"A [construction brick] gaming system for individual level combat originated by Mike Rayhawk. It's similar in intent to other individual level miniatures games, but with an emphasis on mayhem and humor. A wide selection of 'TekLevels' allows players to simulate combat in any combination of time periods and genres."
"Like many games offered free of charge on the internet, BrikWars is appealing in concept, but in practice nearly impossible to play. Rules that appear straightforward at first become perniciously more complex with each passing chapter, almost as if the author were using the rulebook as the medium for some long-running and obscure practical joke. It's a testament to the obstinate nature of AFOLs that they've managed to play as many battles as they have, despite the author's every attempt to thwart them."
Entry from the BrikWiki online encyclopedia as of September 2, 2005, which opens the foreword for the 2005 core rules
You know how when you were a little kid, you would make all your action figures fight each other in hilarious, violent combat? Have you ever tried to play Warhammer with LEGO? Brikwars
recognizes both of these matters, and is one of many proposed solutions.
A strategy Wargame designed to be played with LEGO mini figures (though it can support any type of minifig), it acts as a way to try and play a wargame with minifigures while using something resembling rules.
It treats the matter of toy combat with all the irreverence it deserves, and the author claims that the entire thing is sort of a purposeful Take That! against "Stop Having Fun" Guys. The 2005 core rules are littered with quotes, jokes, Lampshade Hangingings, and a Take That! against anyone who deserves it. Even if you don't ever play it, the rules are an entertaining read.
Even though Brikwars can be played with any combatants with any background, the author and fans have created a setting for the game, mostly known as the Brikwars Universe. The background of this universe is found at the Brikwiki.
A definitive edition of the rules was published by Mophidius Entertainment subtitled Ragnablok Edition in 2023.
Note: Brikwars is not officially affiliated with The Lego Group.
This game provides examples of:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: most swords, the Orange Transparent Chainsaw takes this up to eleven.
- All Swords Are the Same: In the spirit of keeping the game going smoothly and not getting bogged down in keeping track of numbers, all minifig weapons of a given size category have the same basic stats. Got a golden greatsword, a katana, a Beam Sword or a battle-axe? Great, those are all Heavy melee weapons, and their traits are identical.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: The author characterizes minifigs along the lines of the fallen heroes of Valhalla- violent Blood Knight-like creatures, who are bored unless having a good brawl. It's less disturbing than it could be, considering they're LEGO note .
- Always on Duty: Since minifigs in Brikwars don't need to sleep, at any given moment, any proper minifig is either engaging in gloriously bloody warfare or about to be engaging in gloriously bloody warfare.
- Anachronism Stew: Unless the scenario is set up as a purist historical re-enactment, expect everyone to reach into their bins of assorted LEGO and field an eclectic collection of knights, spacemen, and the odd Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot - all on the same battlefield.
- Anti-Infantry: Since the difficulty to hit with a weapon scales with size, it's best to attack infantry with infantry-scale weapons, and save the massive siege-level ones for blowing apart tanks and leveling bunkers.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Softly enforced by the fact that a Hero Unit will become cranky and less effective when they have to share the spotlight (and the battlefield) with other Hero Units from their own team.
- Area of Effect: Explosions, fire, field hazards, and even Blast Gun attacks.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!: The most encouraged tactic, keeping in spirit with the game's Rule of Fun attitude, as it yields far greater potential for Bloody Hilarious mayhem and destruction than more cautious battlefield maneuvers. Especially encouraged for the obviously under-advantaged factions among a group of absurdly dis-balanced armies.
- The Brikwiki even describes peace as a "feared, yet thankfully rare disease".
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Volontarily defied. Commanding units can be added to an army for various prices, but all of them are mediocre or laughably incompetent on their own in a fight.
- Officers are somewhere between a Mook Lieutenant and a Mook Commander. They can increase their squadmates' skill die by one size through bossing them around and being generally unpleasant, but have a low die on their own and suffer from the Stupidity rule when isolated from their subordinates.
- Commanders are officially there to "give the illusion that a strategy exists". They sit around doing nothing, "accumulating strategy", a passive resource that can be spent later to call for reinforcements or launch a Strategic Bombardment, after which they are definitely useless.
- A Great Leader is usually the avatar of the player who controls the army, and is little more than a megalomaniac Bad Boss who Scapegoats and executes their subordinates to increase Outrage in the ranks and bolster aggressivity, and gives grandiloquent speeches afterwards to further increase buffs base on the level of Outrage. Obviously, the Great Leader is completely weak, helpless and incomptent on their own.
- Bad Boss: As mentioned above, Officers are annoying, Commanders are clueless, and Great Leaders regularly cause purposeful mistreatment-induced betrayals to Make an Example of Them. The humans themselves are seen by minifigs as strange, infinitely powerful gods who watch them wage war for their amusement.
- Baseless Mission: Common for smaller-scale skirmishes or invasion scenarios.
- Booby Trap: The Mechanism field hazard can be rigged up as such.
- Built with LEGO: Or
MegaBloks or... - Cannon Fodder: Played straight with a unit type of that very name.
- Colour Coded Armies: A common occurrence with LEGO-minifig troopers, as this allows for quickly determining who similar units belong to.
- Combat Medic: The dreaded Medik unit.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: The "Ninja Scum" unit is very different from a regular ninja, specifically because of this trope.
- In addition, the more Hero units there are on a team, the worse each of them does.
- Also applies to all units in a CP match; the more units the weaker each has to be.
- Chainsaw Good: The Orange Transparent Chainsaw, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Rumor has it that some factions are capable of deploying spaceship-sized OT Cs.
- Cosmetically Different Sides: Later editions did away with Tek Levels in the interest of keeping the pace of the going smoothly despite an anachronistic mix of spacemen, pirates, cowboys, and knights. Now, a Scout is a Scout regardless of whether he's a tribal elf bowman or a futuristic recon infiltrator. See also, All Swords Are the Same, above.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: One alternate rule makes Hero units longer-lived by using this. It also gives people an excuse to have LEGO blood every time they get injured.
- Design-It-Yourself Equipment:
- Design-it-yourself everything, by the game's nature.
- Also the Cumulative Damage/Combined Fire options, which make it possible for a mob of smaller, weaker units to gang up on something large and armored that no one of the group alone could hope to defeat.
- Earth Is a Battlefield: the default setting. More accurately, your living room floor is a battlefield.
- Easy Logistics: Played straight for the most part, as vehicles are mysteriously fueled without visible means, minifigs always happen to have plenty of Universal Ammo clanging around in their pockets, and Mechaniks seem to be able to utilize any nearby pieces without having to physically collect them.
- Averted with Launchers, explosives, and rockets, as physical ammo must be present on the battlefield.
- Eldritch Abomination: Brikthulhu.
- The Engineer: The Mechanik, who can erect kit-bashed creations from random parts laying around the battlefield, slap on repairs and armor upgrades, or even disassemble enemy creations.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The Core Manual invokes this trope quite quickly, and understandably. It is mentioned that nothing would make sense otherwise.
- Feed It a Bomb: One of the ways of bypassing a unit's armor without specialized armor piercing weapons.
- Forever War: The sole purpose of a minifigure's (or any toy's, for that matter) existence is to wage glorious, never-ending, gratuitously slapstick war for dominance of the play area, or, more likely, for the sadistic amusement of their human masters.
- Gatling Good: Minifigs love miniguns!
- Geo Effects: Field hazards and high-ground advantage cover this trope.
- Giant Equals Invincible: Typically, your units' Size Rating has to be equal to or higher than their Structure level. In essence, the bigger you are, the more armor (And weapons) you're potentially allowed to have.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: They're LEGO. No matter how badly the units get dismembered, you can always put them back together.
- Gratitious Foreign Language: Any faction based on a real-life nation does this.
- Guilt-Free Extermination War: Your civilization's aim is to wipe out all others, not because you hate them, but because it would be a disservice to minifig love for horrendous violence *not to*.
- Played straight when massacring
JawJaws or Dimmies.
- Played straight when massacring
- Hard Light: Any ORANGE TRANSPARENT objects, from windows to armor plates to chainsaws, are made of self-repairing fragments of orange laser beams used to attempt destroying an impossibly cold planet.
- Improvised Weapon: "If a minifig can't find a real weapon, Random Objects are better than nothing, although this is only because having nothing sucks to such an impressive degree."
- Kleptomaniac Hero: As replacing spent budget points in campaigns require heroes to stage escapades to get loot, these will appear within the first few battles of any Campaign.
- Loads and Loads of Rules: Invoked, under the assumption that making it up as you go along is more fun, and more appropriate for toy combat.
- Meatgrinder Surgery: Mediks don't heal wounded friendly units. They just brutally revive fallen ones, trying not to amputate too many limbs in the process.
- Moment of Awesome: Heroes have the "Heroic Feat" ability, which lets them have a rule-flaunting Crowning Moment Of Awesome if the player wins a dice roll against the opponent.
- My Nayme Is: If something can be spelled with a K (i.e. Brick becomes Brik), it should.
- Non-Entity General: The commanding player on any given side is usually not represented by a minifig in-game.
- Red Shirt: One of the specific abilities of hero units is they can make nearby regular units "Redshirt" to protect themselves
- Ridiculously Fast Construction: The Mechanik's construction action. Allows for ridiculously fast deconstruction against enemy structures as well.
- Rules Lawyer: The rules are complicated specifically to thwart such tactics.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Blast Guns have 2 inches of range and a scaling 2 extra inches of range per weapon length, and lose 1 damage per inch. At 4-5 inches, an infantry-scale Blast Gun can only cause Something Bad to happen if the user is lucky and rolls an 8.
- Soft Water: "It's a generally accepted action-movie fact that pools of liquid such as water or quicksand, no matter how shallow, will cushion Crash impacts safely and completely."
- Unless it's more funny to have them die horribly of course.
- Splash Damage Abuse: Since the attack difficulty on launchers (catapults, artillery, , missile-launcher, railguns, etc) scales with size like any other weapon, you're not likely to accurately hit your target with a siege-level one. Fortunately for you, the damage and blast radius of any explosive launcher of that size allows you to lob at the other end of the battlefield making aiming a superfluous formality.
- Take That!: Against anyone who takes themselves, rules, or games too seriously.
- Talking Is a Free Action: Or, under these rules, a Quick Action. Other Quick Actions are free, but not all are.
- Technology Levels: The ridiculously rules-heavy old versions of the game had Tek Levels, but later editions did away with the concept in the name of fun and quicker gameplay.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: the game really goes out of its way to encourage ridiculously over-the-top mayhem that even Michael Bay might find to be a bit too much.
