Madcap Comics Battleground - Rulebook

Current version: 1.4 Last updated: 2026-06-08

1. What is Madcap Comics Battleground?

Madcap Comics Battleground is a turn-based fighting game you play in your browser. You pick one comic book hero, the game picks an opponent, and the two fight a series of rounds until one of them drops. Dice decide how each move lands, and after every round you get a short written account of what just happened, so the fight reads like a comic.

Right now the game is a single one-on-one mode. You choose a character, you choose what they do each round, and you try to knock the other character out. There is nothing to install and no account to create. Each fight starts fresh.

2. Characters

You fight with a single character. There are 24 to choose from, drawn from across the comics world. Each one has a themed card showing their colours, a background pattern, their class, and their rarity. No two cards look alike, but they all belong to the same game.

Stats

Every character has seven stats. Each stat is rated on the rank scale (see Ranks). Your stats decide three things: how hard you are to take down, how likely your moves are to land, and how much they hurt.

Fighting is combat skill and technique. It is the most common stat used to land a basic attack.

Agility is speed, reflexes, and acrobatics. It powers evasive and acrobatic moves.

Strength is raw physical power. It is the muscle behind heavy hits.

Endurance is toughness and stamina. It sets your starting health.

Reason is intelligence and tactics. It powers analytical and planning moves.

Intuition is instinct and awareness. It powers moves that rely on reading your opponent, and gives a small edge on initiative each phase.

Psyche is willpower and mental strength. It powers moves driven by sheer force of will.

Ranks

Stats are not numbers. Each one sits on a ladder of named ranks, from weakest to strongest. The higher the rank, the better that stat performs.

The ladder runs: Feeble, Poor, Typical, Good, Excellent, Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing, Monstrous, Unearthly, and several "Shift" and "Class" ranks above that. In the current game your characters sit in the Excellent to Amazing part of the ladder, so those are the ranks you will see most.

Health

Your health is set by your Endurance rank at the start of the fight. The tougher you are, the more punishment you can take.

You lose the fight the instant your health hits zero. Some characters can heal during a fight, but healing can never push you above your starting health.

Condition

Your condition tells you how badly hurt you are. It is worked out from your current health as a share of your starting health, and it updates the moment your health changes.

You are Healthy while your health is at 75 percent or above. You are Bloodied once it drops into the 40 to 74 percent range. You are Critical below 40 percent.

Being hurt makes you less reliable. While Bloodied, your moves are slightly harder to land. While Critical, they are harder still. A few characters have powers that get stronger, not weaker, when they are badly wounded, so being Critical is not always the disaster it sounds.

Classes

Each character belongs to one of five classes. The class is a quick summary of how they fight.

Tank characters soak up damage and keep standing. Assassin characters hit hard and fast but are fragile. Support characters lean on tactics, buffs, and weakening the other side. Powerhouse characters trade on heavy strength and staying power. Wildcard characters are unpredictable and rely on tricks and willpower.

Rarity

Every character also has a rarity: Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary. Rarity is a flavour label that hints at how iconic and how powerful a character is. It does not change the rules of a fight.

3. Leagues

A league groups characters by power level so that fights are fair. The current game uses one league, Enhanced. This covers peak humans, enhanced soldiers, and lower-end superhumans. Every character you can pick belongs to it.

Other leagues for far stronger and far weaker characters are not part of the game yet.

4. Divisions

A division sets how many characters fight on each side. The current game uses one division, Solo: one character against one character, head to head.

Larger divisions, where you would field a team, are not part of the game yet.

5. How a Battle Works

A battle is a sequence of rounds called phases. There are up to ten phases. The fight ends the moment one character reaches zero health, so most battles finish well before phase ten.

Phase flow

Each phase runs in four steps.

Commit. Both sides choose at the same time. You pick your primary action for the phase and, if you wish, arm a defensive interrupt (see Interrupts). Neither side can see what the other has chosen yet.

Reveal. Both sides' choices are shown.

Initiative. Each side rolls for initiative to decide who acts first. See Initiative below.

Resolve. Both committed actions resolve in initiative order. The first fighter's effects land before the second fighter rolls. There is no winning by striking so fast that your opponent cannot move. A defeat check happens once, after both sides have acted. If the phase is simultaneous (see Initiative) both blows land at the same instant, and a mutual knockout is possible.

After both sides resolve, you read a short written account of what happened. The account tells you who acted first and, if an interrupt was armed, exactly why it fired or did nothing.

Initiative

After both sides reveal their committed actions, each fighter rolls a ten-sided die (a d10). The fighter with the higher Intuition rank adds +1 to their result. If both fighters have the same Intuition rank, neither gets the bonus.

The fighter with the higher total acts first. If you have armed a Defensive interrupt this phase, your roll takes a -1 penalty, reflecting the tempo cost of bracing for an attack.

A tied total means the phase is simultaneous. Neither fighter goes first: both committed actions resolve at the same instant, so both blows land even if one would have dropped the other. A mutual knockout is possible on a simultaneous phase. Should both fighters reach zero health at the same moment, the winner is decided by whichever fighter had more health remaining before the final blow; if that is also equal, higher Intuition decides. There are no draws.

Phase names

Each phase has a name that sets the mood of that stage of the fight.

Phase ten is the Final Gambit. If both characters are still standing after nine phases, the tenth is a last stand. If neither is knocked out by the end of it, the character with more health remaining wins.

Guard

On any phase you can choose to Guard instead of attacking. Guarding braces you and cuts the damage you take that phase in half. It is always available, no matter how hurt you are, so you always have something safe to do.

6. Abilities

Each character has a six-slot kit: a Standard Strike, a Secondary Strike, one or more Signatures, a Defensive ability, a Tactical ability, and a Passive. Each slot is described below.

Standard Strike

A Standard Strike is a basic attack. It is always available, every phase, with no usage limit. It can do more than just deal damage; a good roll often adds an effect such as slowing or off-balancing your opponent.

Secondary Strike

A Secondary Strike is also always available with no usage limit. It is a different kind of attack from the Standard Strike and always deals a different damage type. Some opponents are softer against one type than the other, so picking the right strike matters.

Signature

A Signature is the character's most iconic power. Signatures are limited: each one can be used only a set number of times per battle, so you have to pick your moment. Some characters have more than one Signature. Each Signature spells out exactly what it does on a weak, solid, or great result.

Tactical

A Tactical ability is a limited-use move focused on positioning, disrupting the opponent, or setting up a follow-up. Uses are tracked per battle just like Signatures.

Defensive

A Defensive ability is the ability you arm as an interrupt. You do not choose it as a primary action; instead you arm it at the Commit step alongside your primary action. See Interrupts for how it fires and what the result means.

Passive

A Passive is always on. You never choose it; it simply changes how that character fights for the whole battle. Passives do things like add a permanent bonus to a stat, kick in when you reach a certain condition, change how an event resolves, or heal you a little at the start of each phase.

7. Interrupts

An interrupt lets you defend against a predicted attack before it lands, without giving up your own action.

Arming an interrupt

At the Commit step you can arm your Defensive ability alongside your primary action. To arm it you name the slot you expect your opponent to use: Strike, Secondary Strike, Signature, or Tactical. If your opponent has already revealed a specific ability in a previous phase, you can instead arm against that named ability for a more precise read.

Arming costs -1 to your initiative die roll this phase, whether or not the interrupt fires.

Your Defensive pool holds three uses for the whole battle. A use is spent only when the interrupt actually fires.

When an interrupt fires

On Reveal, the game checks whether your prediction matched your opponent's committed primary action. If the slot you named matches (or you named the exact ability and it matches), the interrupt fires and rolls immediately against your Defensive ability's stat. The colour it rolls determines how much it blunts the incoming attack.

If your prediction was wrong, the interrupt does nothing and no use is spent.

Damage type and eligibility

Each Defensive ability lists the damage types it counters at full strength. If the incoming attack carries a different type, the interrupt still fires but rolls at two rank steps lower. Some damage types are simply outside what a Defensive ability can handle; against those the interrupt is ineligible, it does nothing, and no use is spent.

Your primary action still resolves

Arming an interrupt does not replace your primary action. Both still happen. The interrupt fires against the incoming attack; your own committed action then resolves in initiative order as normal.

The opponent arms interrupts too

Your opponent reads your moves and arms their own Defensive ability against the slot they expect you to use. The same rules apply to them.

8. The Dice System

Every action is settled with dice. The game rolls a hundred-sided die, written as a number from 1 to 100. How that roll is read depends on the rank of the stat you are using: a higher rank turns more of the possible rolls into good results.

Roll 1: to-hit

The first roll decides whether your action lands and how well. The result is read as one of four colours.

White is a fumble. The action fails completely and nothing else happens. Green is a partial success: it works, but not cleanly. Yellow is a solid, clean success. Red is a critical success, the dramatic best case.

A White result ends the action there. No further roll is made.

Roll 2: resistance

If your action lands (Green or better) and it would deal damage, a second roll is made to see how well your opponent shrugs it off. This is the resistance check, described in section 9. It can reduce or even cancel the damage before it lands.

Each ability already states how much damage and what effects it produces on a Green, Yellow, or Red result, so the colour of your to-hit roll tells you which outcome you get.

Colour band table

This table shows which rolls produce which colour at each rank. A higher rank shifts more of the range into Yellow and Red. The numbers are the highest roll that still counts as that colour; "00" means a roll of 100.

Higher ranks exist on the ladder, but no character in the current game rolls above Monstrous, so the ranks beyond this point never come up in play.

Impact band table

Most abilities state their damage directly. A few instead deal damage based on a rank, using this table. The amount depends on the rank and on the colour of the to-hit roll.

9. Resistance Profiles

Damage comes in six types: physical (blows and blades), energy (heat, cold, and electricity), mental (psychic force, fear, and illusion), sonic (sound), toxin (poison and disease), and environmental (falls, pressure, and suffocation).

Every character has a resistance rank against each type. When an attack that would deal damage hits you, the game rolls a resistance check against your rank for that damage type. The colour of that roll decides how much gets through. Note that here a strong result is good for the defender.

Any damage type a character has no special rating for counts as Typical, the ordinary human baseline.

Some attacks pierce armour: they lower your effective resistance rank for that hit before the roll is made. A few abilities also deal damage over time; that lingering damage ticks at the start of each of the next phases and is not reduced by a resistance roll.

10. Economy

There is no economy yet. The game has no currency, no purchases, and no upgrades. Every character is available to pick, and nothing costs anything to play.

11. Progression

There is no saved progression yet. The game does not use accounts and does not remember your results between fights. Every battle starts fresh, and any character is available to choose each time you play.

12. Community Voting

Community voting is not part of the game yet.

13. Madcap Comics Shop

There is no shop link in the game yet.