This Fight Is Staged! + New Challenges Expansion!

Welcome to the stage!

You and your friend have begun exploring a shared interest in acting - and particularly love the thrill of fight scenes! Work together to impress the audience with an incredible show!

What is This Fight Is Staged!?

This Fight Is Staged! is a cooperative strategy game for two players, played with two decks of playing cards. Work together with limited information to sequence your number cards correctly and impress the audience of face cards!

It's part of the zine game line by Triple Rainbow Games - small, handmade paper booklets that act as rulebooks and components for a variety of strategy games and other curios of joy. We provide the zines, you provide the rest of the components so you don't have to buy the same stuff over and over again, and we both win from our games being more accessible and affordable!

This campaign is for two zines, This Fight Is Staged! and its New Challenges expansion. You provide your own playing cards! [Though we will have the cute rainbow ones for sale in the future!]

The New Challenges Expansion

The New Challenges expansion of This Fight Is Staged! features six new modifiers to the base scenarios. You can mix-and-match and play them with any scenario, and there's a brand new campaign requiring standing ovations while playing specific challenges for folks who want to really test their mettle!

When you unfold the zine, you'll find seven new wacky bonus stages with unique scenarios, rules, and scoring methods!

Tier Options

Back at the featured tier to get both This Fight Is Staged! and the New Challenges expansion for $10!

If you already have the base game, you can grab New Challenges on its own for $5!

If you prefer print-and-play files over physical copies, you can grab those for $3!

The Story!

Jamie Sabriel of Triple Rainbow Games co-designed This Fight Is Staged! with their partner Kelsey to have a dueling-style game they could play together, since competitive dueling games are Jamie's wheelhouse but not Kelsey's vibe. Kelsey grew up playing many different card games with their family and loves cooperative board games, which inspired Jamie to try to make a cooperative game Kelsey would love using playing cards. Not long into development, Kelsey officially jumped on as co-designer, and they've been working on it together ever since!

The rulebook is an 8-page zine handmade by Jamie, with a campaign of scenarios printed on the inside. It was first a part of the Microgame Club by Triple Rainbow Games, where subscribers get new handmade zine or wallet games bimonthly for $5/month. It was mailed out earlier this year, and now you can pick it up in this campaign!

Our goal with the Microgame Club is to have every zine game be playable as a standalone, so this expansion isn't being mailed out as part of it. This Kickstarter campaign is the only chance you'll have to get New Challenges at the Microgame Club price of $5!

How to Play This Fight Is Staged!

Both players, with your respective decks, separate the face cards [J, Q, K] from the number cards [A through 10]. Select which venue you're playing, shuffle the face cards, and you each set up your section of the audience according to the venue rules.

Shuffle your number cards, set aside the top 3 face-down to track your flourishes, and draw 7 cards.

Take turns playing cards into a shared sequence. You can play whatever card you want, but you'll want to cater your choreography to impress the audience members!

Jacks want to see runs, where each card is one rank higher or lower than the previous card. Aces are always a value of 1, but connect to 10s in runs and vice-versa!

Queens want to see flushes, where each card is the same color as the Queen. [Suit is irrelevant in this game!]

Kings are picky and want both, a run flush!

Each time you play a card, you can impress one audience member if the most recently played section of cards match what they're looking for.

The difficulty to impress the face cards increases as you play, according to the rules of the venue you're playing. Plan ahead and try to chain together impressing audience members for a bigger score!

If you don't have a card you want to play on your turn, you can flourish, dodge, or pass. Flourishing is a limited action you both have access to, allowing you to play a wild card into the sequence! Dodging and passing both let you skip your turn so your partner can play off their own card! When you pass, your partner gets one more turn, then the round ends. Dodge to give your partner another turn without ending the round, but you have to discard a card from your hand to do so.

Between rounds is the costume change! All cards remaining in your hand are revealed to your partner and kept face-up on the table, then you both draw 7 new cards and discard down to a total of 7 cards [face-up and secret].

Before drawing the new cards, you can talk strategy! Once you see those new cards, you're back on stage and can't talk about the cards in your hand!

The game ends in one of 3 ways:

• the 5th round ends,
• you get a standing ovation by impressing every audience member, or
• you go a full round without impressing anybody [if this happens, your performance was too boring and everyone leaves!]

However the round ends, you count up your score based on how many audience members you impressed [with some chances for bonuses if you meet certain conditions!], and see if you got the bronze, silver, or gold star for the venue!

What the Expansion Adds:

Six modifiers to the base campaign venues to test your skill and coordination with your stage partner! Take on an escalating series of challenges with a new version of the base campaign, or play them ad-hoc on any stage for fun!

Seven new bonus stages, with their own wild scoring rules and gameplay modifiers! Experience a variety of creative spins on the core rules, and see if you can earn gold stars through all the whimsy and chaos!

We've been playtesting the expansion content thoroughly at Break My Game, Protospiel Online, and more, so we can ensure that each stage [teehee!] of the challenge is just right!

Add-ons

While the campaign is live, we're offering a number of fun add-ons for past and future microgames from TRG!

A Year of Discounted Microgames

Get a discounted one-year subscription to the Microgame Club! 2-3 zine games or a wallet game in the mail every other month until next May for almost 20% off!

If you're already part of the Microgame Club at the normal price and back the campaign, you'll get a bonus treat when I send you the expansion, to retroactively build in the discount! <3

Available as physical games to folks in the USA, Canada, Europe, and the UK, and as print-and-play versions anywhere!

Hedged In Mini

Hedged In was Jamie's first published game created by and co-designed with their dear friend Connor Wake. Hedged In Mini carries the torch in a smaller form factor! The Beginning has the tutorial from the book, and you can unfold the zine for 7 maps to play. Towers is the first 12-map mini-expansion focusing on a single mechanic!

The Tiny Book of Wandering

An avant-garde curio of whimsy, a traveling chain-letter journal between a dozen strangers. Cast the spell on the cover to bind the Book to someone - perhaps yourself? - or leave it in a location of your choice and have the Book cast the spell on whosoever it chooses. The only way to release the binding is to add your joy to the blank pages of the Book, then pass it on. Its purpose is to amplify joy!

Zine Travel Case

A super-lightweight, sturdy, portable 3D printed travel case with a secure quietly-clicky lid to keep your zine games safe on the go! Holds 3-4 zines!

Manufacturing Timeline and Shipping Info

Jamie makes all the zines by hand and 3D prints the cases at the TRG home office. Production on the expansion zines will conclude after development is finished, which we anticipate will be mid- to late-May; we just have some last tweaks to some of the bonus stages and the challenge campaign we want to test out before we give it our final seal of approval. Assuming we're on track there, we'll mail everything out in early June!

Zines will be shipped in paper envelopes, with appropriate postage. Pricing for international shipping reflects the increased cost of international stamps/postage.

If you order more than can fit in an envelope, thank you!! We'll send everything in your order in multiple envelopes or a bubble mailer, and cover the extra shipping costs as our way of saying thank you for supporting us! <3

This is all an estimated timeline! Ultimately, we want to make the very best game we can, and will take the time we need to do so. We'll keep everyone updated here as development and manufacturing progress!

Why back on Kickstarter?

• This is the only time you can get the New Challenges expansion for the Microgame Club price of $5, instead of the retail price of $7!
• The other zine game add-ons, including the base game of This Fight Is Staged!, are all discounted as well!
• Late pledges will be open during May, but all of the zines will be $6 as late pledges, so backing before the campaign ends costs less!
• This is the only time you can get a discount on a Microgame Club subscription!
• You're supporting an underprivileged designer-turned-publisher who's chasing their lifelong dreams of making games into their full-time gig!

100% Human-Made

We're proud to be prompt-free! No part of the game, campaign, or anything related to it was made with or assisted by AI.

Who are we?

Jamie Sabriel is a queer, autistic, nonbinary game designer with a special love of two-player games and cantaloupe. They've loved games for their entire life; whenever they were asked in grade school what they wanted to be when they grew up, the answer was always "game designer"! They're not any closer to growing up, but they ARE now chasing their lifelong dream! Their previous published titles include Hedged In and Elemystic. They've been involved in online playtesting since 2020, frequenting Break My Game, Protospiel Online, and more!

Kelsey Chase is a creative soul who grew up playing and making up card games with their family. They were inspired to contribute ideas when Jamie started working on This Fight Is Staged!, and turned out to really love playing around with new ways to arrange the audience cards. For this expansion they let their creativity run wild, leaning into their love of storytelling. This is their first published game, and they're excited to create more with Jamie and Triple Rainbow Games in the future!

Triple Rainbow Games is the game design and publishing studio Jamie started in 2022, to get their ideas out into the world and champion the causes they care about - making board games that create a sense of community around them, making people think and feel in ways that help them grow, and making the gaming community as a whole feel welcoming to people of all kinds!