I just discovered an online flash “collectable card battle” type game called Kongai, linked to the free games portal site Kongregate.
It’s been a while since I was sucked into a game like that!
The game revolves around 3 “cards”, or characters, which you have on your team. Only 1 of your characters are in play at any time. Each turn, you select only 2 actions for your active character - to change distance from your opponent, and to perform an action, be it attack, switch the active character with a character on the bench, rest, or intercept your opponent’s switch. The catch is, you and your opponent have your turns resolved simultaneously, and if you guess wrong, you either waste your attack, or worse, get hit without having a chance to return the favor!
To make things more interesting, there are different attack types, different resistances to the attack types, inherent abilities and items you can equip your characters with in order to give them unique abilities.
The real meat of the game is bascially the mind game. You have to read your opponent and guess what he is going to do, given his current health and energy situation, and given your own health and energy situation. I suppose it might be a little like 2 player diplomacy, where you can see the situation, but you have no idea what your opponent is going to do, only what he is likely to do.
It was designed by David Sirlin, who wrote a series of very interesting articles on game design and balance, and I must say he’s done a very good job in designing a game with quite a bit of depth for such a simple premise.
Soooooo… any dopers on? I saw a Muadib yesterday, and I wondered if it were the same Muadib on the SD… likely not though. 
