A quick paper boxing game to play anywhere

Once again, I'll share with you a small and quick two player game requiring very few items, that you can play anywhere.

This one is a simple boxing game, especially well suited for being played on trips or at school (thanks to a clever trick.)

It features dice and stats style combat, like many paper RPG's.

Rules are exceedingly simple, but can lead to pretty intense and animated games with a lot of surprises.

All infos available after the break.

Where does it come from ?

Contrary to most games, this one has a very precise and localisable origin.
It comes from the author of Yuyu Hakusho manga, that used to play it at school to bypass a "no games" policy.
I discovered it years ago through a friend that was constantly reading those, and we played it a lot.

Today I tracked it down and documented it on the Internet, because I wasn't able to find any reference to it online, and I would hate if it was lost forever.

If you ever manage to get your hands on a paper version of the books, this game was featured in Yuyu Hakusho volume 6 (more precisely at chapter 47).

But those specific pages don't seem to appear in most online scanned versions.

The only references to it I was able to find online were in a French version here and here.

Here are the corresponding pages, in case the scans ever go offline :

The rules

The rules for this game are very simple, so here is a summary.
You only need the corresponding paper figures and a dice.
(Part of the fun also lies in drawing and creating your own fighters in the field.)

1. Each player chooses a fighter
2. Players play "Rock-Paper-Scisors (aka. "Janken") to determine who will hit this turn.
3. The winning player then throws a dice to determine which kind of attack his fighter lands during this turn. (The other player doesn't get a turn after that! Only the winner hits!)
4. Hit points are removed from the opponent's life bar according to the landed hit.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 three times, this constitutes a "Round".
6. At the end of each round, both fighters regain 2 HP each, and a new round starts over.
7. Whoever reaches 0HP loses. Fighters can't regain more HP than they started with.

Each fighter has special statistics that define different strategies:

• Each has a different number of HP
• Each have a "Special attack" that deals significantly more damage than the others.
• Some have "favourite attacks": that means they deal slightly more damage than other fighters when they use this technique.

Yes, it is as simple as it looks.
But don't get me wrong, the combined parts of randomness, strategy and very fast rounds make for very intense and heated games, and two consecutive games will never look alike.

Stats summary

Here are all the stats you will need to play the game, translated from the above screenshots:

Hit table:

Dice roll	Corresponding attack	Damage dealt
1	Simple hit	- 1 HP
2	Simple hit	- 1 HP
3	Straight punch	- 2 HP
4	Special attack	- 4 HP (may vary)
5	Hook	- 2 HP
6	Uppercut	- 2 HP

(Unless specified otherwise, "favorite strikes" deal -3 HP).

Fighter stats:

Black Joe: 
HP: 10
Favorite strikes : Hook (-3 HP), Straight punch (-3 HP)
Special attack: "Big Magnum" (-4 HP)

White Tiger: 
HP: 12
Favorite strikes : Uppercut(-3 HP)
Special attack: "Thunder punch" (-4 HP)

Kamikaze Sansuki: 
HP: 10
Favorite strikes : None
Special attack: "Kamikaze shot" (-6 HP)

Mister Question: 
HP: 15
Favorite strikes : None
Special attack: "Athena Bom" (-4 HP)

The "Special trick" (and useless trivia)

In the article introduction, I mentioned a trick, making this game especially well adapted to being played at school or other very restrictive environments.

You might have understood by now this has to to with using dice.

I mentioned this was a game with few requirements, but one might argue that dice are not really among your everyday carry items, or might seem out of place at school.

The clever trick here is replacing dice with a pencil.
Pencils are 6-sided, just like dice are, so you can make a very stealthy and useful emergency dice ersatz by drawing numbers (or punching varying number of small holes with a compass) on each side of any pencil.

If you're not too noisy throwing the thing, you could maybe even get away with playing games during classes.

Seems like somebody made a commercial version of the trick

This is also the perfect trick for camping trips or during travel, as you might improvise various other dice based games from just the pencil and paper you already will have on you.

Speaking of luck-based games, did you know that our innocent children "Rock-Paper-Scisors" game was initially an equivalent of "strip poker" played as preliminaries in Japanese brothels ?

The more you know...

Going further

There are many variations you could use if you ever get bored.
Part of the fun simply lies in drawing and designing new fighters.

Your opponent will most likely want to keep your new stats balanced, but purposely making very unbalanced fights could be fun when combined with "scenarios", where your fighter has to fight gradually stronger opponents, roleplayed by your friends.

You could also make up more complicated stats or rules to your liking to allow for more customisation or more refined fighter "identities".

But trust me, those seemingly simple rules can already lead to pretty heated games.

Have fun !
And stay tuned for more games, pastimes and other cool stuff you most likely never heard about!