Gaia and I have been playing Card Wars a lot on the iPad these days. It's an game based on the eponymous episode of Adventure Time-- it's clearly a parody of collectable card-battle games. It's also a beautiful homage to collectable card-battle games. Also, it's based on an episode of a pretty great cartoon series.
Betty and I all bummed out because there's no 2-player mode. We'd like to play each other. So we did what kids for generations have done. We grabbed some 3 x 5 notecards, a stack of D&D dice and some pencils and rolled up our own characters.
Here are some rules.
Character Cards
Here are our cards from our first couple of battles:
Rolling up some fighters
- Characters get HP based on a roll of 4d6 and discard the lowest die.
- Characters get an Armor Class based on a roll of 1d12.
- A character's Attack level is determined with a roll of a 1d12, and this table determines what dice are used to determine the amount of damage a character deals.
- 1-4 = 1d4
- 5-6 = 1d5
- 7-8 = 1d8
- 9-10 = 1d10
- 11-12 = 1d12
- Each Character gets one healing surge, which can be used in place of an attack, determined with a 1d8 roll.
- Gaia and I then give the character a name and draw a little portrait of the character.
Basic Gameplay
Basic Gameplay is essentially a simplified version of the standard D20 system battle.
Two characters take turns attacking each other, and each player rolls 1d20 to determine initiative. The player with the highest roll goes first.
The player whose turn it is has two choices. They can attack or they can heal.
Attack
The attacking character rolls 1d20. If the die is equal to or the victim's Armor Class, the attack is successful, and the attacker can roll damage with the die according to the character's attack level. The victim subtracts the total damage from their hit points. When a character's HP is reaches zero, they are out. Characters with zero hit points cannot use their healing surge.
Healing
Instead of attacking, the player can opt to use his healing surge, which returns a 1d8 roll of their health.
Victory
The winner is the last character standing.