage Knight leaves him cold. Each character holds just four starting cards, growing to seven, and they never shuffle or discard — you always know what you can do. Cards flip between “in hand” and “on board” faces, so every play sets up the next turn. The randomness lives in the world, not your draw.
He rates the art among the best in any board game, likening it to Studio 4°C. His caveat is looseness: edge cases a tighter design would have closed.
Champions of Hara removes draw luck entirely and puts the randomness in the world instead — does knowing your exact options every turn make a game richer, or does it drain the drama out of it?