So, after last week's Six Bullets debacle, we got to break out Qin last night for a one off session, possibly with an eye to playing a campaign of it. Now, I'd never seen the book before and only knew a little bit about the setting and the game. My Chinese history is weak. The only thing in my favour was that I've seen many, many wuxia films.

None of this mattered - Qin rocked. Hard.

On paper the system seems needlessly fiddly. In play it worked really quite elegantly. The lynchpin of all the powers, and indeed the whole game, are chi points, and the system actively encourages you to spend them freely because it's so easy to get them back again. The taos were fantastic - these are all the wuxia powers, but rather than requiring endless book-referencing, they were very simple yet evocative. No dice rolls to see if you can run up the wall to get to the guy at the top in the face - if you have the right tao, just spend your chi, narrate the wuxia coolness and roll to hit.

My girl was an exiled noble, disowned by her father for refusing an arranged marriage. I had these mean-ass short swords and techniques that let me parry and dodge better when using both. Best of all I had the Tao of One Thousand Bees which was the House of Flying Daggers tao - I could use anything as a thrown weapon, and proceeded to spend the game flinging pine cones and stones at my enemies with lethal force. Even better, I could catch incoming missiles - handy when the Qin soldiers started firing crossbow bolts at us.

I won't go into any detail about the game, just a cool vignette of the climactic fight. In short, I'd been summoned home by my father, who had written to say he had forgiven me and wanted me to inherit his land. But before we could get home and sign the will, my supposedly dead brother had turned up and offed him, and sold the land to our sworn enemies - the Qin.

So we burst in with the evidence of his treachery, lock the door and fling the evidence down on the table, sending scrolls flying. The brother stabbed the official sent to supervise the signing of the will so out came the weapons. But I didn't go for mine - I stood up, grabbed my stool and hurled it at him with such force that he went staggering back, giving me time to draw my swords, jump on the table and engage him in melee. At the same time Five Dragons, my companion, had drawn his sword, ran round the side of the walls and slashed my brother in two with a well-placed sword strike.

A combat fit for any wuxia movie, evocative and dramatic and fun, fully supported and encouraged by the system. I want to play a campaign of this right now!