Mankind has always lusted for power. From its infancy, we fought against one another for dominance, access to food, shelter, mates, resources, and glory. The arms race only intensified as time went on: from simple spears and slings, to guns and bombs, to plasma beams and tungsten rods. A bizarre fascination developed for war and wargames, between individuals, communities, and nations. Each conflict grew progressively more bloody until one day weapons were developed that had the potential to nullify earth's entire existence. Extensive simulations were run using localized reality control fields in which imagination was the limit (and the energy required to power them, of course); such simulations were known as battledreams, for the delirious destruction synthesized within.

Happily, it was never put into play; those that developed them realized that its use would have unthinkable consequences. The power struggles began to scale down, and international agreements sought and adopted alternative methods of conflict resolution. Strangely enough, the creation of battledreams could be used not only to destroy, but to create a space in which such destruction could be contained. Operators of such battledreams were known as battlemancers, who perfected the art in order to settle international disputes in a bloodless manner.

You play one of the battlemancers, on the cusp of entering such a battledream to demonstrate your power.

Trinity

Battlemancer is a strategy game based around the Trinity game system. It is a hybrid of collectible card game and board game where the cards are custom designed by the player and turn into pieces on the board when played.

Settings

The backstory is dependent on the setting. In one setting, the battlemancers are powerful magicians who can call forth entire armies and are the most potent of military forces. In another setting, the battlemancers fight a secret war at night in the modern day world.

Potential

The central concept of the game is that every element is worth a certain number of points called potential. The game is thus balanced by forcing the players to choose how to distribute their potential.

Players can purchase potential at a rate of 1 cent per point of potential, and the amount of potential is attached to the player’s account. Potential is used to purchase cards.

The price of a card is determined by multiplying together all the values associated with a particular feature on the card, and then adding together the values of each feature. A player may craft a card by spending potential equal to its price, and this allows the player to add the card to their collection.

Pieces

The main gameplay elements are called pieces. Each piece is represented by a card when not visible on the board, and becomes a piece when it is visible on the board.

A piece consist of the following customizable elements:

• Name
• Icon

In addition a piece has the following features:

• Skills
• Attributes
• Property

The name is simply an identifier of the piece, and can be any acceptable alphanumeric string. The icon is a square containing art that represents the piece when placed on the board. The attributes are determined according to a point-buy system in which the player can choose attributes and qualities and a piece is balanced by the fact that its power is proportional to its cost.

Skill

A piece can have three particular skills: A melee combat skill, a ranged combat skill, and a support skill. When creating a card, each skill level costs one potential.

Collection

The player’s collection is all the cards that they have purchased. These can be used to build decks.

Decks

Battles may take place at different power levels. You may only play a deck with a power level less than or equal to the power level of the battle being played. A deck’s power level is determined by adding up the total power of all the cards in it, plus starting initiative. In a fair battle, the power level of each player’s deck should be close to the same.

Board

The game takes place on a hexagon of hexagons. Each hexagon can contain only one piece.

Leader

A special card that is always in your opening hand, and which you must deploy first on your first turn before doing anything else, the leader is a customizable card that in order to have a legal deck, you must be able to pay the initiative to deploy it on the first turn. Thus, you must begin the game with enough initiative to deploy your leader. Initially it may be your only source of resources as well. Keep in mind though that it still counts towards your deck’s power level. You win the game by capturing your opponent’s leader, and obviously, you lose the game if your leader is captured.

Hand

The opening hand consists of your leader card, which can be augmented by drawing cards with initiative. You may spend an initiative to draw a card at any time on your turn.

Resources

Instead of land cards, there can now be multiple resource generating pieces, ranging from magical conduits created from inscribing runes onto the ground, to factory structures, or whatever else people desire to create.

Note that a deployment or summoning occurs after the beginning of turn, so pieces initially have no resources on the turn they are deployed or summoned.

Initiative

Initiative is how many actions a player can cause their pieces to take above and beyond what they could normally do with their own energy. You begin the game with an amount of initiative equal to the difference between the power level of the battle you are playing, and the power level of your deck.

Base

At the beginning of the game, before you can really do anything else, you must deploy your leader to a hexagon located in the row of hexagons closest to the player. That particular hexagon becomes your base, and counts as a piece for the purposes of summoning. If your leader is destroyed but you still have a base, return the leader to your hand as a card, which you can summon as normal. If your base is occupied by an opponent’s piece, it is captured.

Summoning

You can summon pieces from cards into hexagons adjacent to another piece you control by paying initiative equal to the power of the card. After a piece is introduced or moved and is not selected it appears with just its picture in the square. Selecting a piece shows the rest of its card. The movement ability of different pieces depends on the amount of points spent on it. It is perfectly possible to have a stationary piece.

Destruction

A piece is destroyed when any of its normally above zero capacities falls to zero.

Victory

Victory is achieved when you are the last player who controls both a leader and a base.