Pamplemoose Games × Chaos World · Concept Pitch

Chaos World
Fortress of Scrubs

A 1v1 card game for 2 to 4 players, where the climb is the game and nobody starts as a hero.

Working title · A concept by Pamplemoose Games

The insight

You already built
the card game.

Chaos World has a class tree where a scrub can become anything and a committed hero can never go back. It has forts you take, garrison, and defend while everyone tries to knock you off. It has shard pulls, boons, rerolls and a roster of nobodies who earn their way up.

Those are card game systems living inside a mobile game. This concept moves them to a table without translating anything.

Derived from Chaos World · never reskinned onto it

What it is

Send nobodies up a staircase.
Make them somebody on the way.

1

Draw. Two scrubs off the scrub pile, plus your hand off the main deck. Every draw burns the clock.

2

Spend. Deploy a scrub to the first stair, or burn it to the energy pool. Play evolutions, attacks, items, summons.

3

Climb. Every unit takes one step toward the fort.

4

Fire. Ranged resolves first, then melee where units meet.

5

Hold the fort. When the decks run dry, the last player with a fighter standing on top wins.

The bind

Your engine is your clock

You have to dig to evolve. Digging empties your deck. Emptying decks ends the game. Every card you go looking for is time you spend.

Format

1v1 first

Two players is the primary format. Three and four are the same rules with more arms on the board.

The signature mechanic

The Drip Check.

A scrub with no drip is just a scrub. Commit it to a class and it suits up. The catch is that the fit is permanent.

One way street

No takebacks

A scrub can enter any of the five trees. Once it is a Knight it can never be a Mage. Nothing in the game undoes that.

Two locks

Place and draw

Where a unit stands sets when it may evolve. What you drew sets whether you can. Both have to line up.

The squeeze

Bodies or fuel

Every scrub you burn for energy is a body that never climbed. Every scrub you climb with is energy you did not have.

Tier 0 · a nobody

Tier I · committed

Tier IV · no way back

Need a White Mage and a Black Mage? That is two scrubs.

Why the stairs matter

Combat starts
before collision.

In most card battlers two units meet and then interact. Here your archers and mages are firing the whole climb, at anything sharing their row or their column. Melee gets there and hits like a truck. Both of those are decisions you make five steps earlier.

Location not mattering was one of the flaws you set out to fix. Teleport in, wipe someone, vanish into the vapor, and they never find you again. Chaos World design notes · this is the table version of that fix

The board

Five pieces.
Every player count.

One fort at the center. Identical staircase arms clip onto its angled edges. Two arms for two players, three for three, four for four. Same components in every box.

Two players · two arms

Three players · three arms

Four players · four arms

Line of sight

You fight your neighbours

You reach only the two players flanking you. The one across the fort is untouchable until you both stand on top.

The roster

Five trees.
Five jobs.

Every role here is read off your own class tree. None of it was invented for the card game.

Hold

Knight

The wall. Shields everyone behind it on the stairs, then hits hardest of anyone on the fort.

White · Holy · God
Black · Demon

Alter

Mage

Changes the space instead of the target. Heals, cleanses, and rewrites what a stair does.

White · Oracle · Time
Black · Demon

Reach

Archer

Fires the whole climb. Traps, summons, and the longest lines on the board.

Hunter · Beastmaster · Dragoneer
Marksman · Lancer

Wreck

Fighter

Biggest damage in the game. You do not get to choose where it lands.

Barbarian · Berserker
Chaos Warrior

Bypass

Thief

Skips steps, slips past blockers, arrives early and unannounced.

Ninja · Assassin
Cursed Sword

Necromancer, Bard, Monk and the rest stay shard pulls. A second economy, exactly as you have it.

The economy

Two piles.
One decision.

The scrub pile is full of nobodies. The main deck holds everything else. Every turn you pull two scrubs and decide what they are for.

Path one

Put it on the stairs

It starts climbing. It might become a God Knight. It might reach the top still wearing nothing and get taken apart in front of you.

Path two

Burn it for energy

Into the pool, where it pays for everything else you want to do. Spent once as a body, spent again as fuel.

Dead scrubs return to their owner's pool. Necromancers siphon from everyone else's.

The cast

What a card looks like.

Scrub · the pile

Glow Up · skill

Badonkadonkey · summon

Swag Goblin · enemy

The Teddy · item

Thief · class

Mage · class

God Knight · top tier

Placeholder art only. Final art would be commissioned. AI never touches the game design.

Where this actually stands

The concept is done.
The game is not.

What is settled. The structure, the economy, the board, the win condition, and how every tree earns its place. That is enough to build a prototype from and start playing this month.

What is not. One real problem is open. Knight in front and archers behind is the obvious formation, and if nothing punishes it the lane stops being a decision by turn three. Your own combat has the answer sitting in it, the random multi-target hits that scatter across a party. Where that lands is a playtest question and we will not pretend we have solved it on paper.

And the numbers. Every value on those cards is a placeholder. Balance comes out of the table, the same way you described it. You define everything, then you play it and go oh, that is wrong, what do we do now.

The long game

One set is a game.
Your roster is a franchise.

Every enemy you build for Chaos World is a card that already has art, a name and a joke. The content pipeline for the card game is the content pipeline you are already running.

CORE SET · The five trees THE SWAMP · Shankberry, Oscar, Breck GRAVEYARD · Reapers and revenants HELL LEVEL · whenever you build it COLLAB SETS · whoever says yes

You mentioned wanting Capcom and Square Enix collaborations. A card game is the cheapest possible place to test whether a partner wants to play, and the fastest to ship if they do.

What gets made

Two products from
one design.

Standard

Cards and standees

Everything you need in one box, and everything after that in boosters. Punchboard standees keep it on a normal table. This is the tier that keeps selling after the first purchase.

Deluxe

Cards and miniatures

The figure on the board physically changes as the card evolves it. Swappable pieces, the same customization idea your overlords already have, in the hand.

Three miniatures showing one character at three tiers

The same scrub at Tier 0, Tier I and Tier IV

Deluxe · the figure changes as the card evolves it

1×Fort tile, four staircase arms

2–4Players, 1v1 as the primary format

1×Scrub pile, shared

1×Solo mode: your roster as the waves

You own Chaos World. Every character, every name, every piece of the world stays yours. We design the game.

Next step

Prototype, playtest,
then pick a road.

First the same thing either way. We build a paper prototype, play it, break it, and fix the formation problem on a real table. After that there are two roads, and which one you take is entirely your call.

Road one

Build it and crowdfund it

Development through to a campaign, with the audience proving the demand before the print run. HAVOC: Gen Zero, the card game we designed, funded on Kickstarter in under thirty minutes.

Road two

Build it and skip the campaign

Straight to a finished game, no campaign, no backers to answer to. Slower to money and quieter, and some people prefer quiet.

No numbers on this deck. This one is about whether the game is good. If your gut says it is not your thing, that is a completely fair answer and it costs us nothing to hear it.

Zack Howe & Cole Beardsley · Pamplemoose Games · zack@pamplemoosegames.com

Concept pitch prepared by Pamplemoose Games LLC. All Chaos World names, characters and imagery appear solely to demonstrate this concept and remain the property of their owners. Game mechanics and designs are original work of Pamplemoose Games LLC. Placeholder art only; final art would be commissioned. AI never touches the game design. Not for distribution.

Chaos WorldFortress of Scrubs

You already builtthe card game.

Send nobodies up a staircase.Make them somebody on the way.