I am back, having played your game during the holiday, here are my thought on it. As we only played simplified "For fun" rules and never even read advanced ones, all the following is only about these rules.
The game was nice to play, we particularly loved your main mechanic of showing your hand turn by turn, then playing one card from it. I never saw that system and is fertile for thinking like “I should play that, but he will counter with this, let's play something else, except if he counters...” à la David Sirlin.
We also noted the troubles we had, if the list is long it is only because we played a lot, not because the game is bad.
It would have been handy to have premade decks to print. As I had to print cards before reading the rules in detail, I printed two of each card. Later I discovered that we were forced to terribly break deck building rules since we had only two shields each but lots of attacks. Having premade decks for beginners would avoid that, and allow to simplify the rules by replacing deck building with “go with the premade deck for your character.”
Rules for losing a stock were not clear. We decided that going offstage was immediately losing a stock and returning to neutral.
Stage banning for the selection is too complex for what it brings in “For fun”. I'd suggest something along the lines “do rock-paper-scissor, the winner chooses the stage”. Anyway we went for the only one I printed and ignored special rules.
In “Trading & Stalemate”, the rules do not state what happen if one player does nothing. In our case, we went for “doing nothing versus shield resets phase to neutral”, but only after extensive arguing.
In “Combos”, on the last point “This is repeated until...” What is repeated? We understood it as repeat from “5 cards are drawn”. Re-reading the rules it seems that only the last point is to be repeated.
Another things in “Combos” is that it is written like the defensive player may have something to say (we suspect a leftover from the advanced ruleset). Especially, there is no actual need to show three cards, get it back to hand, then play it freely. We simply went with “play up to three cards freely”.
Once again, your game is great. Thank you for the impressive work done and for sharing it.
