Vivid

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Vivid is an optimistic wonder-fantasy game of action-adventure for 3 to 5 players, emulating the feel of modern day animated shows (Dragon Prince, Avatar: The Last Airbender) with mechanics inspired by Slay the Spire, City of Mist, Blades in the Dark and others.

Vivid uses regular playing cards and its core mechanic turns spoken language into rules. The rules fit in 15 pages, and are designed to be simple to run, mindful of newcomers to our hobby, 

What Makes Vivid Special

• Immediate resolution: Draw a number of cards from your deck equal to your skill, you only need to get one red (diamond or heart) to overcome the challenge. 
• Maximal flexibility: For each relevant difficulty you need an additional red, or you'll fail. Difficulties can be any adjective: the foe might be quick, the ground could be muddy, your giant axe is very heavy. It only affects the check if it's relevant to the action; a quick orc is not difficult to bargain with, but a cunning one is.
• Simple damage: You have guard and composure to protect you, taking the first incoming hit, whatever it is. Once they’re used up, though, you’ll need to renew them by spending reds. Without them you’re going to get injuries and mindsets, such as bruised arm, constant buzzing, furious, or confused.
• Easy teamwork: To help someone else, you simply give them your reds. It must make sense and be relevant to their upcoming action. 
• Only skills: Your character has several skills, and no other statistics. A skill’s rank (0 to 5) tells you how many cards you can draw on a check, or simply generate reds without drawing - at rank 2 you can gain 1 red, at rank 4 you can gain 2.
• Faces explode, Aces crit: Face cards (J, Q, K) “explode”, meaning you draw another card. Red Aces count as two reds, but Black Aces result in a complication: a fleeting difficulty, a scene escalation, etc.  
• Foes set intentions: At the beginning of an action round, the GM tells the players exactly what each enemy is going to do, and when those enemies act, that’s what’ll happen, no checks are made. The heroes always act first, and it’s up to the players, who decide among themselves their order of action, to stop those intentions from materializing. 

And there’s more: As your skills develop, you gain access to cool abilities, such as automatically regaining guard every turn (as a parrying swordswoman) or negating a foe’s conversational difficulty (with a disarming smile).