Month: February 2021

Continuing to work on agent decks. Started the Investigator deck today. Again, still copying text from earlier hand-written prototype cards, but with a different understanding of how some of the mechanisms will work.

One thing that’s paying off nicely is writing a thematic description of each card first, then thinking about how that theme would manifest with the current mechanisms.

I keep getting hung up on wanting to understand how fire and light should work. But I now think that I should just fudge them until I play through a solo playtest. So I need to get a ghost deck together first. And I’m running out of time: there’s a playtest meetup this Saturday, and I’d love to get this on the table then.

Continuing to work on agent cards for HCI. Realized this morning that Defense could be just another kind of effort, but when a creature in its location would take damage, the players can remove defense to reduce the damage. Making it a type of effort should make the game easier to learn. It also opens the opportunity to have defense be applied to resolving challenges, which I quite like.

I’m getting a little too caught up in the exact wording of these cards. But now is not the time to go into that level of detail. And as I’m writing the cards, I keep thinking of ways to have this game’s mechanisms act differently from other games. (Example: What if when an agent takes damage, they lose exactly 1 resolve, regardless of how much damage they took?) And only the important mechanisms should be substantially different from familiar ones. That’s both to keep the game playable, and to prevent me from going down rabbit holes that delay getting a playable prototype on the table.