Hallowed Grounds is a card game that involves two or three players who are engaged in a battle of land domination. Each player has their own deck, either one previously constructed or made from a limited pool of cards for the event. All the players start the game with the Castle card on the board, which have 30 as their "life total" and loses the game when their life total is reduced to zero. A player can also lose if they must draw from an empty deck.
There are three types of cards:
The Castle type is the life total of a player, the very first card on the board and it has 30 of life in a total, called Defense. This card has two attributes, Defense and Area. The Ground type is the land where the braves battle. This card has four attributes, Defense, Area, Capacity and Cost. The Brave type is the soldier-like, that can attack or protect. This card has three attributes, Defense, Attack, and Cost.
There are five card attributes:
Basicaly, the Defense attribute is the capabillity to defend an attack. The card is removed from the game when the Attack is greater than the Defense. Thus, the card that received the "damage" is discarded to the "discard pile". If the card is defending a castle from a direct attack to it, the card is not discarded because the attack was made against the Castle. The Area attribute is how many Brave cards can be stack over it. Only the Castle and Ground have this attribute. On the other hand the Cost is how much from Area the card take from. For instance, whether a Ground card has Area of 5, the player only can stack a total of 5 on the card, for example two card with cost of 2 and one with cost of 1. Lastly, the Capacity attribute is how many cards of that type the player can put on the board. Whether there are two cards in game with Capacity of 2, another one only can be placed on the board if one of these cards is discarded.
Attacks can be executed against any type of card. If an attack is directed against a Ground card and there are Braves on it, the Braves shall defend the Ground with their Defense attribute. If the Ground is hit by an attack greater than the sum of defenses, the Ground is discarded and the Braves stay inactives until another Ground is put in game under them. In this case, the Braves can receive attacks and cannot be moved to Castle neither to another Ground.
The turns are basicaly when the player of the turn can draw the card and execute movements. The movements can be attacks or movement of troops going from a Ground to another one or to the Castle. The player can place in game as many cards as needed in this moment.
There are three types of decks:
The players can choose their deck cards freely, respecting the limit of 50 cards. (The Castle is not counted for the number of deck cards.) Mixed decks are for adventurers. When a mixed deck is created, only the cards with their respective card colours can be place on the Ground card, Brave cards in purple with Ground cards in purple and so on. To start the match, players need to shuffle the decks and draw 7 cards, each Castle is placed on the board and the player who starts the turn is decided by agreement between the players.