Essay:How Fighting, Damage, and Destruction work in KeyForge
My essay on How Timing Works in KeyForge covered a lot of ground about timing in general. That said, even after pointing players to that essay, there still seem to be a lot of questions about how Fighting works, especially in regards to the timing of different abilities, Damage, and Destruction. Hopefully this essay will provide some more insight to how these mechanics work, and perhaps more importantly, how they interact with one another.
Fighting
Using a creature to Fight in KeyForge sounds pretty simple; Exhaust a ready creature, choose a creature to attack, and exchange damage between the two creatures based on their power. Where things get complicated is applying Keywords like Assault and Hazardous and where they fit in to the "Use a creature to Fight" section of the Timing Chart.
Pre-Fight
Before a fight happens, the active player exhausts the Friendly creature they want to use to fight and chooses the Enemy creature they want to fight. Once that happens, the active player has to resolve any "pre-fight" abilities and Keywords, in the order of their choosing:
- Assault allows the Friendly attacking creature to deal damage equal to the Assault value to the Enemy attacked creature.
- Before Fight: abilities can do various things like deal damage to creatures (Bingle Bangbang), cause a creature to capture Æmber (Gas-Pipes Malone), or look for cards in your Discard pile (Angry Mob)
- Hazardous allows the Enemy attacked creature to deal damage equal to the Hazardous value to the Friendly attacking creature.
As the active player is resolving these abilities, if either the attacked or attacking creature is Destroyed, the main part of the fight (the damage exchange via creature power) does not happen, which means that any Fight: abilities will not resolve.