Draw Steel is a game by Matthew Colville and James Introcaso. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by MCDM Productions. Draw Steel was supported by a crowdfunding effort.

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

How do you think about the material conditions of a Dungeons and Dragons heartbreaker?

Even the most well-financed ones are still falling quite short of the resources at the disposal of Hasbro, one of the biggest toy companies in the world.

I guess for this one we will stick to the historical context in order to do the material analysis. In January 2023, Hasbro dropped the ball with threatening to revoke the OGL. Not only did that undermined the enclosure of the artform they had cultivated for decades, it caused many a third-party creator to start looking for an exit strategy. Of course, eventually Hasbro realized nobody was buying Dungeons and Dragons toys because of Chris Cocks’ beautiful eyes and stock portfolio and the entire brand relied on things that were not controlled by Hasbro — from Netflix and Amazon to the smallest LLM-slop publisher of third party materials in the DMs Guild, with classic detours into war-criminal Ghibli 5e supplements. It walked back, but not before a dozen “replacements” for 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons were announced.

Most of those projects are not even worth remembering. Of all of them, Draw Steel is the only one that does not feel pointless. Why the competition was doomed to irrelevancy was quite simple: not only were most “competitors” happy to return to Hasbro’s enclosure, all but one misunderstood what they were competing with. They thought they needed to fulfill the hole of a lackluster generic fantasy game using a bad randomizer; however, they needed to offer a lifestyle as an alternative to the Dungeons and Dragons lifestyle products. The most successful one of those knows that and offers itself as a lifestyle product; you have and play this game as part of your Critical Role consumer lifestyle.

However, as a game and a piece of art, it is as pointless as the others, abandoned before it was even born by parents not really into it.

Then, why is Draw Steel the one that stands out? Well, first, it is the one that is an actual game on its own and that was not just a preemptive reaction to being kicked out of the Garden of the Coast. Sure, it is clear the entire episode was the thing that made the game actually happen, but there was a lot of design work already in motion —- decades of it. Second, is having the design chops behind it — in a decade of “homebrewing” and “third party” content of statblocks of Pack Tactics and Bite, MCDM Productions stood out in actually reworking and elevating Hasbro’s slop rather than sticking to it like a ravenous lamprey. Couple that with the understanding that there was no “fixing” that mess of a game and you would need to reexamine every assumption and build a game from scratch, and we break past cynicism or opportunism and into genuine artistic contributions. Finally, MCDM Productions may have dependent on Hasbro, but most of its products and their success was born as much of frustration as fandom with their pop fantasy game; having gone through the trouble of making a game from scratch, they would have the drive to go their own way and an audience that would follow.

Draw Steel is fascinating to me personally. MCDM first came to my attention when someone brought up its rules for strongholds as a counterpoint to playing something more focused on the elements of running a large-scale organization. They were cemented in my mind at that point as “Dragon Game Extraneous Rules”. They remained comfortably in that spot until Draw Steel.

Draw Steel exists in a world where more and more we are seeing people accept the rightful place of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, as an amazing tactical combat engine. Pathfinder 2e is what led me to Draw Steel, when a different person brought up its rollicking movement functions in comparison to less kinetic tactical affairs. So I checked it out.

The MCDM guys left me impressed, because they could have been just as happy continuing to release Dragon Game Extraneous Rules, and instead they took a massive swing here.

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Well, it is still a pop fantasy game. Inquiring the violence of the adventuconquistador genre, Draw Steel does not. Or much else, really. Draw Steel priority is to be an entertainment product. It is about big cinematic fights and expects you to consider that by itself as fun and offering all fulfillment that you need from a game through that.

It is also not about dungeon-crawling. It is all about heroic fantasy flights, made interesting by rewarding tactics and cinematic action. Sometimes it happens in a dungeon. For Draw Steel, this means two things: moving miniatures across a grid and a focus in the use of powers.

This is important to mention in terms of expectations, because the marketing and presentation of the game create very strong expectations. The game is named Draw Steel, all over the place are words like Medieval Europe Analogue, heroic fantasy, a focus on tactical combat and cinematic classes. I’m pretty sure the clash of weapons and breaching of armor featured intensely in your mind’s eye upon reading those words. However, that is not how Draw Steel imagines heroism, cinematic action or tactics. Weapons and armor? No. What matters are the powers your knight has. You will have an easier — and more fun — time meeting the game where it is if you think of the characters of Draw Steel as fantasy superheroes than anything else.

Modern pop fantasy games and their heartbreakers have been struggling with the racism incorporated within and how to move on from that. The efforts are ultimately misguided and/or tokenistic: getting a stamp from a consultant they paid for to say it is racism-free and cynically pretending to change based on that — because the power relationship is not of peers and collaborators but of employer and employee. Of course they fail, because to actually do something about that would require examining the violence of the adventuconquistador and taking a stance of universal personhood that is incompatible with Hasbro’s game — it is like trying to make a Marxist Monopoly game while not changing anything of Monopoly other than calling propriety and rent other stuff1. So I did not expect Draw Steel to do better than most. However, it is surprising how it both had the tools within to be much better than the competition and how it ended up kinda accidentally being pretty bad at it.

So, the tendency among these games has been to move away from “evil races”, or at least to avoid the term and not apply those to peoples connected to “player character options” within two degrees of separation. While there has been a lot of experimentation with “racial mechanics” around the problems with pulling out the calipers was the calipers not being small and precise enough so you can stat your character “racial destiny”, the dust has settled into just replacing “race” with “ancestry” and not really examine where the racism keeps coming up from. Or maybe they do “examine” it, and we get the aforementioned tiny calipers so you can properly stat the perfidious elf blood from your dwarf’s grandmother or replacing American-style racism “all elves are good dancers and archers” with the European-style racism “those from Elfwood are all good dancers and archers”. Draw Steel does the bare minimum token effort of replacing race with ancestry, but creating the mechanical foundations to move past ancestry altogether, with a point-buy system of embodied lineage, cultural backgrounds and lived experience. Then, after doing the hard work, it wraps it up in the same old wrapping, resulting in the outcome being good old “build-your-own racial stereotype” bags. In such bundling and selling, it is hard not to see the human ancestry ability as anything other than “Sense Other”, giving humans an inherent Hitler-radar for anything Foreign.

The reason it ends up stumbling backward after taking a leap forward will be discussed in point 4 and the genius that could have truly improved things will be covered in the next part.

Excellent craftsmanship bundled up with weird packaging can summarize a lot about Draw Steel.

I am very excited to see that Draw Steel has its own bespoke efforts to create specific, localized safety tools that actually foster a culture of safety and comfort. Unfortunately, they are not in the book proper and must be obtained online.

Draw Steel is unabashedly a pop-fantasy game. You are going to be playing a larger-than-life, mighty thewed, bubble-gum-chewing, ass-kicking hero, and you are going to use cool powers and extra movement to do it. The game is focused on this, and therefore has some notable failures in other related areas, which my cowriter summarized beautifully.

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Draw Steel is about Heroes fighting Monsters. Big damn figures going against truly terrifying opponents that nobody else could face, happening through a tactically focused combat systems.

Draw Steel is about Heroes on big damn adventures stealing victory from the jaws of defeat by confronting dangerous enemies.

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Draw Steel definitely is a game about combat. It is an excellent game for grid-based tactics about throwing powers against each other. It performs quite admirably when compared with games like 13th Age, Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, or Lancer. If you like the powers of those the most, Draw Steel will quickly win you over and maybe become your game of choice.

What is quite unclear is whether Draw Steel is about anything else. It seems it is about larger-than-life heroes, but seems pretty coy about exploring what it means to be such a looming figure or a hero. Sure, their powers may be impressive, cinematic and worthy of a demigod, but the player characters tend to be quite diminutive figures in terms of narrative presence and personalities. There is not much space for exploring what it means to be a hero, why they keep adventuring, why they do what they do, and what they want to achieve as actors in a story. They are Heroes because they fight Monsters; same way a Superhero is someone who fights Supervillains. It is Monsters and NPCs that have wants, motivations, drives, actions, and Draw Steel offers almost 400 pages of much more interesting characters. Heroes in Draw Steel seem to be defined entirely in opposition to those actual narrative actors.

Part of the issue comes from the clash between the carefully designed rules, mechanics, and stat blocks clashing with how much a fuzzy bland mess the universe of the game. This is no accident, but a well-planned choice.

No, it does not give character. It actually strips of it. It adds every ingredient, not caring how well they work together. It is all maximizing Market Penetration, to exclude nobody from its Target Audience, an action screaming excessive Focus Testing. Where one half of the game is so confident and sure about what it does, what it is about and puts every effort in excelling at it, the other seems unwilling to either take any stance or open any theme to exploration. Setting is not separated from system, setting is system. This stains across the entire game, resulting in the heroes becoming so vacuous, so disconnected from anything, as Orden IS a world made of pudding. The result is a game about heroes that does not want to talk about heroes.

Draw Steel is about having a fun time in a tactical combat. This could be an insult; it could be damning via faint praise, but I am going to tell you the truth, it isn’t a big thoughts game. You are going to build characters, who you may define in relation to whatever corner of the setting your GM spends the effort to spin out into a defined setting, but the game isn’t about that. It’s about the sheer thrill of your barbarian picking up and slamming a dude through walls for the joy of seeing the number get bigger.

I hope that as time goes on we get a chance to see Draw Steel develop a deeper meaning.

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