Toy Battle

On your turn you do exactly one thing: either draw two troop cards (numbered 1-6 across multiple toy units) or play one troop face-up onto a base on the shared map. Placement has a hard adjacency rule — the chosen base must connect back to your headquarters through an unbroken chain of bases you already occupy — and a value rule: you can overrun an enemy base only if your number is higher than theirs. Each placement triggers the troop's special ability (push, pull, swap, ranged shot, etc.). Turns are fast, decisions snappy, the table-feel is constant pressure.

Set up one of four double-sided maps (eight terrain variants — jungle, castle, space, etc.), each with its own medal layout, region shapes, and victory threshold. Players alternate single actions: draw 2 troops or place 1. Whenever your placements form a closed loop of bases around a region, you instantly claim every medal inside it (and you keep those medals even if the enemy later breaks the ring). Game ends three ways: you occupy the opponent's HQ (instant win), you reach the map-specific medal target (instant win), or a player can't legally draw or place — at which point most medals wins. Typical game: 15 minutes, ~20-30 placements per side.

Every turn is a small but tense optimization: do I burn a turn drawing (and let the opponent develop) or commit a troop now and risk being out of options later? Placement is a 3-way puzzle — supply chain (must connect to HQ), value pressure (must beat any sitting troop to overrun), region geometry (which placement closes a medal ring). The option space is moderate (4-10 viable placements at a typical mid-game state) but reading the opponent's hand size and likely high-cards is what separates clean wins from bad trades. Multiple maps mean the strategic puzzle re-shapes between sessions.

Dominant skills: spatial planning and tempo. Strong players think two placements ahead, visualize ring-closures that force the opponent to break their own supply chain to defend, and ration their high-value 5s and 6s for the moment a critical base is contested. Secondary: hand management and bluffing tempo (drawing troops telegraphs that you don't have what you want). The game is essentially a two-player abstract dressed in toy-soldier paint — no luck mitigation needed beyond draw timing, no math beyond comparing two integers, no memory load.

A tabletop MOBA-meets-tower-defense for two players in 15 minutes — push toy soldiers across a map and surround the enemy.

Paul Mafayon illustration — bright, cleanly-outlined, color-saturated toy-box aesthetic; each map has its own coherent palette (jungle greens, castle stone-grays, space neon). Repos Production house style with chunky readable troop iconography, designed to look inviting on shelves and easy to parse mid-game.