Built among friends, for fun

Drawn is built by a small team of friends in their spare time. We are not a studio, we did not raise money, and there is no roadmap committee. The whole project runs on free evenings, group chat threads, and a stack of unfinished art commissions.

We do use AI tools to help us — for code, for testing, and to generate placeholder card art during the beta phase while commissioned artwork lands. We are open about it. The story system, the rules, the balance, the roadmap, and the community side of the game are all human work. The compute helps us ship more cards, faster. We are not pretending otherwise.

If you want to help — with art, with playtesting, with rules feedback, or with translating to your language — drop us a message. We read everything. There is no application form, no portfolio review. If you have something to add, we want to hear about it.

Most digital TCGs are built around squeezing money out of players. The big ones charge for packs, sell single cards on the secondary market, run constant FOMO events, and balance the game so the people who pay the most always have an edge. We have all played those games. We are tired of them.

Drawn is a long bet that you can build a real TCG without any of that. No pack purchases. No card sales. No premium currency. No card you can only own by paying. You earn cards by playing the game — by opening daily packs, completing challenges, dissolving spares for crafting fragments, climbing the ranked ladder. Every player has access to the same card pool, the same crafting system, the same battles.

The game runs on three things: banner ads (small, in obvious places), optional rewarded ads (you watch one, you get a free pack), and cosmetics (card backs, field skins, profile flair — purely visual, no in-game advantage). That is enough. We do not need to extract twenty dollars a month from every player. We need enough to keep the servers paid and the domain renewed.

The other half of the vision is honesty. We will tell you when something is broken. We will tell you what we are working on. We will tell you why a card got nerfed. We will not pretend to be bigger than we are, and we will not pretend to be smaller than we are when we make a mistake. The Discord is the backchannel for all of this — every patch note ships there first.

Drawn is set in a fragmented fantasy world built around seven elements — fire, water, wind, earth, metal, lightning, and neutral. The elements interact in a rock-paper-scissors loop: every non-neutral element beats some and loses to others, so the deck you bring shapes the matchup before either player has played a card. Neutral sits outside the cycle and pays no advantage either way.

Cards come in three flavours. Creatures fight in front. Objects do the everything-else — buffs, attachments, spells, reactive plays. Field cards reshape the whole battlefield while they hang around. You build a deck, you bring it to a small board, you play it out turn by turn against another person.

Battles are real-time multiplayer in your browser. Two players take turns summoning, attacking, and reacting under a turn timer. The server runs the rules — no client can cheat by peeking at the opponent's hand — and every match is saved as a replay you can share. Win, lose, or draw, the game keeps a record.

Above the moment-to-moment combat there is a thin layer of meta: ranked seasons with tiered promotion and relegation, daily and weekly challenges with streak rewards, guilds with shared progression, tournaments with bracket viewers, and a collection layer that tracks every card you have owned and every set you have completed. The whole thing runs in a browser tab — no install, no app store, no DRM.

We are still adding cards, sets, and modes. The world has plenty of room to grow, and the systems we have shipped so far are the ones we want to build on top of for a long time. If you want to follow what is coming, the changelog page is the source of truth. If you want to suggest the next thing, or just hang out and chat about deck ideas, the Discord is open.