Death By Sketch — Full color combat!

In a world where every board game seems to come with a ton of miniatures, cardboard, tokens, soundtracks, expansion packs, Death By Sketch! flips this system around by allowing the players to create nearly everything in the game with just paper and drawing instruments. The end result of a game of Death By Sketch is incredibly satisfying, fun, and leaving the players creatively fulfilled. Let’s dig in.

Created by David Irwin, DBS is a drawing battle game where players sketch out their base and monsters, with the intent of battling each other, and ultimately destroying each other’s bases. The gameplay is simple. On each turn, players draw cards to gain special abilities, roll dice to create monsters and determine their health, and then attack each other. These actions can be done in any order, which can lead to some hilarious results.

The game comes in a small box, great for storage or playing on the go. It comes with instructions, a deck of special cards, 2d10, 1d8, and a special d6. The rest of the game is up to you to supply your own paper and drawing instruments (pen, pencil, crayon, charcoal, acrylic paint, whatever).

This game is incredibly easy to pick up and play. A 2 minute video on Youtube cleanly explains the entire game, but there is a book that includes some extra rules. I’ll go through them briefly.To start with, players draw a base and assign it 1000hp, which may seem like a huge pool but it can go quick depending on your table.  Roll a d6 to determine your monster, then 2d10 to create its health.  Draw a card, play it (or hoard it). If you have a monster ready for battle, then attack your opponent’s monsters or base (or both!). If you kill a monster, draw the way it dies. 

The cards and dice add some variability to the game. For example, a player may draw “Switch HP” which allows them to swap HP with other monsters. Or “Sidekicks”, which allows a monster to have d8 sidekicks, which adds bonuses to the monster itself. The cards all have clever artwork created by Shubbabng, a popular cartoonist and illustrator. 

The dice determine the amount of monsters you create and their health pool, along with attacking. A happy face on the d6 means you’re successful. A sad face means you’re not.  If you roll double zeros on the included d10s, you get a base defender, which defends your base from attacks. 

What I really like about this game is the focus on the imagination. This can be played by anyone, I think families would get a lot of mileage out of this game, as it encourages creativity, artistic expression, and math skills. For the rest of us, it’s just plain fun. At my table, we forgot about attacking each other’s bases and spent a good hour building armies, laughing at our monsters, and ultimately attacking each other until someone mentioned we could go after the bases…then the game became a bloodbath of using the cards, scribbling unique ways of killing monsters, and ultimately one friend was the victor.I can’t remember the last time a game so simple turned out to be so much fun. I highly recommend this game for everyone, and if you want a copy, David has a Kickstarter set to go live at some point soon.