Taking a few steps back: Trim the Fat, Sharpen the Blade

I just uploaded what is (for now!) the leanest, meanest edition of Fighting Wheel.

After a very pleasant and fruitful beta-testing day with random players in a local culture center, I realised something:

This game’s strongest moment is the five-card stare-down, not the bookkeeping.

Also te alternate card design is a much bigger hit than the original design, so it is being promoted to main design :)

So here's a new build to the game, stripping away everything that slowed players from getting to meaningful match moments in under two minutes.

What changed (and why)

1. Crickets are gone
   I love the concept of corner-coach buffs and the flaor of the fighting cricket (a staple of southeast asian culture), but every version of it I implemented either: (a) spiked variance too much, or (b) required too many rule paragraphs that new players read and reread trying to understand and exploit instead of actually playing the game. The current mission is punchy first contact, so crickets wait on the bench for a future update.
   
   

2. Add more weight to luck
   A fighter's hand before each Round is now decided with a random draw, instead of having the full deck aailable to them:
   
   Draw 7, play 5, shuffle 2 back feels like the best balance to the game —three cards in the deck stay unseen forever at each match. The math (after over 50k sims ran with AI assistance) lands at a victory probability of ~54 % Even | 46 % Odd, which feels fair enough.
   
   

3. Rulebook drops to a single A4 page
   No sub-phases, no edge-case icons —just the suit wheel, the mirror table, setup, and win conditions. Print, cut, fight.