Dreamblade

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Dreamblade
Dreamblade: Dice
The six faces of a Dreamblade Attack Die.
Players Two or Four
Age range 13 and up
Setup time < 5 minutes
Playing time < 50 minutes
Random chance Some
Skills required Miniatures
Arithmetic

'Dreamblade', is a collectible miniatures game created by Wizards of the Coast that debuted on August 9, 2006, the day before Gen Con Indy. The game is a strategy contest that includes an element of chance which comes into play through various die rolls.

Similar to Magic: The Gathering each game represents a battle between very powerful individuals, in this case psychics called "Dream Lords." These "Dream Lords" battle one another across the landscape of humanity's shared unconsciousness by spawning dream creatures out of human emotions, in particular Valor, Fear, Madness, and Passion. Although there are many collectible miniatures games available today, Dreamblades's restricted landscape and spawning rules (among other things) result in many aspects which are more similar to a collectible card game than a traditional miniature game.

Contents

[edit] Game play

In a game of Dreamblade, two players engage in a duel. The game is won by the first player to win six turns. Each turn is won by the player with the most "conquest points," earned by controlling territories and destroying your opponent's creatures.

Each player begins with a warband composed of no more than 16 miniatures. In the course of the game these miniatures are put into play where they are used to accumulate conquest points towards winning the turn, and from there the game. There are two types of miniatures, creatures and locations. The miniatures, along with the playing area, and special six-sided attack dice comprise the unique elements of the game.

[edit] Elements

Miniatures: The main element of the game and the only element that is collectible. Each miniature will have a common, uncommon or rare designation. There are two types of miniatures, creatures and locations.

  • Creatures: The basic attributes of every creature include its spawn-cost, aspect-cost, power, defense, and life. Additionally each creature belongs to one of the aspects of Valor, Fear, Madness, and Passion and may have a lineage and special abilities.
    • Cost: A miniature's cost has two parts—spawn cost and aspect cost.
      • Spawn Cost: The minimum amount of spawn points a player has to spend to spawn the miniature.
      • Aspect Cost: Each miniature from the same aspect which is in play or in the graveyard counts as one point of the aspect cost, all remaining aspect-cost must be played using spawn points.
    • Power: The number of action dice the player rolls for the creature when he attacks.
    • Defense: The amount of damage it takes to disrupt a creature.
    • Life: The amount of damage it takes to destroy a creature.
  • Locations: Locations have a spawn cost and an aspect cost (just like creatures), but no power, defense or life. They cannot move, but offer some special ability to the rest of the warband.
  • Aspects: Each miniature belongs to one of the four aspects of Valor, Fear, Madness, and Passion. Each aspect has different qualities which are reflected in the miniatures. For example creatures from the Madness aspect have low defense but high life.
  • Lineages: Some miniatures belong to a lineage. Lineages are creatures spawned by a specific dream lord or a group of dream lords. There are 6 lineages: Bloodcut, Janus, Lost, Hellbred, Hiveling, and Stitched.
  • Abilities: The initial Dreamblade rulebook lists approximately 50 different miniature abilities. Blade abilities are the most common of these.
    • Blade Abilities: Blade abilities come in four types: blade, double blade, multiblade, and double multiblade, each representing the number of blades which may be spent on the ability, one, two, unlimited, or an unlimited even number respectively. All rolled blades must be spent, which allows for the existence of negative blade abilities.
    • Spawn Abilities: Spawn abilities are like blade abilities except that they are activated in the spawn phase by paying spawn points and sometimes may only be activated when in key cells.
    • Come into Play Abilities: Come into play or CiP abilities activate whenever the miniature is spawned, usually as an extra cost to playing the piece or as a special ability.

Playing Area: The playing area is a five by five grid. Players start out on opposites corners of the grid (this is known as the players portal). The back row is known as the spawning row, and the center 3x3 grid is known as the key cells.

  • Spawning Row: After the first round a player may spawn creatures in a cells on the spawning row which both share a row with another creature, and are unoccupied.
  • Key Cells: All of the cells within this 3x3 grid are worth conquest points to one or both of the players. The row closest to a player's spawning row is worth 5,4 or 3 conquest points to his opponent, starting with the cell corner adjacent to the players portal. The center square of the middle row is worth 2 points to either player, while the other two cells are worth one point each. If a cell is contested (both players have creatures in the cell) then neither player receives any conquest points.

Attack Dice: Attack dice are six-sided (see the attached picture.) Two of their faces count as misses (diamonds), three of the faces count as damage, with a 1 point, 2 point, and 3 point damage face. The final face is the dreamblade, which is used to power the special abilities of the miniatures in the game.

[edit] Sets

There are currently only 2 sets of miniatures released, the Base Set and Baxar's War Expansion. New sets are due to come out every three months with the next set, Chrysotic Plague, coming out in January 2007. The total number of miniatures with these two sets is 156, 96 in Base Set and 60 in Baxar's War.

[edit] External links

[edit] Official sites

[edit] Unofficial sites

  • Dreamblade.TCGplayer.com Dreamblade community with articles, figure and warband databases as well as a discussion board
  • Maxminis.com Unofficial forums for discussing all of WotC's collectible miniatures games
  • DreamBladeOz.com The Australian DreamBlade Community, with discussion forum and list of upcoming tournaments & locations.
  • dreamblade.altervista.org The Italian Dreamblade Community: lot of articles and files; on the forum you can post in english too.
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