Octagon Hustle

Ricky Rizzo has the microphone and the purple suit. Big Earl has the cauliflower ears and the opinions. Between them is an eight-sided cage, and in it is you: a jiu-jitsu beach bum, a Muay Thai assassin, a circus-trained sambo bear, an Olympic judoka, a cartwheeling capoeirista or one of three more, or someone you built yourself out of two styles and twenty-seven points.

Octagon Hustle is an MMA card brawler on dungeon-solitaire bones. Four cards come into the fight row and you play three. His moves are red and have to be answered: meet them head on, stop them with the right defence (a guard won't stop a double-leg, a sprawl won't stop a hook), or stash them in the corner. Your moves come from your own deck: jabs and teeps, head kicks and spinning backfists, double-legs, suplexes and uchi matas, guard passes, back takes, armbars, triangles, heel hooks and rear-naked chokes. Position is everything. Standing, clinch, guard, mount and back decide which of your cards work at all, and turn his cards into different moves. The same red card is a hook on the feet, a knee in the clinch, ground-and-pound from mount, or a triangle if you are foolish enough to sit in a jiu-jitsu player's guard. Submissions become a timing duel: tap in the green to finish, or to escape. Health, stamina, body and leg damage, cuts and the doctor, three-round fights, five for a title, and three judges with opinions of their own.

Between fights there is a career. Climb the rankings from a regional league in an old ice rink to the world title in Vegas. Pick your opponents, run training camps that add cards to your deck, hire coaches, and buy gloves, walkout songs, pyro and an ice bath. Then there's the hustle. Slick Vinnie gets you main events and now and then wants you to take a dive. Big Tony arranges for your opponents to have off nights. And Dr. Feelgood, licence pending, sells entirely fictional juice: real stat boosts, a drug tester who turns up at the worst moments, stripped belts, and wear and tear that doesn't go away. Score is career earnings. Blood can be switched off.