Guardians is a short but neat Power-Rangers-inspired one-shot or serial campaign RPG.
Its PDF is one page, with a clean layout and solid use of a rainbow graphic to frame the text. The text *does* feel like it could maybe be broken up into sidebars to make the page more visually interesting, but I do not have a graphic design background and I can't say that with authority. Plus, everything's perfectly readable as is.
Gameplay-wise, Guardians is played with d6s, tokens, and a deck of cards.
Play is divided into two phases, one of which is a social phase where the players explore the world like a standard rpg and occasionally make rolls to overcome obstacles. This phase is open-ended, and lasts until the players decide they're done with it.
The second phase is combat, and in it everyone plays a narrative card game that's informed by the resources the party generated during the social phase.
Honestly, this structure is cool, and it does a good job mirroring the format of a Power Rangers episode. It does assume there's only one combat per episode, but you could change this pretty easily by looping back from combat to social play.
The combat phase is also a fully detailed minigame, and the suits of the cards are used to trigger different effects. At the same time, the numbers on the cards to decide whether the scenario's monster can counter them, and this is solidly fun. It makes for an interesting back-and-forth, but while the game doesn't explicitly spell this out, the players can't lose. If the team is about to get knocked out, one of the rangers instead develops a new power and overwhelms the monster.
Overall, I think Guardians is a cool game with a strong mechanical foundation. It does a great job reproducing the source material, but it doesn't necessarily deliver a lot of narrative tension, so you may need to tweak the rules in a few places if you want, ah, Kamen Rider Amazons or Gaim instead of MMP. You also might need to read the PDF twice, as in some places the rules are kind of densely packed, but this is not a huge burden for a one-page game.
Ultimately if you like Power Rangers, if you like games that are quick to pick up and play, and if you like games that feel both mechanically lose and mechanically solid, you should check this out.
Minor Issues:
-3rd para mentions that there are tables to help if you get stuck, but I couldn't find any.
-4th para, "Character, guardian and mech" this might be a bit unclear without an oxford comma
-Can you start stats with 0 points? If so, that zero stat will make for rolls that have no successes and no failures and can theoretically force the game into a neutral state.
-6th para, "the player or the GM then describes the action based on the number of successes and failures." This could use some guidelines on how to interpret it. What does one success mean? One failure? Multiple successes and failures?
-There's also some secondary weirdness with the dice in that having more dice doesn't necessarily make you better. It just amplifies the magnitude of your successes and failures. Is this intended, or would you rather a pool with 3 successes and 2 failures mean a success by margin of 1?
-What happens if the players run out of friendship tokens during the battle phase?