DrawCraft! Rules and discussion

[Jason Rainville]

1095708


DrawCraft is a mix of illustration and turn-based strategy games that pits two artists against each other in a war of imagination. Anything can happen as each player draws new buildings, soldiers and upgrades to counter his enemy’s strategy; Attack your opponent with Viking longships blessed by Odin to soar through the air, or send waves of zombies to infect the enemy. Draw klingon warriors and send their foes to the underworld, or research dark magic for your wizards by building spell towers.

Download the board here
(http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/8392/drawcraftboard.jpg)

At the beginning of the game each payer must choose a faction. It can literally be anything; dwarves, sci-fi aliens, possessed household appliances, whatever they might want. Players must then draw up their command building (whatever it might be) and a basic soldier unit and place them on the board. Place both the starting building and soldier in the starting area. the command building at the start can produce the basic soldier but like everything else can be upgraded later. The object of the game is to defeat your enemy by destroying their command building. The spirit of the game however is to defeat your enemy in the most unique way possible.

By default, each soldier can move one space per turn and have one ability (such as attacking or any other special ability). All soldiers can move simultaneously, however soldiers can’t move and attack in one turn (to start…) Each soldier has one hp and deals 1 damage (if they can attack at all), so at the beginning must will die in one hit. Buildings start out with 3 hp and can only be built next to adjacent buildings in any direction. Creating new buildings and soldiers means that the player must illustrate them and reveal their abilities. Players can also spend time upgrading buildings or soldiers (and of course drawing the changes)


During their turn, each player can do one of each of the following

- Unit Action: Move or complete an action with your soldiers (such as attacking or using a special ability)
- Unit Production: Produce new soldiers from production buildings (each production building will yield one soldier) or upgrade a current design. Soldiers will pop out of their production buildings and be placed in an adjacent square.
- Building Production: Place a new building on the board (by either copying a current design or drawing a new one) or upgrade a current design. Buildings can only be built next to other buildings.

These actions should be taken in the above order, to prevent someone from building a new building, producing a new soldier from that building and moving him all in one turn.

Once a building or a soldier has been upgraded, all other similar units produced will start with the upgrades in place. If you upgrade your laser rifleman’s weapon to a plasma launcher (for an attack strength of 2) then you can produce new plasma soldiers right after that instead of having to upgrade your old ones.




So, see all those nice shiny rules up there?
Feel free to break any and all of them, but make sure to do it within the context of the game; maybe next turn you upgrade a building for more hp, or a better attack or higher rate of production.

Any rule can be bent or broken except one; no one building or unit is a game winner. No building a nuke, a super-plague or nanites that will wipe out the entire board. Any other tactic is valid; ninjas that can move outside the board, space cruisers that can move over other units without having to go around, zombies that take over other units, special upgrades that bend the rules etc. We want to have (and see!) a fun game with players vying for control, not a compound on either side that’s researching the doomsday device.

[Ivory_Oasis]

Here are some ideas :) Kind of going off of things like magic the gathering or civ (oh no, i'm a nerd :(

First, limiting resources. Instead of the game simply giving you a unit, you should be able to use strategies such as longer term saving for bigger units. The game starts you with 10 units of resources.

So, put 5 resource nodes onto the board. (2 close to each player, and one in the center). Each turn, as long as you control a building designed to extract from the node, you gain a resource.

Then, units should also be restricted in terms of resources.

To begin, a basic 1/1 unit would cost 1 resource. This means, each point of life or attack are worth 0.5 units. The life is a total maximum amount (but does not regenerate on its own).

Then, each ability which affects a point of life or attack costs an additional 1 resource. Also, each ability beyond that costs an additional 1 resource.

So, you could have a 1/1 creature (1 resource) who then has the ability to deal 1 damage (1 resource) to a creature 1 square out of melee range (1 resource) for a total of 3 resource. ((were it to be deal damage 2 squares away, it would have been 2 resources instead of 1)).

That brings us to combat.

First off. Creatures both attack each other when combat is initiated. So, a 1/1 creature attacking another 1/1 creature both would kill each other. ((Though, you could give a creature such things as “First strike” ability for an additional resource, which would let them calculate their damage first)).

Flying is important to address. Everything should work off a basic melee attack…with ground being able to attack flying and visa versa (flying could let you stack units on top of eachother though, making them combine if attacked? Attacker gets to choose how to distribute the damage though).

Then, you should also be able to move OR attack with all creatures each turn if you want to (like civ). Attacking simply requires an attempt of movement onto the square of the enemy (which means a unit that can move 2 squares each turn could attack 2 times maximum…making them more deadly to buildings which do not attack back unless given that ability).

Mmmm, so, that should give some structure to limitations placed on creatures / buildings you can make. That way you can devote larger resources to more advanced units.

Though, didn’t give much thought to how upgrades of existing units should work… or how to handle buildings?

[Jason Rainville]

All good ideas Ivory (and I did think about resources) but the problem is, the game has to be as open and simple as possible. I'm a tabletop rpg nerd and I'd love to add mountains of rules to the thing with random number generators, tables of costs and actions and units...

but I'd be the only one playing :)

I think the act of making a fun match with some unique drawing opportunities trumps game balance or plausibility. That said, I do like your idea for simultaneous combat, however it complicates things by having to determine who did what when. If I have a zombie that has a 1 damage bite that also turns people into zombies, but in simultaneous combat also gets destroyed... what really happens? Did the zombie bite and die, and the opponent turns, or did he kill him before the bite... there are a number of special situations that would be complicated by this type of combat.

plus, it also means that there's no real advantage by holding ground; a stronger unit will be stronger wherever it is if it doesn't have to worry about who attacks first. If it did have to worry about that, then a weaker unit might have a chance if it can hold some ground and get the first strike.



AALLLLLL of that is moot though since you can start with whatever rules you want really. It's not MY game, just an outline of something I think would be fun :)

[UCT]

Jason, has this died the death, or any of it still going on?

[ChromaticCodex]

Yes. Drawcraft must live! If you still want to start a round i'll play with you UCT. I've already got a game started with HugeHarHar but he's taking to danm long :) ... The ole' carple tunnel is starting to act up, but ive got another arm and plenty of ideas. So if you start a thread and post your first move, i'd be happy to throw down some antagonistic sketches :batgirl:

[Jason Rainville]

Jason, has this died the death, or any of it still going on?

My 2 games have apparently died, but no one needs me to start a game or anything :) Just get a buddy and draw!

[Robotus]

What about something more like scrabble or dominoes; adding on instead of a war? A person could draw something within a time limit and the competitor must either add something into the drawing plausibly or enhance the realism of the original drawing, the latter producing more points than the former. Perhaps one can loose points if the addition is judged by some method to be implausible or to have damaged the realism of the added upon drawing.

That way the competition happens directly using the act of drawing itself.

[ChromaticCodex]

Robotus-
That sounds much less fun. Especially over the web. My friends and I sometimes play exsqusite corpse which is somewhat like the game you described but without any rules or structure and is done in person. I think this drawcraft thing is more about having fun prompting each other to draw and get ideas down quickly and less about having an objective game. There's like almost no structure; it's like either player could decide "I win this turn!" which i think is great. But what the hell, that's just me, i'm sure if you came up with some rules for this game you could find someone to test it out with you, i'd be interested to see what happens.

[Beeston]

I am going to try and start up a DrawCraft game group for my Uni soon, I want to see how it works out. I'm trying to get people in my Animation class to draw in their spare time as well as playing Magic the Gathering and D&D, just in a way that's helpful to their interest in drawing.

I'll let you know how it works out =)