Ruinous - Deckbuilding Golem Battling

At a glance...

• Simultaneous play, fast-paced deckbuilding - battle golems against your friends!
• Solo dev/artist, designed in Perth, Western Australia.
• Manufactured with local businesses and recycled materials, reducing our carbon footprint and ensuring minimal environmental impact.

(Painted minifigs not included in the official Ruinous game - they helped pose for the photos though!)

Overview

You’ve stumbled upon a long-forgotten civilization – ruins littered with treasure and traps. You came down here with some equally as greedy folk, and as suspected, as soon as the treasure shows up, so too does the TREACHERY!

None of you are particularly good in a fight yourselves, but it turns out the ruins has some old magical gems that help power the nearby dusty automatons. So you’ll let them decide who gets to keep the loot.

Command ancient golems in rapid deck-building combat. Build up your arsenal of magical gems, power up your army, then rain down rocky mayhem upon your opponents to crush their heart gems. A game of careful planning, quick thinking, and hopefully no ruined friendships!

Last person standing escapes the ruins with their life… and the shiny loot!

How to Play

Rather than each player taking turns sequentially, and those turns growing longer and longer as everyone builds increasingly complex decks, Ruinous focuses on fast-paced, simultaneous action, while retaining emerging strategy as the game ramps up, or on future playthroughs as players discover their favourite playstyles and golems. Gameplay is broken up into rounds, consisting of three phases each. There is also a sudden death round, called the Final Rumble. More on that later though...

Phase 1 - Animate

Players draw from their deck and pick cards to play for this round. Gems shown on the chosen cards will push up a player's energy bars - this will be used in phase 3 to Activate your golems. Make sure you choose cards which also have Ancient Coins on them. These will be used to purchase upgrades in the next phase...

Phase 2 - Market

Time to buy some upgrades! The player with the least number of coins across their chosen Animate Cards may take the first turn - they're carrying the least stuff, so they can run faster!

Spend your coins on new, more powerful Animate Cards and NEW GOLEMS! The starting golems (no offence to them) aren't very useful, so you want to replace them quickly. Be careful which new golems you pick. Make sure you have a strategy in mind - full defence, full offence, or a careful balance?

Each golem fills a unique role, from high defence, to quick priority. Keep an eye out for the sneaky Pierce ability - punching right through your defence! Or the risky Sacrifice ability that allows you to attack at full force... for a price!

One more important point; each golem must be linked with your red or blue energy, and it can only attack golems linked with the same colour on your opponents sides. Think carefully about where you position your newly acquired golems!

Phase 3 - Combat

It's time to FIGHT! Use your built up energy to Activate your golems and attack your enemies! When Activated, a golem will use all the icons stored within it's Ability Block; Attacking to deal damage, Pierce to ignore a foe's shield, and Heal to restore some of your Heart Gems.

Golems attack in order of Priority, with faster golems at 1 priority, and slower golems down at 20. The fast golems are generally a bit weaker than the slower golems, so keep in mind your strategy - going for the speediest golems may not always be the best choice.

When your golem attacks another player, their golem linked to the same colour energy will block the attack with their Shield icons. If you can deal damage equal to or more than their Shield icons (factoring in Pierce as well), then their defending golem is Chipped. A Chipped golem can still defend and attack, but if it suffers another attack like that, it will be discarded, and it's owner will be left defenseless!

If your golem can do more damage than their golem can block with their shields, you will attack their Heart Gems, reducing them by the amount of damage dealt by the attack.

When one player drops to 0 Heart Gems, the next round becomes the FINAL RUMBLE!

SUDDEN DEATH - Final Rumble

The last round of the game! Winner runs away with the loot! Be wary of adjustments to the gameplay for this final rush.

• If anyone has an empty golem slot in front of them, they can search their hand, deck, or discard pile for a golem to fill that slot.
• Whenever someone buys a new Animate Card, the gems on it are used immediately, allowing for rapid energy building.
• The player who dropped to 0 Heart Gems last round is empowered for this round. They can choose one of their golems to give that empowerment to! The chosen golem will act before all other golems, dealing out one attack completely for free. Afterwards, that golem may attack again if you have the energy to activate it.

The player with the most remaining Heart Gems is the winner! If, somehow, all players end up on 0 Heart Gems, the player who first dropped to 0 is the winner!

Kickstarter Rewards

Choose the Reward Tier that's right for you! Copies of Ruinous are discounted during the Kickstarter Campaign. After this ends, the game will go to a regular price of AUD$40.

Stretch goals?

The funding goal is just for a small print run of the game. If we reach beyond $2000 with this campaign, I can invest in bigger print runs, which will drop the cost of everything! Mostly shipping, but if you're buying this game outside of Australia, that's good news!

Backstory

Hello! I'm Jake, the designer, artist, and general creator behind Ruinous, and lead creative at Dapper Cranium Studios. Games have been a huge part of my whole life, from 5 year old me asking my mum to help me beat the first Bowser boss in Super Mario 64, to last week as I grind out Pokopia on my Switch 2 (distracting me from actually launching this game...).

I've been making card games for a while now, but it wasn't until 2021 when I gave this whole Kickstarter thing a go, with Frodge, my funny little frog racing game. Since the success of the Frodge Kickstarter, I delved into a new kind of game developing for me; educational games. I made Bin Off, a quirky waste sorting card game designed to educate and inspire players on good waste sorting habits (based on the Western Australian teaching). The success of Bin Off took me on a rollercoaster ride of educational games, discovering an untapped niche in the market, and in my game designing passions. I loved making games that entertain, but also educate. And I still do, but sometimes we need a break...

To design games, we need to play games (duh). So I was playing this colourful indie RPG named Sea of Stars. I played through the 3 player co-op mode with some friends, and whenever we got to rest at one of the game's taverns we made a mad dash to one of the mini-games within Sea of Stars; Wheels. We loved this little dice-roller (or, wheel spinner) with funky battling figurines. When we beat the game, I had a thought. "I want to try making my own 'Wheels'". So... I did. Mostly as a design challenge for myself - how could I translate the spinning wheel mechanic in Wheels into a card game. I played around with some deck-building gameplay, a re-draw mechanic, and slapped 'golem battling' on the front of it all. A few playtests later, and you can probably guess where we ended up...

Ruinous began as a little exercise in video game to board game adaptation, and evolved into something entirely different (because otherwise this would be plagiarism, duh). Also, it allowed me to scratch an itch that had emerged a year or so ago; make games just for the sake of it. Don't get me wrong, educational games are a major passion of mine, and I want to see games take on, or possibly take over, the entire education system. But sometimes, it's nice to sit down with a silly battling card game where we throw golems back and forth at each other until someone wins.

So that's why Ruinous exists. I also wanted to join in for Micro May, this amazing little (seems quite big, actually) collaboration between tabletop game devs from all over, where we all make cool stuff during May, and uplift each others' projects.

Do you want even more colourful gaming experiences?! Check out these other games, made by me (and some friends' games further down) - available at a discount as part of a pledge to the Ruinous Kickstarter Campaign!

Frodge

Leap and whirly-do your way across the pond, guiding your frog to victory while messing with your friends' frogs. Easy to learn, fun to play again, ideal for ages 8+ and for 2-8 players.  

Bin Off

Strategically sort waste and build up points for each filled bin you claim. With gameplay that references real-world recycling and waste management strategies, Bin Off is sure to be a fun AND educational addition to your board game sessions!

As you delve into the ruinous ruins, you see plenty of puns ahead! Something streaks across the sky - is it a bird ... a golem … no, it’s … Robo-Boy! 

Robo-Boy is a short comic hand-drawn by two aspiring artists, eventual golem masters, and coincidentally brothers Samir (11 years old) and Hamzah (8 years old) Salahuddin! They love to draw, read and play games.

Their dream (apart from being able to play games all day or eat sweets all day or do both all day) has always been to design a book that is enjoyable and now they finally have!

Inspired by amazing books like The Mighty Bite, Dogman, Captain Underpants, The Bad Guys, Diary of A Wimpy Kid, The Treehouse Series, and … (okay you get the idea - they read alotta books!), Robo-Boy is full of laughs, thrills, and even How-To-Draws!

Rather than run their own Kickstarter (which their poor Dad will have to do, who’s already too old and not-so-cool), their Dad’s infinitely cooler and not-so-old friend Jake has graciously allowed them to squeeze the comic into his wondrous Ruinous campaign! So a big thank you, Jake!

Please support if you can, because it’s a lot to write here and the paragraph is really long. Can I stop writing now? Is that long enough? OK great! So yeah - back it if you can and you’ll get a PDF that you can print out. Thank you for reading!

- Samir and Hamzah’s Dad aka Jake’s friend aka had to type all this without coffee because it’s 10PM.

Bee The Buzz

I'm the artist and co-designer for this other MicroMay project! Learn all about native Perth, Western Australian bees and how we can support pollinator biodiversity in this all-ages dexterity game!

Game Foundry

I'm a member of the Perth, Western Australian board game developing community; Game Foundry. Check out some other games made by our group, also launching in MicroMay! Click the banner to go to their page.

MicroMay

We're officially part of Kickstarter Micro May! Click the above banner to check out a list of games launching in Micro May! Or any of the below banners.

Credits

Ruinous is a game developed by Jake Bamford of Dapper Cranium Studios. All art, design, writing, and content is owned by Dapper Cranium Studios. AI has NOT been used to create or assist in any part of this project.

For more Dapper Cranium fun, check out the website here: Dapper Cranium Studios.