Chapter One

Gameplay


Unsophisticated players might think that the Letter of the Rules is more important than the Spirit, but the Letter is a lot less likely to sneak up behind you with an axe if you abuse it.

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Almighty Benny and Major Natalya settle their BrikWars differences over a high-stakes game of Nano-BrikWars, proving themselves to be deadly metagamers.
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Little is known about Humans, but this much is fact: young or old, rich or poor, all Humans harbor secret toy armies and dreams of conquest. Anyone failing this requirement is either not a real Human or has forgotten how to be one.

BrikWars provides a safe and comfortable setting for construction toy armies to mutilate and slaughter one another for the entertainment of their Humans. Unlike less serious wargames, BrikWars is about combat between the toys themselves. Players take turns moving toy troops and toy vehicles through toy terrain to attack one another with toy weapons and die horrifying toy deaths. The conflicts can be large or small, balanced or skewed, orderly or chaotic, as long as they deliver the mindless violence on which minifigs' psychological health and happiness depend.

1.1 Overview


Elements of Play

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Bricks

Bricks are the fundamental physical material making up the worlds of BrikWars. An individual brick is called a component: the smallest physical piece of an object that can't be disassembled any further, like a brick in a wall, the head of a minifig, or the entire body of a horse. Most objects in BrikWars are built from plastic construction bricks, but non-construction toys and other components are included as well; minifigs can't tell the difference.

It's good to have a supply of spare bricks close at hand. Players can whip up a costume change for their Hero, craters and debris from explosions, support stands to hold unexpectedly airborne minifigs aloft between turns, and any other objects that might appear as the result of events spinning completely out of control. Extra blood and fire elements become increasingly useful as a battle drags on.

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Minifigs

Minifigs and their violent passions are the heart and soul of a BrikWars battle. The minifig is the basic example of a unit: an active combatant within the game with the ability to engage in independent Movement and Action.

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Dice

Dice are spirits of chaos that power all meaningful events in BrikWars, bound in plastic and geometrically determined to thwart their Humans' plans. The minifigs' ability to take Action and do Damage is determined by the Action dice that animate them and the Damage dice they control.

The more dice, the better. Players can pass communal dice back and forth, but play goes much more smoothly if each player has their own set of dice to roll, preferably in their own color.

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Gratuitous Violence

Gratuitous violence is both the means and the justification for all minifig behavior. Every minifig activity from peace negotiations to gardening to basic dental hygeine has gratuitous violence as its end result.

Setup

Besides being easier to assemble and play on, quick terrain built with boxes and colored felt feels more natural and realistic to a minifig than the over-precious model landscapes of other wargames.
Photo: Bálint Kapos
from the BrikWars Facebook group

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Olothontor and Kidko find themselves in a zombie-infested museum. Very quick games can be thrown together by scribbling out maps onto sheets of paper.
Photo: Kidko
from "Zombie Survival"

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Players prepare for BrikWars by assembling armies, fortifications, and scenery as dictated by the imagination and toy collections of the Humans involved. Plastic brick construction is best, allowing forces and landscaping to be modified on the fly to reflect damage, equipment changes, and dramatic posturing, but armies of stuffed animals and action figures can march through book-stack mountains and shoebox buildings using the same rules.

A typical BrikWars battle has two to four players with a dozen units each, fighting over a tabletop-sized battlefield (either a literal tabletop, or a tabletop-sized area of the floor), lasting two or three hours or until players decide it's time to stop.

Battles can of course be much larger or smaller, from single-combat duels between lone Heroes in tight arenas, to quick-paced skirmishes between several dozen small teams all seeking to steal the same prize keg of Maniac Beer, to epic multi-faction zombie invasion campaigns run online with thousands of minifigs and taking months to complete.

The First Battle

For new players, the best way to learn BrikWars is to find an experienced player to teach them all the rules completely wrong. If there are no experienced players available, they can group up with other new players and learn everything completely wrong together. If none of those are available either, opponents built out of bricks are just as good and often smarter.

For their first few battles, new players can toss a handful of minifigs on the field, read a chapter or two of the Core Rules, and duke it out immediately. The players can add more chapters as they become comfortable with the rules they're misusing, or stick with (or return to) the simpler rules according to enjoyment. If they get as far as Chapter Six: Heroes, every player can promote their most ridiculous minifig to Hero and keep fighting.

For their first battlefield, players should start small, placing armies a foot apart with some simple buildings or obstacles in between to break their line of sight. This will give minifigs the opportunity to seek out cover and maneuver for advantage without needing to cross a lot of ground to reach direct combat range, and let players get comfortable with doing everything wrong right away.

Playing a quick tight skirmish to become familiar with the flow of the game will give new players a much better idea of what size and type of battles they'll enjoy before they jump into larger and more complex engagements.

Once the battlefield and armies are assembled, players assign a turn order and starting locations by any combination of scenario requirements, mutual agreement, and dice-rolling, and then combat can begin.

If one player designed the battlefield, it’s customary to allow the other players to have first pick of starting locations.

Taking Turns

One at a time, each player takes a turn, conducting Movement and Action for each of the active units under their control. When they've completed maneuvers for all of their units, the next player's turn begins. When all surviving players have taken their turns, the cycle begins again with the first player.

While it's easiest to pick a turn order and stick with it, players can mix the sequence up as they see fit. Some players like to roll dice to randomize the order of each cycle of turns, or to let the current smallest army decide the turn order each round.

When players are allied, or their forces are too far apart to interact, it can save time to run multiple players' turns simultaneously until they're in position to start killing each other like civilized minifigs.

Once Per Turn

When a player can use an ability "once per turn," the ability resets at the beginning of that player's own turn, ignoring those of other players.

When an ability can be used "once on each player's turn," the ability resets at the beginning of every player's turn, whether belonging to the unit's own player or an opponent.

Victory

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It's not especially important for any one player or team to "win" a battle. Dying horribly in some ridiculous fashion is always funnier than surviving horribly in some ridiculous fashion, and BrikWars is set up to favor the optimum result of the complete destruction of all participants, bystanders, and scenery.

Final victory goes to forces of nature or deadly catastrophes as often as to any of the players. Fire, explosive decompression, and "I told you to put your toys away twenty minutes ago" have winning records that no Human strategist can hope to match.

The classic BrikWars conclusion is for the entire battlefield to be destroyed in a cataclysmic fireball. This is considered a victory for all sides.

License to Kill

When minifigs battle, it's never over something worth fighting for. Causes like civil liberty, economic justice, or species self-preservation elicit nothing more than reliable yawns compared to disagreements over beverage brands, musical taste, t-shirt colors, or religious faith. Just like in Human conflicts, only the most face-slappingly stupid trivialities have the power to rise above petty rationality and inspire mass murder.

No battle should ever end with any faction holding the moral high ground. As in real life, this is considered a loss for all sides.

Objectives

General Yadlin briefs Nyphilian cabinet members on the success of PandoraNuker's objectives in Project Orion, despite his having later become the hated war criminal FedoraNuker.
Photo: beluga
From "The Military of Nyphilis United"
Elements shown: LEGO, iPhones

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Regardless of the "official" mission objectives, reducing a pristine battlefield to complete chaos is a clear victory for everyone.
Photo: Jim "Warhead" Lang
From "Zombie (Zulu) Dawn"
Elements shown: LEGO

image rights: Warhead, signed 12/24

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Minifigs are notoriously poor at sharing. There's nothing in the world they won't use as justification for mutual homicide.

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The simplest battles have no larger goal. Minifigs holding weapons don't need an excuse to run around whacking each other with them. When the dust settles on the piles of and dismembered limbs, success is measured solely on whether this battle was crazier than the battle before, and by how much.

In (marginally) more serious games, minifigs fight for a higher objective — stealing the enemy's secret taco recipe, assassinating a meddling peace delegation, or heaping the largest pile of skulls for the glory of the Stud God.

Objectives work best when they're aggressive and specific, driving minifigs away from safety and into direct confrontation. Specific targets to destroy, murder, or steal make for exciting battles. Passive goals like defense or escape should be treated with disgust if they're tolerated at all.

"Survival" is never a worthwhile objective. Any minifigs saddled withsuch a repugnant goal should ignore their Humans' orders and kill themselves immediately in protest.

1.2 Numbers


Units in BrikWars are defined by their physical construction and positioning. Players don't need to refer to pages of charts and graphs to see if a minifig's shopping cart has been returned correctly, if the minifig policeman is holding a chainsaw, or if the cable news channel's cameras are pointed the right direction to record fair and balanced video of parking lot justice being served. The plastic figures speak for themselves.

Some attributes aren't obvious from the physical models. In-game abilities like a shopper's running speed, a policeman's lumberjacking skill, and a chainsaw's effectiveness versus escaping minivans are represented by numbers and die rolls. BrikWars' moment-to-moment chaos is built up from orderly numerical comparisons.

Inches

The blessed RulerBokken exacts disciplined measurement in the hands of White Nun and the Purification Sisters of Saint Attila.
Wiki: White Nun

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In BrikWars, movement and weapon ranges are measured in inches. If players are opposed to inches, they can use any alternate system of measurement that seems reasonable. An inch is about three centimeters, the length of three construction studs, or the height of three construction bricks. It's not important whether the conversion is exact, as long as everyone's using the same system.

The length of a sixteen-stud brick is exactly five inches, a standard measurement distance for movement and ranged attacks.

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Vertical Inches
When measuring between elevations, downward motion is always free. Whether firing arrows over a wall, launching a school bus off a ramp, taking sniper shots from a guard tower, or stepping off a diving board into a volcano, minifigs can measure to any point above a target rather than to the target itself.

Dice

An assortment of es, s, and one glass . You will almost certainly never need a in BrikWars.

The result of this unusually lucky roll is 0 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10, or 86, ignoring the possibility of Bonus Dice. Whether or not a roll of 0 on a earns Bonus Dice is undefined.

Elements shown: dice

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Dice are the animating power that allows inert toys to rise up and take violent action against each other.

A minifig without dice is a smiling lump of plastic. A minifig with dice is a smiling lump of plastic who can run, play, drive, operate heavy machinery, plant explosives, and use farm animals as projectile weapons.

BrikWars uses die rolls to reflect the unpredictability of minifig efforts. If a minifig fires a pistol at an opponent, sometimes he'll hit, sometimes he'll miss, and sometimes he'll "accidentally" shoot his own commanding officer. If the bullet strikes a target, sometimes it will do enough damage to kill, sometimes it won't, and sometimes it just makes the minifig's superior officer very, very angry. Die rolls determine the outcome of actions whose effects aren't guaranteed.


A

A

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For the Core Rules, dice come in two flavors: the d6 () and the d10 (), named according to the number of faces on each die. The six-sided es ("dee-sixes") are regular cube-shaped dice like you might find in any lesser board game. Ten-sided s ("dee-tens") are less common; players might have to do some shopping at their local gaming store or online to stock up. es are used for almost all normal action in BrikWars, while s are reserved for specific types of high-powered combat.

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If players don't have a ten-sided die, they fake it. With a marker or stickers, they take a regular and replace the 4 with an 8, and the 2 with a 10.

Is this exactly equivalent to a true ? Not really. Does it matter? See The Rule of Fudge later in this chapter.

If players don't have any six-sided dice, they're on their own.

Dice Colors

In this rulebook, dice and other icons are given colors to match the effects they're associated with. This is solely to help find relevant rules on a page more quickly. Readers who are colorblind or reading from black-and-white printouts aren't missing anything critical.


Yellow: Action

Green: Movement and Range

Red: Damage

Blue: Armor and defenses

Rolling Dice

Die rolls are described according to the number of each type of dice involved, plus or minus a modifier number (if any). A roll of 4 means the results of four six-sided dice added together. 1+2 is a roll of one ten-sided die with two added to the result. 17 + 23 + 0937 means rolling seventeen six-sided dice and twenty-three ten-sided dice together and adding BrikThulhu's holy number zero thousand nine hundred thirty-seven to the result, which players will hopefully never have to do.

No matter how negative a modifier may be, the lowest possible result for any die roll is zero. A roll of 1-1000, for instance, will always have a simple result of zero unless a player's luck with Critical Rolls defies belief.

Critical Rolls

Rolling dice in BrikWars is never a sure thing. No matter how easy or difficult the task, as long as at least one die is rolled, there's always a chance to defy the odds through Critical Failure or Critical Success.

Critical Failure

If all the dice in a roll come up "1," then the roll is a Critical Failure, regardless of other pluses and minuses. Whatever task a player or unit was attempting fails completely, no matter how easy it might have been.

Many player groups use Critical Failures as opportunities for slapstick. Their Critically Failing minifig might have to choose between breaking his weapon, slipping and falling on his face, or accidentally slaughtering his friends and loved ones. For further ideas, see Something Bad in 5.1: Making Attacks.

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Critical Success

When rolling any number of dice, for each die that comes up on its highest-numbered face (a six on a , a ten on a ), the player may add +1 to that roll as a Bonus Die. The same holds true for the additional dice rolled – any sixes rolled on the Bonus Dice continue earning additional Bonus Dice.

A player may elect not to roll a Bonus Die that they earned, for whatever reason.

Action Rolls, introduced in 4.2: Action, earn an even crazier version of Critical Success called Over the Top Action.
Example: Bonus Dice

Example: A player makes a lucky roll on 2 + 1.

2610
The and one of the es roll their highest numbers - a ten and a six, respectively - each earning an extra Bonus Die.
+61
The player rolls the two Bonus es, rolling a six and a one. The six earns another Bonus Die.
+6 
The player rolls yet another six. The total roll is now 2+6+10+6+1+6, or 31.

The player could continue rolling Bonus Dice for as long as they keep rolling sixes, but at this point they decide to stop before the other players realize they're using a weighted .

1.3 Proper Observance of Rules


The right answer is the wrong answer if it takes more than thirty seconds to look it up. When checking a rule isn't worth the effort, it's better to axe a stupid question.

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Rules are for the small-minded and weak. Let some first-graders loose with a collection of bricks and watch the way they play. All the drama, death, and explosions anyone could want, and they won't have to crack open a rulebook even once.

How is it that they're so much smarter than adults? The answer is that adults have been subjected to many more years of forced schooling than the kids have. Wait until the kids turn eighteen; they'll have become just as slack-jawed and dull-eyed as any other Human.

BrikWars has a lot of rules. Players who've felt the sting of the compulsory education system will respect these rules, because the rules are written down in a book and some of them are even capitalized.

For players whose lives went so badly that they attended college as well, there's a risk that they'll not only shackle themselves to these rules, but will then twist them to their own ends, weaseling out loopholes and exploits to cleverly frustrate the other players and ingeniously prevent fun for the entire group.

Players engaging in rules-lawyering and munchkinism have missed the point of BrikWars. If possible, they should schedule some time with actual children and try to remember all the things they've forgotten about having fun.

The reason BrikWars has so many rules is that it's a lot more fun to flout a large rules system than a small one. Rules should be treated as a springboard for imagination rather than as a leash for self-enslavement. But not everyone is ready to live without the safety net that a rules system provides, so before going any further, here are the three most important rules in the game.

The Rule of Fudge

Inspired by divine fudge, these formerly dreary and law-abiding citizens have turned to a fulfilling life of crime. The power of fudge overrides all laws.
Elements shown: LEGO, fudge

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The Rule of Fudge
Fudge everything your opponents will let you get away with.

If left unchecked, rules-obsessed players can track events down to the tiniest detail. Turns take hours, everyone loses interest, and no one wants to play a second time. This is for the best. Those players should give up on construction bricks and donate them to someone with an imagination.

Just because players can assign die rolls to every sneeze and trace the trajectory of every blown-off body part doesn't mean they should. The most probable results are very often the least ridiculous, and why bust out calculators just to spend more time having less fun? Except when opponents insist otherwise, the bulk of the action should be resolved by rough estimate, arbitrary fiat, and a generous supply of hand-waving.

Given the opportunity, players should always fudge in favor of mayhem. Don't waste time on stuff nobody cares about. Following the rules should be an even lower priority than worrying about who's winning. Getting some laughs during the battle and having a good story to tell afterwards are the primary goals.

Remember that while you're fudging everything your opponents aren't objecting to, they're trusting you to set the limits on their fudging in return. They won't know what degree of rule-minding you're most comfortable with if you don't tell them.

What I Say Goes

WHAT I SAY GOES
Players are smarter than rulebooks. Especially the ones with the highest dice rolls.

There are times when players disagree, when the best course of action isn't clear, or when no one remembers a rule but it's not worth wasting time to look it up. Can zombie bites convert bears into zombie bears? Can archers fire longbows from inside a garden hedge? Magnets, how do they work?

If there isn't a quick consensus, then it's time for a What I Say Goes Roll. Every interested player (along with any sufficiently opinionated bystander) states their position. All participants roll dice, re-rolling ties if necessary. The player with the highest roll wins, and What They Say Goes.

Everyone's the Boss of Their Own Toys

Everyone's The Boss Of Their Own Toys
Don't break people's stuff without their blessing.

BrikWars works best when game effects are reflected in the physical objects. When a minifig gets decapitated, the head is removed and knocked aside. When a tank gets blown apart, the model is smashed to pieces and scattered across the battlefield. When land mines explode underfoot, holes are chainsawed into the table surface to show where the craters are. When the doomsday nuke goes off, players set their house on fire.

Surprisingly, not everyone is happy to see their prized constructions, furniture, or home equity destroyed for the sake of BrikWars realism. They may doubt their ability to put their favorite models back together again after the battle, or they might worry about losing valuable elements when all the pieces get mixed up. They may be thinking ahead to the tedious job of explaining completely justifiable arson to an insurance adjuster.

No matter how poor the excuse, Everyone's the Boss of Their Own Toys. If a player or other concerned bystander doesn't want their stuff broken, don't break it. There are other ways to track damage to enemy units and structures and players besides busting pieces off of them, even if it's not as much fun. If you don't know whether someone is excited about the idea of you breaking their stuff, ask.

Even more important than their physical models, players can be very protective of their characters and storyline. Players should resist the urge to What I Say Goes an opponent's twenty-year epic with a cast of thousands into a black hole for the sake of making their own half-assed army they invented over a lunch break seem two percent cooler. Regardless of what happens on the battlefield, players are the bosses of their own storylines. If they don't feel that other players are treating their Kanon with respect, their plot twists will be vetoed.

When constructing BrikThulhu, it's important to keep a supply of flowers close at hand for the sake of omitting them.
Elements shown: LEGO, Mega Bloks

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The Book of BrikThulhu

BrikThulhu (10.4: Monsters) feasts on the obsession of Humans, and wargames are one of his many lures.

The Human who understands all of a wargame's rules system is just as useless to BrikThulhu as the one who understands none of it. The perfect rulebook is one that holds its Humans in the liminal space between, perpetually on the verge of comprehension and never achieving it.

Every rulebook inconsistency and difference of interpretation is another construction brick in BrikThulhu's cyclopean Tower of Babel, rendering players incomprehensible even to each other. A truly effective rules system is a labyrinth of tantalizing ambiguities that hook and constrict like tentacles, dragging victims into arguments and flame wars that repulse the rest of Humanity.

Like Human legal systems, religions, marketing copy, and end user license agreements, a good rulebook increases its Humans' isolation and paranoia with every turn of the page, binding them ever more deeply to the game they use to oppress themselves and inexorably into BrikThulhu's cephalopodan embrace.

(BrikWiki entry: BrikThulhu)
How to Use This Rulebook

A builder with a limited brick supply will try to use every last element. A builder with a larger supply learns to be more selective. The BrikWars rules are a very large pile of bricks, and it's rare that players will have a need for all of them at once.

The rulebook is organized around increasing levels of player investment. The book divisions mark the three main levels of play:

Numbered chapters are considered essential; each new chapter builds on the numbered chapters preceding it. Chapters marked with letters and symbols are supplemental and can be swapped in and out without damaging the core system.

Players can stop after any chapter and have a complete game. A first-chapter game will be all hand-waving and What I Say Goes Rolls, good for pick-up games and quick backstory resolution. A second-chapter game is good for introducing the basic system to Human children and players new to miniatures wargaming. Experienced gamers can start by reading up through Chapter Six: Heroes, treating the remaining chapters as inspirational grim warnings and tempting forbidden lore.

Once they're comfortable with the systems, seasoned BrikWarriors are free to switch between rules levels on the fly based on how invested they are in the units currently getting wrecked, how much time they have left before bedtime, and which type of beverages they've chosen to drink too many of.