So, I was talking with ruby, and we did a quick mental exercise I like to do. Basically, you take a specific genre or game, and your goal is to design a version that is as stripped down as possible. A few simple rules: All the rules must fit on a sheet of paper, and your ultimate goal is a game easily played on pencil and paper.

First, here’s my game, based off the RTS genre, which I call Paper Knaves. (If you have a better name, let me know!)

Setup
You play on an 8×8 board, the color of the spaces do not matter.

Each player gets one castle, to be placed anywhere within the first two rows on their side.

A castle can make either a stable, or a barracks, and place them anywhere within two spaces of the castle.

At the beginning of your turn, you can either make a new building(Your only allowed one castle though), or a new unit.

Castle makes a pikeman, a stable makes a knight, and a barracks makes a peasant.  Units are generated right next to the building, on any available spot.

Buildings can be placed within at least two spaces of any other of your buildings.

Combat
Units must be next to each other to initiate combat.

Pikemen beat knights in one turn, knights beat peasants, and peasants beat pikemen.

Any other matchup(IE: Knight charging down a pikeman) results in self-destruction.

Buildings take two turns to be destroyed. However, castles take four turns.

When a building is being attacked, that building cannot make any units.

When your castle is destroyed, you lose.

Movement
Pieces can move in any direction. You can move one piece two spaces, or two pieces one space. Allied pieces can move through each other(like a Knight in Chess).

Buildings cannot move.

Turn order
Your turn is in three phases:
1)construction: You can either build a new building, or recruit a new unit.
2)movement of pieces
2.a)Then pieces can attack units beside them. Units do not occupy the space of vanquished units
3)clean up(you remove all destroyed pieces, buildings from the board, and play passes to your opponent.)
Design process

The design process was relatively simple. We looked at the very core of RTS gameplay, which is resource management and combat. This resource vs that resource, and one win. Placement of resources also factored in as well. So, I broke down the RTS genre into three types of resources: time, units, and buildings. If you make the game turn-based, it becomes easy to balance the time aspect, and the easiest and simplest way to balance unit superiority is to use a rock-paper-scissors style dominance method. And I chose to have the win condition as elimination of your castle, to save time on mop-up procedures. However, it does mean that pikemen are that much more valuable, since there is only one building to make it. I still haven’t playtested the game yet. If you have any thoughts, considerations, critiscisms, verbal diarrhea, let me know at zeroth[a t]oddco[dot]ca

EDIT: Added and updated the rules for clarity.