Superrobotbear, 2-6 players, 2 hours, $10 
I ran this as a one-night fill-in when my normal D&D campaign couldn’t run because of absent players. We’ve been playing in Roll20 as a Virtual Tabletop, so I wanted something that would use that. I also wanted something I was pretty sure would fit into one evening; picking a “short” D&D crawl was a recipe for it spilling into multiple weeks.
I ended up with One Last Fight, by Ethan Hudgins, released back in late 2019. Ethan describes the game as “A GM-less Card-Prompt RPG for 2 to 6 players,” and that’s pretty accurate. I purchased and ran this through Roll20, which seems like a much superior choice to buying PDFs and printing up your own copy of the game.
I say “I ran this,” but that’s not quite right. OLF is technically GM-less (I was GM as far as Roll20 was concerned, which was helpful with some card mechanics, and I knew the rules better than the players, but I tried to keep a distance regarding creatively guiding the game).
OLF’s premise is that a party of 2-6 is ending a long campaign/quest against their nemesis: slowly approaching where the nemesis is located, fighting their way in, then engaging in final battle. All of this is guided by a structured card deck built from separate decks for each phase of the approach. Twenty-five cards are dealt, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the games generally seem to take a couple of hours.
There are really two games in OLF. One is a structure for conflict resolution. Character cards have simple combat attributes, bolstered by items/treasure acquired. Those attributes represent the number of dice to be rolled vs the challenges on the Adventure Cards. The Adventure Cards are flipped from the deck, and may force a solo challenge (which can be passed on to another player) or a group challenge (faced by each individually). These could be a bad guy, a group of opponents, a trap, a challenging situation, etc.
So if the conflict has Swords and Magic as vulnerabilities, and I have two Swords and one Magic, that gives me three dice, plus the free one I get, so I am rolling 4d6. If the conflict shows “4 4” as the difficulty, then on the individual dice I’m rolling (sums make no difference), I have to have two dice that have 4, 5, or 6 on them.
While many conflicts have the stake of losing life vs gaining treasure, quite a number have a different win/lose effect, sometimes being a matter of “this helps the party a lot” vs “this helps the party a little.”
Conflicts get hairier as the adventure progresses, until you finally get to the nemesis, the titular Last Battle, where it is kill or be killed.
Additional variation in play — beyond the randomizing of the built deck — come from the characters chosen: a variety of archetypes with both different strengths (conflict attributes) and various ways they can break the rules, from changing die rolls to providing assistance to other players.
But that brings us to the second system present in OLF, because, beyond a solid conflict mechanic, OLF is first and foremost about storytelling.
A game can be set (as a collaborative decision) in any setting — high or low fantasy, science fiction, the Old West, spies, comic books, named franchises or generic pastiches. The cards and actions are set as archetypes, without any particular setting in mind — a character’s description as being able to tell the future could be magic, it could be psionics, it could be the Force, or it could be a powerful computer. This gets determined by the group defining the setting, and by every card — nemesis, characters, gear, and adventure cards — having a series of questions that describe the present or fill in the past.
Those questions may be answered by individuals drawing the cards, or by group efforts. And while the story built by those questions and answers don’t actually affect the mechanics, they can influence how the individuals play, and, when all is said and done, the create the story that players will remember long after they recall a given die roll.
It’s those questions and answers in the end that make OLF special, from “What does this statue ask of you” to “For whom in the group would you take an arrow? Why?” to “How did you allow this enemy to escape before?” to “What does the nemesis mutter as they cling to life?” You could play without that storytelling, but ultimately they are what, to me, makes the game what it is.
And even when you reach the end, and the Nemesis is defeated (one hopes), there are final questions — the inevitable (and often most dramatic) where does you character go from here? (Or, if your character died — quite possible — how are they remembered?)
The Good
- Well done storytelling prompts.
- Good conflict resolution mechanic.
- Pretty easy rules.
The Bad
- Storytelling and conflict resolution don’t really link together.
- Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be irksome.
- No physical printed version available; printing PDFs would be painful.
- Very indie, so not a lot of info out there about it (by no means the game’s fault).
Overall, One Last Fight is a flexible and entertaining and imagination-stretching game, perfect for fill-in sessions or killing a couple of hours. The rules setup (at least in Roll20) was a bit sketchy and disorganized, but the gaps are easily filled in; the game’s rules are picked up pretty quickly in play. It’s available on Roll20 for $10, or on the author page for the PDF version (same price).
Vigorously recommended.
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