Kongai

Kongai is a card game created by David Sirlin and run by Kongregate. The game was in closed beta until July 10, 2008. Since that date, Kongai has been available to the general public. However, a second closed beta with 40 new cards began on September 17, 2009.

Building a Deck
Before you start picking your starter cards, you should play with a random deck first to get used to the game (see section below for details). Once you have gotten used to the game format and won some cards, you can start building decks. You can build either a three-card deck or a five-card deck, and there are game types that correspond to each type of deck. You may earn cards in one of three ways. The first way is to beat a weekly challenge on the Kongregate website, secondly you can buy them with Kreds. Finally, when you win a match you have a chance of winning a card in a game. The chance that you win a card goes down as you fill up your collection of cards, but it will never dip below 3% for ranked matches and 1% for unranked matches.

There are two types of cards, characters and items. There are now 40 character cards, which are split into eight groups, with five character cards each. The groups are Martial Artists, Amazons, Tiki Villagers, Vampires, Pirates, Knights, Robots, and Witches. Alternatively, you can look at a full list of all the characters here or a full list of the items here.

Item cards are split into nine groups. Eight groups are color themed and may be equipped only by characters of the respective color. The ninth group is gray, meaning that these items may be equipped by any character. Each character may be equipped with a single item. The item each character has is chosen when the deck is built and cannot be changed. Thus, in order to build a full deck you will need at least three characters and at least three items. You may not put multiple copies of a single character into your deck, even if you have multiple copies of them. However, you may equip multiple different characters with the same item, provided you have more than one copy of that item.

Gameplay
Each round of gameplay has two phases: the maneuver phase and the attack phase. Both phases happen simultaneously for both players, so you do not know what your opponent will do until after both of you have picked your moves.

During the maneuver phase players may pass, move close, or move far. Moving close or far costs 50 energy. If one or both players move close, then the range is set to close at the end of the movement phase. If one or both players move far then the range is set to far at the end of the movement phase. If one player moves close and one player moves far, then the range remains what it was at the beginning of the movement phase.

During the attack phase, each card may either attack, intercept, switch out, or rest. Each card has 4 attacks to choose from, though depending on the range some attacks may not be available. Consult the pages for individual character cards to learn what their attacks are and when to use them.

If you switch out, your current character is moved from play to your bench, and you may pick one of the other characters in your bench to replace them. When switching out, you avoid all attacks and effects, with the exception of undodgeable attacks which can hit fleeing characters. Switching out is countered by intercepting.

If you intercept, and your opponent switches out, you deal 35 damage to them and their character does not switch out for that turn. If your opponent does not switch out, intercepting does nothing.

Resting causes you to regain 20 energy (in addition to the twenty you regain every round).

At the end of the round you gain 20 energy.

For more information on the rules of Kongai, see Kongai Rulesheet

Beginning Play - Read before choosing starter cards!
There is not a lot of information out there to help people get started in Kongai. The average person ends up making a lot of decisions they later regret before even beginning play due to this lack of information.

The first thing that someone is confronted with when they load Kongai is the screen to "Choose Starters". Most people do this because they figure that is a good idea at this point if it is showed to them at this point. People that choose here before playing any matches do not have a sound basis with the gaming system and tend not to fully understand the implications of their choices.

One method for choosing starters is as follows:

1) Cancelling the option to pick starters before play.

2) Going into Multiplayer and choosing Host Game - 3 card.

3) Since no cards are on the account, the game will Default to the play setting "Random (ALL)" which will give 3 characters and 3 items and allow play.

4) Repeat step 3 until you win 10 cards by winning games (approximately 30). This gets you familiar with the cards and how they play and allows you to take maximum advantage of the 33% win rate for less than 10 cards. After you have 10 cards, the card drop rate is approximately 3% for ranked matches and 1% for unranked matches. Remember that you have to actually win those matches, not just play and lose them.

5) Once you have 10 cards from matches, then do available challenges. There is normally 1 per week, so this will get you to 11 cards.

6) Quit Kongai and go back in, at this point choose starters based on your knowledge of cards and based on the cards you already have, bringing your total to 14. Try to match characters and items together, such as Rumiko or Onimaru + Scroll, Yoshiro or Higashi + Insignia, etc.