Fate Carvers is the work in progress title of a game I’ve now sketched and even designed alpha cards for. Here, I’ll go through that sketch of the game in the hope that this marks me starting a playtesting process and not just spinning words out into the void. This game represents a bit of an oddity in my game design: I usually wish to create a world, then model it. Here, I’m really just obviously inspired by the games I’ve played recently. Specifically, those are Dice Gambit on PC, which I loved, and Dice Throne on tabletop, which I’ve played a ton with my son for the past week or so.

Both games see you rolling dice Yahtzee style, where you roll once, consider the abilities you can trigger with the symbols, then selectively reroll one to two more times to hone in on a specific skill or combination of actions you’d like to execute. So basically: that, but with miniatures.

The Setting

The setting for this will be something of a dark or at least serious fantasy world. I’m taking my inspiration from any number of MyMiniFactory creators who generate beautiful small skirmish warbands every month chock full of miniatures I’d love to paint but have no real game for.

I’d like this world to have a focus on deities and small conflict, such that your small five-man warbands pledge themselves to a deity and go to battle over area objectives or treasure objectives on a 3×3′ board. Like I said: I’m very mechanics forward here. The world is somewhat of an afterthought and I hope to work with a good friend to plot out something that I’ll then take and integrate into the game.

Mechanics

The core design objective is to create a fantasy themed hero brawler with strong push-your-luck elements, where teams of 5ish models fight over objectives that reward positioning, movement, and enemy manipulation more than raw killing power. Think fantasy Marvel Crisis Protocol with Yahtzee dice mechanics for triggering powers. That’s really it.

The heart of the design I’m writing is the character cards, as seen above. As the game is in the alpha stages, please don’t mind the generic buff names. Those will be replaced with something thematic down the line. You choose a class for each character and print off the relevant cards. There’s no customization, but you do get to choose a deity who will also give you an additional ability card to roll on.

The turn flow is simple: you alternate activating with your opponent in Initiative Cycles. First, we do characters with Initiative 1, then 2, then 3, etc. If I have more Initiative 1 characters, I get to activate more of my models before you do. When a model activates, it rolls five dice and looks at its character card. The colored cubes are dice requirements on a D6.

Blue: 1-3. Green: 4-5. Purple: 6.

You then compare to the dice requirements of your skills. You spend dice one of four ways:

1. Move – spend any dice of any symbol to move your default value.
2. Attack – spend any dice of any symbol to perform a basic attack per your stat line.
3. Skill – spend any two dice in accordance to the requirements of the skill you wish to execute.
4. Delay – spend any one dice to have the character wait to activate in the next initiative phase instead, but they retain their remaining dice.

The idea here is you spend your dice as you please. You could, for example, move twice and then use Pin to debuff an enemy’s movement, then use Attack to shoot another enemy. You could instead Attack, then Pin, then use Refraction so you could affect four enemies or just one to two enemies several times. You could use the same skill twice if you have the dice for it.

That’s… the game, honestly. There’s more–the skills are the bulk of the interest. They affect all the game’s stats, provide rerolls, move allies and enemies, or possibly just do direct damage. I have not settled health values but my intent is for characters to be able to survive 5-6 hits on average. There’s some healing peppered about, too. An ideal party should be a mix of capabilities, similar to an RPG. I have sixteen classes drafted and hope to have around 30ish with reasonable variety between them for an end product.

I also intend to have a pantheon of deities you can pledge yourself to to gain additional abilities to roll on or dice manipulation to help you in your cause.

From here, you keep alternating, playing out and combining your skills and dice luck to achieve the scenario objectives. I’d likely take a page from Legion and Marvel Crisis Protocol and allow warbands to select their win conditions. I really want a combo mindset here, rewarding players for thinking about how they can use their movement abilities, buffs/debuffs, and personal objectives to achieve victory. It’s a bit of the Magic: The Gathering appeal.

My Goal

There’s more to think through. You may have noticed the top right number on the cards: that’s meant to be health. I have not settled it. I need to playtest to start to understand how it all comes together and a game like this will demand a ton of playtesting. My hope is to play against myself soon and start to iterate mechanics and ideas toward an actual, functional product to alpha test with others.

Keep an eye on this space. Hopefully, more to come on this one–assuming I don’t run off with Battletech or Dragon Rampant or Midgard or…