I was looking at the Modiphius website recently and I saw something that surprised me; a print copy of BrikWars. It was something that, as a youngster, I never thought I would see, and now in 2024 it’s a startling reality. If you’re not familiar with BrikWars, it’s a miniatures wargame that uses Legos. Any kind of plastic construction toy can be used, but if we’re being realistic, everyone uses Legos for BrikWars.

The reason it’s surprising to see BrikWars in print is because it always seemed like something The Lego Group would never allow. BrikWars was preceded by a game called Lego Wars, created by Eric O’Dell and R. Todd Ogrin. The game was originally published in 1991, and a second edition was released in 1995. The Lego Group, especially back then, was a very litigious company, and so Lego Wars was hit with a cease-and-desist. It might be surprising to hear this now, considering how popular “brickfilms” are, but the first brickfilm of note, The Magic Portal, had legal troubles of its own.

BrikWars is the creation of a commercial artist named Mike Rayhawk. Rayhawk’s involvement with BrikWars began when he essentially replaced every use of the word “Lego” in Lego Wars with “brik”, but in the nearly 30 years since then BrikWars has evolved dramatically under his stewardship. Rayhawk, as well as being the designer of BrikWars, also was a long-time employee of The Lego Group. He began with work on the Knight’s Kingdom theme in 2002. Over the years his Lego artwork became highly popular within The Lego Group, specifically artwork he created for BrikWars, and eventually he pitched what turned into Ninjago, which was a massive breakout success¹.

Of course, this means nothing when brand identity stuff needs to be protected. The reason the BrikWars book is not currently available from Modiphius is because The Lego Group asked them to stop printing it. Mike Rayhawk is currently replacing all of the artwork that looks too Lego-y in order to make BrikWars more legally distinct from Lego on a visual level. It’s very unfortunate, because whenever someone tries to draw “not Lego” it just ends up looking like Mega Bloks, which is bad.

The modern [not Modiphius related] BrikWars website has lost a lot of its utility; all of the cool stuff that used to be on the old site’s sidebar is now basically hidden inside of the wiki, specifically all of the old editions of the game. When I first got into BrikWars, probably around ~2009, the newest version of the game was BrikWars 2005. BrikWars 2010 entered development soon after, but you had to change the 2005 URL to find it. BrikWars 2010 was still in progress years after 2010 came and went; the tardiness of 2010 became a running joke in the forums.

As you’ve maybe inferred, I got into BrikWars at a young age. Since the game was about Lego, it always attracted younger players, even if the rulebooks made it very obvious they were written for an adult audience. As I said, the newest edition at the time was 2005, but the 2001 version² was also popular. Less popular amongst forum users, but not disliked, was QuikWars, a variant of BrikWars that could fit onto two pages.

BrikWars is a very simple game, especially the 2005 version. Players move around their minifigs and then make their minifigs attack each other. Literally all dice can explode, and if all dice in a roll come up as 1 it’s a critical failure. In BrikWars a critical failure almost always means a comical death. There are some interesting rules, like the “angry inch” [a free extra inch of movement minifigs can do when performing melee attacks], but it’s mostly extremely basic. The most complicated section in the rules relates to “Special Creations”, which is to say, tanks, spaceships, etc.

“Rules of continuity and physics are as malleable as any of us in the ‘real’ world have learned to expect from a lifetime of superhero comics, schlocky action movies, and public education — and they’re always trumped by the dramatic requirements of the moment and the most liberal application of Murphy’s Law. Even the rules governing BrikWars itself are unresistingly overturned by a haphazard shrugging of shoulders and the players’ mutual whim. Spelling is consistently poor.” – BrikWars 2005

The most unique element of BrikWars, Lego theme aside, might be its aggressively irreverent tone. The game includes things like “The Law of Fudge” and “What I Say Goes Rolls”, which “serious” wargamers will balk at. I think these are included not to imply that the rules don’t matter, even if the book literally says “rules are for the small-minded and weak”, but rather to weed out bad eggs before play even begins. The book basically says as much under “The Nuklear Option” heading.

“Wargamers tend to react badly to BrikWars‘ antagonism towards its own rules, especially where it gives their opponents free rein to do something unbalancing or game-wrecking . . . The second reason is that some gamers are jerks, and when gamer jerks become wargamer jerks their jerkiation is almost unstoppable. These guys get myopically focused on victory to the exclusion of all other concerns, and try to munchkin and weasel and rules-lawyer everyone else out of having any fun at all . . . That battle may be ruined, but in the process you will have identified someone whom you should never, ever play games with. And in the long run, that knowledge is more valuable than any single battle. Whether in BrikWars, real life, or any other game, it’s better to not play at all than to play with jerks.” – BrikWars 2005

Since I was young when I discovered BrikWars, I didn’t understand many of its rules. It might be more accurate to say that, to some degree, I reacted to them with a level of incredulity. The concept of rolling for defense, for instance, was so incomprehensible to me that instead of rolling for defense my friends and I always made the default armor its highest possible roll. Likewise, skill rolls seemed a bit silly; why would someone need to do a skill roll to shoot a gun, if the actual pivotal roll is the damage roll?

Because everyone always had maxed-out armor by default, we buffed all of the weapons; a sword for my friends and I was probably 2d6 instead of 1d6. I eventually began to understand the value of opposed rolls as I entered my teenage years; they made the game more involving for non-active players, and added more drama to the game. Skill rolls made certain things, like disarming bombs, meaningful. But I couldn’t convince my friends to use the marginally more complicated rules; they were too used to the extremely rules-lite version of BrikWars I’d inadvertently created.

None of the friends that I played BrikWars with had especially large Lego collections, but that didn’t matter. I was an only child, and I had enough Lego to feasibly stage a battle with six different players. In the beginning I’d create huge maps that took up most of my bedroom floor, but over the years, especially after buying little hexplates for my figures, I started to just put down a few strategic piles of books and DVD cases to create little arenas. I wish I had pictures of some of the bigger maps I created, some of which I can still remember with startling clarity, but I got my first smartphone in the 9th grade.

Oh yes, the little hexplates. There’s an entire cottage industry of companies that build Lego-compatible weapons and armor; The Lego Group has a longstanding policy against making realistic weapons. BrickForge, BrickArms, and BrickWarriors were the ones I bought overpriced pieces of plastic from. All of these companies were popular amongst BrikWars fans, and I remember finding out about BrickWarriors because its founder advertised directly in the BrikWars forums. These companies were all also popular with brickfilmers; yeah, I was a cool kid, I also made brickfilms.

BrikWars 2005 was the edition of the game I grew up with, and so it’s my favorite. I also grew up with 2001, but I used that edition more so for inspiration. 2001 was notoriously crunchy relative to 2005; it included things like “TekLevels” and “Brik Physix” that felt needlessly complicated. There were things that were really cool, though, such as the concept of a game involving a small handful of combatants who have to do special-ops stuff [which I never fully explored since I wasn’t doing skill checks], and Champions, which were like Hero units but even better. Even though 2001 was a brief 135 pages, 156 if one included the Supernatural Powers supplement, it looked massive after I’d printed them both out and put them into a binder using my dad’s printer, which couldn’t print double-sided.

“BrikWars action is divided between two scales, and many players prefer one over the other, sometimes even one to the exclusion of the other. Troop-level players think in terms of crawling through rubble, gaining access to control panels, taking cover and lining up sniper shots, scaling walls, breaching gates, digging trenches, and so on. Platform-level players think in a larger scale – plowing through foot squads, pounding buildings to rubble, warhead launches, carpet bombings, and so forth. At the small scale, troopers are the key to surgically gaining control of critical platforms and locations; at the large scale, platforms are the key to strategically directing campaigns of mass destruction, and troopers are the bloodsacks whose burst carcasses are used to keep score.” – BrikWars 2001

To be clear, I’m looking at BrikWars from the perspective of someone who will probably never play it “seriously” again, but the 2020 version of the rules don’t look as appealing to me as the 2005 edition. Some changes, like the return of Mechaniks and Mediks, are welcome; I remember when these were gradually added back into the game during the 2010 era. But other things feel a bit extraneous, like an entire chapter on Loot. A lot of stuff from the online community has also crept into the game, which I don’t love; I prefer the highly non-specific feeling of the 2005 book, which was written before the community blew up. If I’m being honest with myself, however, I probably would’ve been super into all of the extra, non-essential stuff as a BrikWars obsessed 13 year old. Back then, I used to have lore for my armies and favorite minifigs.

These days, all of my Legos are in big storage bins. I sometimes feel the itch to build things, but I don’t have the space anywhere in my apartment, and the amount of effort it would take to put everything back would definitely outweigh the enjoyment I would feel building something again. My Warhammer-obsessed cousin is coming to visit about a month from now, and a part of me wants to show him Brikwars. Maybe I’ll pull out a few minifigures and hexplates, make an area out of a few books, and print out a QuikWars PDF; it wouldn’t be as ornate as the battles I had when I was 11, but hopefully it would be a nice look back.

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1. Ninjago had a 15 season TV show, a sequel show with a second season that just started, and a feature length film, making it probably the most popular Lego theme, if we exclude licensed themes like Star Wars. ↩︎
2. I’m not linking directly to 2001 because it doesn’t have an HTML version like the others, but you can find the PDF on the BrikWars wiki. ↩︎