Revamp!

Time for a lot of text!

So today I was in school working with my group from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., we did QA(Quality Assurance) the entire day and improved the game. The main goal was to create ways for the wizard to split up players, since during the QA last friday we discovered that it was too easy for the heroes when they stick together.

So we decided to add these spells:

Switcheroo:

Choose a player and a token, switch their places.

Possess:

Choose a player, that player deals damage equal to the number of 

equipment he/she has to another player in the same room.

Whirlwind:

Choose a room, move each player in that room to a different adjecent room.
Place 2 level 5 tokens in the room they were previously stated in.

And my personal favorite

Evil Laugh:

Choose a room, each player in that room 

skips a turn for each player in that room

What this did was that the wizard could split the players up, or punish them when they are together and thereby making it more riskful to walk as a group. We also lowered the amount of swords a player could have (positive combat modifiers) from "one of each kind" to "two of any kind". Since there are three +3 swords, four +2 swords and five +1 swords. Before this change when you played three heroes all those heroes could have one +3,+2 and +1 card, giving them an +6 on their combat rolls. After this change, if you played three heroes only one person could have a total of +6 on their combat rolls, the other players could only have +5 and then +4 and so on.

We also wanted to try one new mechanic and add one new rule. The mechanic was "the rage of the wizard", when all three key's needed to get into the wizards tower is collected, the world starts to fall apart. The wizard must now, at the beginning of each turn, remove X number of tiles, where X is the number of people in the game. There are some constraints though, the wizard can't remove tiles so that a player can't get to the tower, of if a player dies and drops key's there must remain a path two that key. What this did was to create a narrower path to the wizards tower, forcing the heroes to walk through the wizards traps and monsters.

The rule we added was that when the wizard was enraged, he was allowed to place creatures inside of his tower aswell that the heroes had to fight before they win.

After some QA

The next thing we tried was that instead of the wizard gaining one "mana" each turn in addition to the modifiers from the tiles the players walk on, he only got the mana from the tiles. The reason we did this was because we felt that the wizard got to much "mana" too fast in the early game.

After trying this concept one time we realized that we had to re-balance the modifiers on the tiles in order for it to work. Since as they were now, the wizard was simply not getting enough "mana" because the negative "mana-modifiers"(the digit in the left icon) were too height and too many. So we made most of the -2 and -3 mana tiles into +1 or -1 mana tiles instead.

This helped some but the wizard still felt too underpowered in the beginning of the game, and was basiclly just sitting and rolling his thumbs until he got the mana he needed to cast creatures and spells. So we decided to add more lower costing spells, creatures and traps.

While lowering the cost of some cards we also added some new spells, such as:

Demolish:

Destroy any 1 equipment in play.

We added this card since the players got a lot of equipment that they didn't have any use for. Say that a player had one +3 and one +2 sword  equipped, and they get another +2 while looting a room, they would just hold on or throw away that card . Now that the wizard can destroy equipment a player needs to keep reserves of weapons so they still have some value.

Teacher QA

We then had a QA session with one of our teachers, Marcus. He played two rounds of the game, first as a hero and then as the wizard, both games took 1h 45min. The first time we played Jonas played the wizard and the three heroes won. The next turn Marcus played the Wizard and it looked like the heroes was going to win again, but slowly but surely Marcus got back on his feet. And Marcus then hammered the last nail in the coffin when he used the "switcheroo" spell to switch place of the hero with two of the three key's with a monster at the edge of the board while the world was falling apart around them. Marcus then overwhelmed the heroes, filling the board with traps and monsters until the last man fell.

All and all Marcus liked the game and didn't have any criticism, he did however suggest that we try to change something in the exploration system. As it looks right now, when a hero steps onto a tile, that hero flips all the tokens(monster, traps and illusions) on that tile and then resolve combat, loot and such. He suggested that we try and play that you aren't allowed to flip the tile until you've killed all the monster-tokens on it, he thought that would perhaps create even more mindgames. So that's something we shall at least try and see how it affects the dynamic of the game.

A thing that we decided ourselves that we wanted to try was to remove some equipment cards and replace them with consumables that give similar bonuses, i.e. replace some +1 swords with some +1 dmg potions.

Tomorrow I've arranged a big QA meeting with most of the group in the course, there we will play the same version of the game that Marcus tried to get more opinions from various different people.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell