About Lost Fighters Arena
Lost Fighters Arena is a one-on-one dice fight built on a Yahtzee roll. You roll five dice, reroll twice, then turn three of a kind, a straight or a Yahtzee into a strike, a charge or a heal. Two fighters face off in a small hexagonal arena surrounded by electrified ropes; the first to drop from 20 HP to zero loses. The rarer the combination, the harder the hit, and where you stand decides the move: up close you pound with sets, at range you charge in with straights or catch your breath with a heal.
It is designed and illustrated by BigBoyShino (Alex) and released for free on itch.io as a prototype, version 3 at the time of writing. The setting is the Lost Fighters universe: fights to the death broadcast across the galaxy by Channel Zero, with a comic page for each fighter. The itch.io page discloses that the graphics are AI-assisted.
How to play in one minute
- Each player picks a fighter and takes their board; put the Lava arena between you and set both standees on their starting hexes. Everyone starts at 20 HP.
- On your turn, roll five dice and reroll any of them up to two times, exactly as in Yahtzee.
- Play one move from your board that matches your roll: three of a kind, small or large straight, full house, four of a kind or Yahtzee. In contact, three of a kind is a strike; at range it is a heal, and straights are charges that move you in and then hit.
- Strikes can knock your opponent back into the ropes or out of the arena; lava hexes add Burns, and three Burns cost 5 HP.
- Use your fighter’s resource, OverJuice for Crusher Boy or Despair for The Vagabond, to unlock bigger moves. Bring the other fighter to 0 HP to win.
The two fighters
Crusher Boy is the easy one: his OverJuice tank fills a little every turn and pays for heavy close-range blows. The Vagabond is rated advanced: he gains Despair every time he loses HP, so he gets stronger as he gets hurt, and can even hurt himself on purpose to power up. The rulebook gives each fighter a strengths-and-weakness box, which helps a new player pick.
What you need to print
Download two PDFs from itch.io: the 9-page A5 rulebook and a 5-page A4 file with both fighter boards, the Lava arena, the standees and the comics. Print in colour; the standees are glued and cut out, and a simple token works too. You also need five ordinary dice, a few small cubes for the gauges and something to track HP. The rulebook’s dice table gives the odds of each combination over three rolls, from 74% for three of a kind to 5% for a Yahtzee.
Who it’s for
Two players who like Yahtzee’s push-your-luck rerolls but want a duel instead of a score sheet, and fans of fighting games. A match takes about 15 minutes. The author asks players to send feedback through a short form linked in the files, since the game is still in development.
In the PDF
- Rulebook (9 pages, A5)
- Two fighter boards with standees: Crusher Boy and The Vagabond
- Lava arena
- Comics and lore pages
