Whether in video games or board games, there’s a certain zen — is it okay to call it zen? — that washes over you when you only have one hit-point left. Now it’s just you and your skills. How smartly you can dodge. How precisely you can block. You become an agent of grace, dancing across the screen or tabletop. The playing field has been leveled. Every mistake is now the same as every other mistake. Just you and your abilities and those key-mappings and—

And now you’re dead.

One-Hit Heroes by AC Atienza and Connor Reid starts from the idea that, well, look, it’s right there in the title. One hit and you’re dead. It’s a fantastic idea. One they fudge a little bit, which is to be expected, and one where the execution sometimes feels a little thinner than it might have. But the idea never stops being fantastic.

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