Rules
This is how a game of Dvorak works. You can either start with a deck of cards that somebody else has made (we've got lots of them archived on this site), or you can start with a pile of blank cards and build a new deck from scratch.
Basic rules
Dvorak is played entirely with cards, and there are two types of card - Things and Actions. When you play a Thing card, it goes onto the table in front of you and stays there, possibly having an effect while it's in play; when you play an Action card, it does whatever it does and goes to a discard pile.
Take the deck of cards, shuffle it, and deal five cards to each player (which they hold in their hand where other players can't see). The rest of the cards go in the middle of the table as a draw pile, and whenever a card is discarded or destroyed, it goes into a discard pile.
Starting with a random player, you take turns in order. A turn consists of:-
- Drawing the top card from the draw pile. (If the draw pile's empty,
shuffle the discard pile and turn it over to make a new draw pile.)
- Playing up to two cards from your hand. You can play one Thing and one
Action per turn (or just one of those, or no cards at all).
- Checking your hand size; if you have more than five cards, discard down
to five.
The game continues until somebody meets whatever victory condition the deck has. (Some decks have fixed victory conditions, while others have them written on a card - "when you play this card, you win the game if...")
Making a deck
If you're making a new deck from scratch, you need to prepare an initial set cards before the game begins. Take your pile of blank cards, and distribute it amongst the players.
Before you start creating, the players should agree on a theme for the game ("okay everyone, let's make a pirates versus ninjas game"), and possibly a victory condition ("if you have five pirates or ninjas in play, and none of the other type, you win!"). You can even agree on thematic rules for the deck to make the final game more coherent ("every Thing card has to be either a pirate or a ninja, in some way, and the number of cards in players' hands are conceptually 'money', for effects which let you draw or discard").
Players can then start creating cards, writing them up (with or without a picture) and throwing them into the middle of the table. To get a good sized deck, try to get nine or ten cards from everyone. A useful design tip is to have two different coloured marker pens, one for Things and one for Actions, and to underline the card titles appropriately.
Each player has absolute veto power over the cards being created - if you see something that you don't like, for whatever reason, pick the card out and see what everyone else thinks. A card only makes it into the actual game if everyone is happy with it.
When you're done, you've got a deck of cards - you can now play a game with it, as described above.
Adding and changing cards
You can also add new cards to the game while it's being played - again, just write it up and throw it onto the table. If nobody wants to veto it, it gets shuffled into the draw pile.
If you want to remove a card from the game or just change the wording of it (maybe because it's too powerful, or because it clashes ambiguously with another card), then announce your intention and see what the other players think. If nobody objects, then you can remove or change the card.
Advanced rules
Over the years, the game has developed a few extra, optional rules to cover the sorts of mechanics that tend to come up a lot. Some of the archived decks use them, and you're welcome to adopt them yourself.
Special rules
"Special rules" are additions to the basic game rules to give the game a little more depth. Things like "each player starts with twenty hit points", so that people can make cards that say "every player loses 5 hit points" or "you gain 10 hit points" without having to define what hit points are on every single card.
If you want to add a special rule to the game, suggest it in the same way as a card - if everyone's in favour, it gets added.
Action abilities
One of the early Dvorak decks included a Thing that said "Each turn, instead of playing an Action card, you may destroy a Thing." - you could skip your ability to play an Action to get a special effect from the Thing.
This became so widely used that a shorthand developed for it. Instead of writing "Each turn, instead of playing an Action card", a card would just say "Action:" - whatever's after the colon is what you get to do instead of playing an Action.
This is called an "action ability", and still counts as an Action for the purposes any other cards that affect or react to Actions being played.
Playing cards onto others
If you like, you can specify that some Thing cards can be played "onto" other Thing cards to give them some sort of bonus or penalty (like armour, or equipment, or a brain-sucking alien). A useful rule for these is that if the Thing it was played onto is destroyed or otherwise leaves play, the Thing that was played onto it is destroyed.
Multi-deck Dvorak
Although it's possible to make a normal Dvorak deck where two different 'sides' are in conflict (as in the Day of the Triffids deck), such games either have to be vague (players aren't forced to pick a side, and can change and mix allegiances as much as they like) or include redundancy (players are forced to choose a side at the start of the game, and the other side's cards are useless to them except as discard-fodder).
A more effective way to create such a game is to have separate decks, each deck focusing solely on that side.
Multi-deck Dvorak is played in the same way as normal Dvorak, except that:
- Each player has their own draw and discard pile.
- When a card is destroyed or discarded, it is sent to the discard
pile of the player whose deck it came from.
If playing creatively, new cards are created as normal, going into the creator's deck by default. You can still veto other player's cards, but in this case it might be more useful to resolve disputes by creating a similar card for your own deck - "if you can have something that destroys all my aliens, I'm going to have something that makes you discard your entire hand".
CCG Dvorak
The Dvorak framework has been used to make a few fledgling collectible card games - these typically have a lot of special rules, and involve the group creation of a single, agreed card pool from which players can build their own custom decks.
