The Challenge (game)

The Challenge is a fantasy combat card game published in 1990 by Lion Rampant. Players build and control parties made up of characters drawn from different fantasy races, then pit those parties against one another using a combination of tactical card play and dice rolling to resolve combat. The game's deck is split into three distinct types of cards, characters, actions and mystic cards, giving players separate pools to draw from when assembling a party and choosing how to fight with it. A single game can run anywhere from about fifteen minutes to a full hour depending on how many people are playing, and victory is reached through defined end conditions such as eliminating every opposing party or accumulating enough points, rather than a single fixed win condition. Its multiracial fantasy party structure and layered card deck place it within the wave of fast playing fantasy card games that competed with more elaborate roleplaying products in the early 1990s.