Mêlée, the Medieval Combat Card Game

Mêlée is a maneuver and fight, dice-less card game of medieval hand-to-hand combat. The game is for two or more players. It recreates combat with playing cards that represent individual warriors and warhorses. In game play, Mêlée is like a traditional miniatures game, except that it uses cards rather than miniatures -- i.e., a miniatures game without the miniatures -- making it very affordable. Multiple sets of decks are being manufactured, allowing it to serve as a collectible.

Battles are fought on a table top, upon an imagined grid of card-sized columns and ranks. Alternatively, players may either create their own or purchase a large scale roll up play mat so that spacing is more visually apparent, though this is not required by any means.

The game is designed for simplicity and ease of play. It is challenging and enables fast-paced play in 30 minutes or less, even when there are 50 warriors or more on each side. The biggest limitation is the size of the gaming table available, rather than the cost or availability of armies of warrior cards.

The game designer's goal was to make a medieval combat game that cuts out the many complexities that often bog down miniatures combat games. Instead, the focus was on rendering a more historically realistic experience on the battlefield with colorful and unique coats of arms carried by each warrior, as depicted in large size on the cards. Launched through Kickstarter, the first sets of the game had cards that were sponsored by individual backers whose names and coats of arms appeared on each warrior card.

While most miniatures and fighting/combat games use various forms of hit points, unit points, and strengths, and these are slowly degraded in various engagements with dice rolling, routing, critical hits, and so forth, Mêlée is different. There is no extensive paperwork and unit tracking round by round. There are no chits or markers to indicate wounded warriors or degraded units -- warriors are either alive and fighting, or are killed.

The game depicts small, medium, or large-sized battles, but focuses combat right down to the individual level. Its combat methodology is drawn from the actual experience of the designer (and play testers) in medieval reenactment battles, where an individual fighter is generally doing fine, fighting away, moving, charging to engage, and so forth, but then at some critical moment in the battle, quite suddenly, he or she gets out too much in front or ends up on the flank with opposing forces circling around.... Things happen quickly from there -- and WHAM, WHAM, WHACK, they're down. Mêlée captures that experience perfectly.