Draconis 8 TCG

This video includes an interview and game play. We have more videos in the "Videos" section of this page.  

Pledge Tiers

Add-Ons

Card Sleeves (pack of 50) 

Each pack contains 50 sleeves with the Draconis 8 card back, but with 5 different interior colors. 10 Black, 10 red, 10 blue, 10 green, and 10 white per pack. This will allow players to sleeve different decks with different interior colors to help differentiate cards during play. 

Card Binder $39

• Holds 324 cards. (A full set of Draconis 8 art or 36 Decks)
• 18 pages - hold 9 cards (a full deck) on the front and  on the back of each page. 
• Holds cards with or without sleeves.
• Black backing separates the front and back of each page. 
• Pages are bound to the spine (no metal rings to damage your cards).
• Zipped closure to keep your cards safe.
• Bound to the spine Premium card binder 9 pocket. 

Storage Box $29. 

• 265mm x 320mm x 94mm three-row storage box 
• 3 foam blocks 
• 21 plastic dividers (9 ability, 7 dragon, 1 terrain, 4 deck)
• Holds cards with and without sleeves. 

Divider Expansion Pack $9

Twelve additional 87 mm x 73 mm high-quality (.76mm thick) plastic dividers to sort your favorite decks in your Draconis 8 Storage Box. Area on top to label with a marker. 

Playmats (24"x24") $25 Each

These large 24" x 24" Neoprene Playmats work perfectly for 2, 3, or 4 player games of Draconis.

Your terrain card(s) are centered on the mat such that regardless of the direction you build out, your 4x4, 5x5, or 6x6 game grid stays within the playmat without having to slide cards around. 

Pouch with 2 more Bead Colors (to support 3 & 4 Player Games) $9

Drawstring cloth pouch with 30 green and 30 clear glass beads. 

Starter Set

Your starter set includes 4 nine-card packs (each its own deck) and a cloth pouch with 41 glass beads for two players to keep score, all in a box that has room for even more cards (with or without sleeves). 

Pack

Each pack contains a terrain card and a complete eight-card deck for one player with one mighty dragon and seven champions. Scan the back of your terrain card to get an exact digital copy of your pack to play in the Draconis 8 app.

Display Box

Each display box contains twenty-four Draconis 8 Packs! 

Gameplay

Draconis has great strategic depth, but is easy to learn. 

Each player starts the game with an eight-card deck, a terrain card, and a supply of red or blue glass beads.  

Players randomize which terrain card will be used and place it on the table. The terrain is a neutral card that either player can score points against. 

Next, players shuffle their decks and draw one card. 

Each turn, both players draw a card, giving them a two-card hand. Then both players choose one of their two cards to play, and reveal them simultaneously. 

The player who revealed the card with the higher speed (the number in the circle in the upper left) claims a yellow bead (worth 1 victory point). They play their card onto the table next to (orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to) any card in play. Then the player with the lower-speed card plays it onto the table. 

When opposing cards are next to each other and their Powers (the numbers in the shields) touch, the highest Power wins and its owner places one of their Victory Point beads on that number.

Note that some abilities may cause cards in play to shift. If a card moves, remove all beads from fights it was involved in and recalculate, placing beads based on its new position. 

In a two player game, cards will form a 4x4 grid. Once there are 4 cards in a row or column, the edges of the grid on both ends of that row or column are locked and cards can't be played beyond those edges. 

At the end of the 7th turn, players calculate their score by counting their yellow beads plus their color beads won in battle. The player with the higher score wins! 

Abilities

Played Abilities do something when the card is played. After that, a Played Ability has no effect.  

These cards represent great military leaders. As the battle develops, one of your units may find itself outmaneuvered, with its powerful sides unengaged and its weaker sides outmatched by opponents.  A command card can turn those losses into victories.

When a card with command is played, you may rotate a friendly card next to it (orthogonally or diagonally adjacent) to any facing.

Illusionists, Satyrs and other tricksters confuse their opponents into deadly mistakes.  

When a card with Confuse is played, you may rotate a diagonally adjacent enemy card to any facing.

The hearts of even the mightiest warriors fill with terror in the presence of the undead!

When a card with Fear is played, you may rotate an orthogonally adjacent enemy card to any facing.

Ogres and Giants might not be the brightest combatants, but their sheer size sends foes running.  

A card with Stomp may be played on top of an opposing card, forcing that card to slide to an empty orthogonally adjacent space. 

Continuous Abilities are always active, and never "shut off".  After each move in the game, a card with a continuous ability checks to see if that ability applies or not.  

When deployed properly, witches and wizards can turn the tide of battle!

If a card with aura is winning two or more challenges, it has an additional two victory point beads. 

Certain creatures, such as krakens, wurms, and elementals, are difficult to engage in battle. 

A card with enforced is immune for challenges and opponents abilities (such as fear, confuse and range) on its walled-off side and corners. 

Fliers have a powerful battlefield advantage, being able to swoop in to attack opponents where they are weakest. 

If a card with flight wins a Challenge by 10 or more, it scores an additional victory point bead in that challenge. 

Range units can attack without engaging the enemy directly.  

Your card with range scores a victory point bead if an opposing card is diagonally adjacent to the range icon in the corner of your card. Range also scores a victory point if the terrain card is diagonally adjacent to the range icon in the corner of your card. 

Ents and many giant beasts stubbornly hold their ground in battle as if rooted in place.  

Cards with Rooted can’t be moved or rotated by opponents abilities. 

Dragons

In Draconis 8, you play as a Dragon Emperor, leading a war band of seven champions chosen from the mightiest minions in your domain.

Your dragon card represents you, and is the most powerful card in your deck.

 All dragons have Flight and Range. Their Range ability effects all four corners of the card (unlike standard Range cards which only effect two corners).  

Additionally, each Dragon has a third ability based on its color. 

Finally, their challenge stats are higher than a standard card with the same ability and initiative would have.

Using your dragon wisely is the key to victory.

With their acid breath and mastery of necromancy, Black Dragons inspire fear throughout their empires and beyond. 

They draw power from from rot and decay, so they value marshes and swamps in their domains. But they also find calm and focus in barren landscapes with little of the buzzing energy of life. 

Agile, clever, and playful, Blue Dragons love to arc their lightning breath across multiple targets. 

Their weather magic gives them control of winds and rain, making them a favored monarch of farmers and sailors. 

Brown Dragons possess the magic of the earth, with the ability to manipulate soil, stone, and plant life. They can cause the ground to shift and crack, raise walls of earth, and make forests and fields grow lush or wither away at will. 

They are the guardians of the deep woods and wild places, embodying both the nurturing and destructive powers of nature. This sovereign is revered by druids, rangers, and forest dwellers such as elves and Ents.

Gold Dragons can exhale a blast of focused, searing energy that can strike with surgical precision.

They are masters of mental magics such as telekinesis, telepath, mind reading.

So benevolent are Gold Dragons to their subjects that  "under golden wing" has become an expression meaning having good fortune, or a blessed life.  

Gold dragons love order, knowledge, and art (especially music and grand arcature).

They cultivate wealthy kingdoms that can devote time to artistic pursuits. 
 

Green Dragons wield the power of hypnotic magic, able to cloud minds and bend the will of those who dare to face them. With a gaze or a whisper, they can weave illusions that confuse, disorient, and lead opponents to fatal errors. Their very presence can cause hallucinations, making enemies see allies as foes, or perceive solid ground where there is none. The green dragon’s breath may emit a mesmerizing mist that muddles thoughts, sows fear, or lulls adversaries into a false sense of security, leading them into traps or deadly situations.

This ruler is favored by those who practice the arts of deception, illusion, or mind control. Sorcerers, illusionists, tricksters, secretive guilds, and political manipulators revere them for their cunning and mastery over the mind. 

Red Dragons embody sheer power and overwhelming force, using its massive size and strength to dominate the battlefield. With a single stomp, they can shake the earth, causing shockwaves that send foes tumbling and scatter armies in disarray. Their scales are as tough as iron, and their claws can tear through the sturdiest defenses.

White Dragons are masters of the frozen wilderness, dwelling in the harsh tundra and icy mountains where few can survive. With a breath that freezes the very air, they can create towering walls of ice to block paths, encase enemies, or form fortres-like walls in an instant.

White Dragons are favored by the hardy inhabitants of the cold, northern realms, ice dwarves, frost giants, and northern barbarians, who respect their dominion over the frozen landscape. Ice mages, frost sorcerers, and others who wield cold-based magic revere them as powerful symbols of their craft.  

Formats

Pack Battle (Sealed Pack)

In a Pack Battle, your deck comes from exactly one pack. This can be a pack you just opened, or a favorite pack from your collection.  

Constructed

In constructed formats you build a deck with cards from multiple packs.  Each constructed deck must have exactly one dragon and 7 champion cards.  

Constructed decks may have a maximum of 4 champion cards (non-dragons) with any one ability. For example, your deck may contain a maximum of 4 champions with Fear. Your Dragon could also have Fear.

Note that every sealed pack follows these rules. Therefore you can open any pack and play it in a constructed format game.   

3-Pack Constructed (3-Pack Sealed)

In this format you build your constructed deck using cards from a maximum of three different packs. This can be three packs you just opened, or three packs chosen from your collection.  

Full Constructed 

You can build your deck using any of the cards in your collection in this format. Cards in your deck may come from any number of packs. 

Draft

Draft is a super-fun format where you and your opponent(s) take turns picking cards from packs to build your deck. 

We recommend drafting with one, two, or three packs per player, depending on how wide a card pool you would like to use.

A draft deck must contain one Dragon and 7 Champion cards. Unlike Constructed formats, there is no limit to the number of champions with any particular ability. 

In a one-pack draft, you must use your first pick on a Dragon card. Once you are done drafting, there is no deck building. The cards you drafted are your deck.

In a multi-pack draft, you must draft at least 1 Dragon. If you haven’t drafted a Dragon yet when you start drafting the final pack of the draft, you must use your first pick on that pack to draft the Dragon card. When you finish drafting your cards, you build your deck with 1 Dragon and 7 Champion cards. 

Two-player draft

In a two-player draft, both players open a pack simultaneously and pick one card. They then pass the pack to their opponent and both players draft two cards. Continue this until you are passed a pack with only one card in it (you draft that card).

3-8 player draft

When drafting with 3-8 players, players are assigned random seats around the table. This way players can’t choose who is passing to them and who they are passing cards to. 

All players simultaneously open a pack and pick one card. They then pass the remaining cards to their left. Each player picks a card from the pile that was passed to them, and passes the remainder to the left. Continue this until you are passed a pack with only one card in it (you draft that card).

In a multi-pack draft, repeat this process with each pack, but in the 2nd pack you pass to the right. In the third pack you will pass to the left again. 

After players have drafted all their cards they build their decks. 

3 & 4 Player games

Draconis 8 is a great dueling game, but is also a ton of fun to play with three or four players. 

Three-player games use three terrain cards and you will be building a 5x5 grid while you play. 

In a four-player game you will use four terrain cards and will be building a 6x6 grid when you play. Also, the TWO highest speed cards played each round win a yellow victory point bead.

Four player can be played as a free-for-all (with each player using their own score bead color) or with two-player teams (each team sharing a score bead color).   

Free-for-all multiplayer games will have higher scores as your cards can score points against any opponent. For this reason we provided 30 green and 30 white beads and two Starter Sets in the Four-Player tier. 

Gold-Border Cards

In the early printings of Draconis 8, including this Kickstarter, 1 in 100 cards (excluding terrain cards) will be printed with a gold border and silver card frame instead of the standard black border and gray-stone card frame.

As it's printed, the stats of each gold-border card are added to a reserved list and will never be printed again with a gold border. Thus each gold-border card is truly unique. 

When you scan your pack, your gold-border card will have a shimmer effect on its borders in the app!

While gold-border cards are cool collectables, they are at the same power level as standard cards, so they don't provide any game advantage. 

Gold & Dragon Gold Packs 

Every reward in this Kickstarter includes some number of Kickstarter Exclusive Gold and/or Dragon Gold packs.

Gold Packs

Each Kickstarter Exclusive Gold Pack has one guaranteed gold-border champion (non-dragon) card. The other cards in the pack each still have a 1 in 100 chance of having a gold border, so some packs will have multiple gold-border cards!

Dragon Gold Packs

Higher level tiers include Kickstarter Exclusive Dragon Gold Packs. 

On average, you would have to open 100 packs to find a single gold-border dragon card. But every Kickstarter Exclusive Dragon Gold Pack has a gold-border dragon!

Draconis 8 App

Right after this Kickstarter successfully funds and pledges are processed, we will be inviting all backers into the beta of the Draconis 8 App! This should be around November 15th, 2024. Initially the Beta App will be available to backers on iOS or Android. 

For playing in the beta, you will have one digital pack for every physical pack in your reward tier. The beta will run until we are about to start fulfilling rewards. At that point all your beta digital packs will go away, and in the full release version of the app you will scan in your physical packs. If you win any digital packs during the beta (such as tournament prizes), your full release account will get the same number of new digital packs. 

You can play with packs as they come or build a Constructed deck from your collection.

 You can play your decks against the AI or other players from around the world. 

You can also play an immersive PVE campaign using any of your packs as your starting deck. 

Choose your path to the final battle. Each location has different rules that will change the game.

As you win battles, you earn rewards such as new cards for your deck or even the ability to upgrade your cards for the duration of your quest. 

Important Beta Notes

• This is a Beta. There will be frequent updates and bug fixes.
• You don't have to play in the Beta. You'll be able to scan your physical packs into the final version of the app regardless. 
• During the Beta, before physical cards are printed, we will be collecting data from all games and verifying that all mechanics are properly balanced.  
• Occasionally during the Beta, we may reset players' collections. For example, if data is showing a particular mechanic has too high of a win percentage, we will increase it's cost in our card generation algorithm and reset players' collections. You will still have the same number of packs in the Beta, but those packs will change. 
• Shortly before we start fulfillment of physical rewards, the Beta will be shut down and all your cards in the Beta will be gone for good. But don't worry, you will be able to scan your physical reward packs into the final release version of the app. 
• If you win digital packs in tournaments during the Beta, we will add the same number of digital packs to your account in the final release version of the app.  

The Art of Draconis

AI used as an artist's tool, NOT an artist replacement. 

Draconis features 321 beautiful new works of art!

Every piece is created by Wise Wizard Games incredibly talented Lead Artist Antonis Papantoniou.  

Antonis has been working full time at Wise Wizard Games for many years. 

He created these pieces by combining his painting skills with new AI tools.

As AI art programs came onto the scene, Antonis was interested in seeing how they could be incorporated into his artistic process. 

Through experimentation, reviews with the team, and a lot of hard work, Antonis made new art creation techniques for Wise Wizard Games. 

The results, which required the skilled hand of an artist, are truly stunning!

Here Antonis describes his process: 

"I have been working as a game artist for some years now, using various tools, techniques and processes to develop visuals and assets for video games and tabletop games. During this time I have used traditional tools, digital painting tools, and 3D modeling and sculpting tools, often merging these together to explore various approaches.
AI tools have been a recent addition to my toolset, combining them with my other tools to explore a wider variety of options for concept development and visual storytelling.
When I work on a visual, I do have a general end-result in mind, but I like to keep this mental image flexible and open to changes. AI tools allow for this flexibility and exploration of forms, as they produce a vast number of iterations when developing a visual idea.
By exploring, art-directing, and merging these iterations, unexpected visual solutions occur, keeping the process of visual storytelling dynamic and interesting to me.
AI tools also take care of time-consuming polishing passes, keeping the overall process at the speed of concepting and sketching, while rendering  polished results."

Step-by-step example:

3) Pick one of the generated thumbnails to develop:

4) Paint-over areas of the thumbnail, to develop the dragon and the background:

5) Use the resulting rough image as an image prompt to get a polished version:

6) Paint-over, making corrections:

7) More paint-over along with AI iterations. This step requires an organic, constant back and forth between painting, generating AI in some areas and manipulating the image using Photoshop's tools, including its native AI tools:

8) The process described in the previous step continues as I detail and polish the image further:

9) Intuitive change: As I work on the image, it occurs to me that the environment and this type of dragon are more closely associated to the Command ability of a Gold Dragon rather than the Confuse ability of a Green one. So I use the image as an image-prompt, instructing the AI to change the color of the dragon to gold and making additional color changes in photoshop:

10) Use Photoshop's image manipulation tools to make the dragon leaner. Painting and smudging over the image and using layers of painterly filters to unify and diffuse low quality artifacts. Also adding effects like the Dragon's breath and light flares:

AI tools used in this process include Midjourney, DALL-E, Photoshop AI Tools, and a local installation of Stable Diffusion and ControlNet.

Videos 

Shipping

We plan to ship to backers directly from fulfillment centers in The US, UK, EU, Australia, and Asia.

Our goal is to get product to our backers as soon as possible. When product arrives at one of our fulfillment centers, we will begin the process of shipping to backers in that region without waiting for product to arrive at other hubs. This means that backers in some regions may receive product before backers in others.

IMPORTANT - For this Kickstarter you will be charged shipping separately after this Kickstarter concludes via the Pledge Manager. Shipping charges will be based on our actual cost to get your rewards to you.

Here is an estimate of shipping cost by region. 

¹ Estimated shipping cost for the Starter Tier.
² This is the maximum you will be charged for shipping regardless of what tier(s) you get and number of add-ons. Any additional shipping costs will be covered by Wise Wizard Games. 
³ Unfortunately, we do not ship to all regions. We only ship to the following regions: Arab Emirates, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Canary Islands, Cayman Islands, Chile, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jersey, Korea (Republic of), Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Türkiye, United Kingdom, Uruguay, and United States of America (including all USA territories and military bases).
 

VAT & Sales Tax

Backers in the EU, UK, and other locations with VAT: You will be charged VAT in the pledge manager.

Backers from the USA: If you are in a state where Wise Wizard Games is required by law to collect sales tax, you will be charged sales tax in the pledge manager.

Pledge Manager 

This campaign will use BackerKit as the pledge manager.

Please keep an eye out in UPDATES for our request for survey completion and contact us (support@wisewizardgames.com) if you have not seen the BackerKit survey email within 3 months of the campaign end date.

If backers do not fill out the survey within ONE YEAR of BackerKit survey send date, we will consider your pledge a donation to this project.

Project Notes

Kickstarter Exclusives

These are exclusive items for Kickstarter backers, with remaining stock available through conventions and special promotions only. 

Nothing is final until it is printed

All art, materials, card text, and packaging is subject to change. The final versions you receive may not exactly match what is described or pictured here.