Picture Wars battles are called matches. They are a series of pictures with descriptions, each representing a turn taken by a player.
How are they played[]
Most matches are duels, one player battles another player. However, there are many more variants: there are free for all games, team games, special scenarios and so on.
Turn orders[]
Picture Wars is a turnbased game, in which players take turns in moving their armies, training units, fighting, gathering resources and so on. There are several turn order systems, which are listed below.
Fixed turn order[]
Most regular matches follow this system. At the beginning of the match, a fixed turn order is agreed. Players only take a turn when the previous player has taken one. If for example, we have a three player match consisting of John, Gary and Isaac, a sample turn order would be: John, Gary, Isaac, John, Gary, ... and so on.
Declare system[]
Larger scale matches often use the declare system, to prevent players from having to wait very long times before they can take another turn.
A player declares he's going to make a turn in the match by posting "declare" or something similar. He then gets a certain period of time (usually an hour) to make his turn. When he has finished his turn, he posts it. Declaring prevents several players from making turns at the same time, which would lead to messed up turns and other problems.
There's usually a limit on how often you can declare. The standard these days is waiting until at least two other people have made a turn before declaring again.
Taking a Turn[]
Now you know when you can take a turn. We'll go on by explaining what a turn actually is.
The way that turns are done, is by editing the image from the last player's turn. To take your turn, you must save the image, then open it up in your favourite image editing program such as MsPaint. Once your turn placed into the image is finished, save the image and upload it to an image hosting site such as http://filesmelt.com/ . Retrieve the image URL, paste it into your turn with [IMG] tags, then you can write a description to let others know what you did, or just to add dialogue and make things more interesting. But now you may be asking, how should I edit my turn?
Commanding your army[]
On your first turn, you will need to open up the spritesheet image with your units. Copy the units that you want to use for the turn, and paste them into the image. Every turn after that one, you simply erase the old pasted sprites, and then post in some new ones to move them across the playing field. The terrain may also be edited for when placing parts of a base in the map, when causing damage, or editing parts of the map over multiple turns to give physics to objects. your own units may need to be edited as well for various reasons from conforming better to the terrain type, to death poses.
Types of matches[]
These are the most common match types, but are by no means the only match types that can be played.
The Gallery of Honour[]
A selection of completed matches can be found here.