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Chapter Two
The Mighty Minifig
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A minifig is a cute and friendly-looking fellow, but don't be fooled. Behind that lovable exterior is a remorseless killer. A minifig will hack a Human's heart right out of their chest if he thinks he can get away with it - his minifig village could live for months off the meat. Failing that, he's happy to go on massive fratricidal rampages in hopes of gaining favor with his Human overlords.
2.1 Minifig Attributes
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Despite his shocking misanthropy, a minifig is a simple creature, defined by three attributes: Action, Move, and Armor. (In later chapters, advanced minifigs will also have a Specialty that gives them extra abilities.)
These attributes are described on a minifig stat card like the one above. Players fielding a large number of different kinds of minifigs can print or photocopy their cards for easy reference during battle. In the Core Rules, however, most minifigs are exactly the same, distinguished only by their choice of weapons and equipment.
| The Minifig Gender Monotone |
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While Humans come in a dizzying variety of genders, minifigs are limited almost exclusively to one, thanks to the gendercidal efforts of the Fedophile and his army of sockpuppet minions.
Browsing the shelves of Human toy stores, the success of the Fedophile's campaign speaks for itself. Across construction toy brands, non-male minifigs are outnumbered by male minifigs by twenty to one if they haven't been eliminated entirely.
As heinous a crime as that is, toy industry gendercide was only the first step in the Fedo plan. The true atrocity was in convincing Humans that shelves full of male-only construction toy lines make perfect sense and aren't even slightly a cause for boycotts and violent uprising.
The words "he," "him," and "his" appear more than 0937 times in this rulebook, and every one of them should make you angry.
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A minifig's life, soul, and power to take action are granted by his Action Die ( ). The Action Die's faces are the composite sum of the minifig's natural aptitude, training, and luck.
The minifig's Action die of means he's powered by a standard six-sided die. The minifig's player rolls this in an Action Roll to determine the outcome of his Actions whenever the difference between potential success or failure is funny enough to justify rolling dice. If the minifig's Action Roll matches or exceeds the Use number of the weapon he's attacking with or the Action he's attempting, his efforts succeed.
An Action Die gives a minifig one Action, which he will ideally spend to attack an enemy minifig. A spent Action recharges at the beginning of the minifig's next turn.
| Basic Attacks |
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Minifigs use their Actions for all kinds of misbehavior, from Sprinting and Bailing to stealing cars and playing video games (4.2: Action). But the only Actions anyone cares about are attacks, and players can save themselves a lot of trouble by sticking to basic attacks and ignoring the rest of the rulebook.
Basic Close Combat Attacks
A minifig with a close combat weapon can try to whack any other minifig close enough for him to touch with it. He spends his Action and rolls his Action Die.
If this Action Roll comes up as a 1, then the minifig's attack misses.
On a 2 or higher, his attack hits! The minifig rolls his Action Die a second time to see how much damage he does. Whether or not the attack is successful, he and his target are now locked in Close Combat. If either participant tries to move out of the striking range of their opponent's close combat weapon, that opponent can make a free attack on them as they leave, without having to spend an Action.
Basic Ranged Attacks
As long as he's not in close combat, a minifig with a ranged weapon can try to shoot any minifig he can see within six inches. He spends his Action and rolls his Action Die.
If his Action Roll is 2 or less, the shot misses.
On a 3 or higher, the shot hits! The minifig rolls a  to see how much damage it inflicts. all dice, stat, weapon icons
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see 4.1: Movement
A minifig's Move attribute describes the distance he can move in a single turn under normal conditions. A standard minifig moves five inches per turn.
| Basic Movement |
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Minifigs can get as fancy as they like with their Movement, with special rules for climbing, crawling, Sprinting, or falling on their faces and Disrupting themselves (4.1: Movement).
For basic play, this level of detail isn't really necessary. A minifig can't move through solid obstacles, and he can't make jumps higher than two inches. Otherwise, he can move up to five inches during his turn however he wants. If he ends his movement in an unstable location — halfway up a wall or leaping through mid-air, for instance — he falls to the ground at the end of his turn.
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see Chapter Three: Minifig Weapons
A minifig's Armor attribute tells how much Damage he can withstand from a single attack — in this case, four points. If he's hit by an attack that does fewer than four points of Damage, the blow glances harmlessly away and the minifig can continue fighting. If an attack does more than four points of Damage, he's killed instantly; knock the minifig over and sever a couple of body parts as appropriate. And if an attack does exactly four points of Damage, then the minifig's player gets to choose Something Bad to happen to him (5.1: Making Attacks).
Minifigs don't have "hit points" like Humans might have come to expect from other games. In BrikWars, an attack either kills a minifig or it doesn't. In battles that might involve dozens or even hundreds of minifigs at once, a system of individually tracked hit points is too burdensome to manage from turn to turn.
| Basic Damage |
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In advanced BrikWars, combat modifiers and complex damage effects take up the majority of time and brainpower spent, giving players the chance to experience grueling pain along with their units (Chapter Five: Combat). Players who prefer to leave the suffering to their minifigs can rely on simplified damage rules.
If a minifig takes three damage or less, the attack has wasted his time. He survives unharmed.
If a minifig takes exactly four damage, one weapon of his choice is knocked out of his hand, landing as many inches away as his attacker's Action roll. If the minifig wasn't holding a weapon, he dies instantly from embarrassment.
If a minifig takes five damage or more, he's killed. Attackers can work together to make a combined attack, adding the damage from their successful hits and making a lethal strike more likely.
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While the LEGO® MINIFIGURE™ is the seminal example of the minifig species, minifigs are now available from a large number of manufacturers in nearly limitless variety.
Minifigs shown: LEGO, Mega Bloks, Best-Lock, PLAYMOBIL
2.2 Minifig Armies
Like the rest of BrikWars, how players handle army composition and team balance is more a matter of personal taste than any one system set in stone.
Serious builders can spend hours crafting polished infantry, vehicles, and scenarios. Dedicated tacticians can put special thought and care into balancing the distribution of minifigs and equipment, guided by a misconception that battles should be fair or conflicts should make sense. More commonly, BrikWars armies are mustered through the time-tested military strategy of dumping bins out onto a table and grabbing whichever units come most immediately to hand.
Preemptive Attack
Preemptive attack is the recommended and most popular army balancing system among minifigs and BrikWars players alike. Players can avoid accounting overhead entirely thanks to a simple and innovative technique: once the armies and battlefield are assembled, they immediately begin the game and attack before any of their opponents have time to worry about balance.
Enemy balancism can't always be prevented. Some adversaries might try to thwart the preemptive attack system by running army calculations in advance before even showing up to the battlefield. In cases like these, the solution is to ask them a simple question about their army numbers, wait for them to start talking, and then immediately attack.
Minifig Budgeting
In the Core Rules, all units are minifig-based, and minifig budgeting is simple. Regardless of weapon loadout, a minifig is worth one minifig. A Horse (Chapter H: The Horse) is also worth one minifig. A Hero (Chapter Six: Minifig Heroes) is worth one Hero, which is a different thing altogether. But if every player has the same number of minifigs and Horses together, and all players have the same number of Heroes, then their armies are equal. If not, then they have an opportunity to decide whether equality is something they care about to begin with.
The Military Draft
For impromptu battles, players don't have to bother with preparing armies in advance. Instead, they put all factions' combined forces and equipment in a pile between them and take turns choosing assets for their teams in a military draft.
Players can divide up the draft options however they like. It can be as granular as picking out individual minifigs, weapons, and vehicle parts one at a time, or as chunky as choosing between pre-equipped minifig squads, fully loaded warships, and ready-built military bunkers. There's no need to worry about whether the options are equal or balanced, since all players are all choosing from the same supply, but in order to maintain the illusion of fairness, the player who divides up the pile for everyone to pick from should take the last spot in the draft rotation.
| Expanded Draft Picks |
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Military drafting doesn't have to just be about weapons and personnel. Players can mix in all kinds of items to add variety.
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| The Rise of the Minifig |
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In the beginning, there were only bricks.
Mysteriously, scraps of advanced genetik material appeared from nowhere to pepper themselves throughout the primordial ABS plastic. Lurching brick-built homunculi rose up to evolve into a variety of minifig predecessors, from noodle-armed giants to faceless proto-figs and squat limbless duplicants.
As the first true minifigs appeared, the rise of the Yellow King brought yellow minifigs to dominance over all other colors. After 374 failed attempts, they mastered the art of hinged castlery with Yellow Castle 375, and established the orders of Sticker Knights to eliminate all non-Yellow figures in a merciless campaign of smiley-faced genocide.
History progressed, and carefree medieval castles metastasized into modern towns and cities, brutally segregated into hat-based castes of policemen, firemen, construction workers, and, eventually, girls. While most castes focused on security enforcement, the construction workers poured their research into occult ABS brikcraft, learning its science-defying potential for interdimensional shenanigans through trial and error and a withering casualty rate.
Before long, the other minifigs discovered the construction workers' ABS teknologikal revolution, and minifig civilization was caught up in the race to extend their reach to the plastic stars above. SpaceShips were assembled in high-security police and fire stations, and proto-figs worked around the clock in hidden hospitals to create the superfigs to pilot them.
The prestigious research team at Hospital 555 was the first to hypothesize the development of a species so destructive that it would break the flow of reality, shattering the universe and sending bits of itself backwards across time.
In a classic demonstration of minifigs' inability to consider consequences, the Hospital 555 team hunted down and reassembled shards of future debris from their own distant past, extracting the genetik material to prekonstrukt the most dangerous bioengineered organism that was ever about to exist: the Deadly SpaceMan.
The Deadly SpaceMen immediately went on to wipe out the researchers, minifig civilization, and, eventually, the spacetime continuum.
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