This progress update is brought to you by Mark Mizak:
Busy couple of weeks for myself. My family did not do Christmas in December due to a money crunch so we did on January 25th instead so much of my free time in the last two weeks has been getting things together for Late Christmas but did manage to get some DwD work done. Additionally wanted to fill you all in a bit more on the card and board game end of things.
I am also “working” on the Beastiary. I put my contribution in quotes because truthfully I have done very little. We have a lead man on this (Ben Gorman) who is doing great work, communicating thoroughly with Bill, and I am keeping my hand in it with occasional comments. This is one of the projects that Larry Moore had been spearheading and neither Bill nor I were exactly sure where it stood. Happy to report it is much farther along than we had feared. This will be a great addition to BBF and I can’t wait ‘til you all get a chance to see it.
Finally in the BBF end of things I am working on my second module tentatively titled “Fierce Creatures” One of our friends from the DwD Community is helping me with mapping--though so far I have not sent him my preliminaries for him to flesh out--Sorry Eric hopefully this weekend. He has read through the module so far and seems to like it. I hope I can clearly communicate to him what I want in way of maps--this is a new sort of collaboration for me so we will see how it goes.
I mentioned in our first Update that we have a number of games in development, let me explain what that means... We’ve talked about them at least!! Some are much farther along than that. We have three games that are actively being worked on at this time. I do not want to say very much because our experience with Agents of SECTOR show that a game’s final iteration can be VERY different than what it looks like when it starts or even half way along. But for the sake of full disclosure I will tell you all a little bit.
One game is a card game having to do with simulating a siege on a castle. This game is in the building stage. My eldest son, TC, and I have been going over how to delineate the different aspects of the cards, the power level, speed factors, art ideas, and possible game mechanics. This game’s original idea came about with conversations between Bill and I of the sort of card game we would like to play.
Game two is a historically staged conquest game. In our minds this is going to be a big, complex, meaty, game with a nifty mechanic not seen in other conquest type games, which I am going to keep under our hat. TC is working on the maps--a special interest of his since he was a small boy--while Bill is working on the mechanics of one aspect of the game. I am a constant sounding board for each of them while working a bit quietly on my own ideas for some of the other aspects and the board layout.
Game three was first floated between Bill and I on our way home from GenCon 2013. It is a resource game with a sci-fi theme and a hopefully really cool map mechanic. The board is a real challenge that I am working on finding some technical help with. I have extensive notes on this game which hopefully will help us develop it pretty quickly--that is a very relative term in game design--once we have the map licked.
-Mark
I have a lot of experience in card game design from my many years working on the Star Wars TCG on the IDC. In the castle siege game, the thing to remember is that the person who goes first has the advantage. Every bit of power is 33% more effective than the second player. (That was from a very thorough study I did of power effectiveness that ultimately got ignored and the IDC paid the price with a way overpowered dark side-centric BOE set. [Dark Side goes first]) Contrary to what you might initially think, the first player should be the castle defender. (Consider the first attack to be the volley of arrows.) He wants the siege to end quickly and decisively, and wants to wear down his opponent's resources quickly, through a swarming aggro strategy and resource denial. Inexpensive recursion is an important tool for him, along with drawing. His units are also inexpensive, but weak. This makes protracted sieges more difficult. The second player should be the invader. He wants the war to go on and on until the first player runs out of defenders. He comes in with his massive armies, siege engines and catapults (These are known as "Tank cards" because they're expensive heavy hitters that can take a beating,) and has a more effective build/draw/energy engine. He can cycle his resources over and over. Inexpensive recursion is bad for this player to have, because it could cause him to dominate the game. He also should not have as much resource denial capability. Though both sides should be able to block certain moves.
Avoid too much build cost reduction or build gain for the first player. (He doesn't need it.) Avoid free card selection for the second player. (They should have to mill cards to find what they want.) Despite being the invader, remember that the second player is defensive and wants to keep his troops alive with lots of healing, not simply throwing them away.
Of course, this isn't entirely hard and fast. You can play around with having tanks on the first player's side and swarms on the second player's side, along with mixing and matching other strategies, as long as you remember what each side's strengths and weaknesses are. You want to design each side to not fully utilize its own strengths and take advantage of the other side's weaknesses. (Generally involving diminishing their ability to exercise their effectiveness.)
Also, if speed is a factor, the second player's units should be faster.
If you hold to that, you can't go wrong. Trust me.
The Bestiary sounds like a really cool book. I'm looking forward more almost to the encounter tables.