Realm: A Game of Influence by Enkoder Games

[Cyrus]

Redid about 50% of the cards today after a series of playtests. The two decks that I currently have designed are much more focused now, and hopefully more balanced.

The elf deck's basic strategy is simple mid-range spread and control, while the advanced player can set up ruthless battalions using Admirer of Legends and any of the few stronger unique elves. The deck also has a combat exclusion sub-theme that I will be expanding on in future expansions for the elves, which will give them a significant advantage over control style decks that rely on one or few late game bombs to win.

The orc deck is now much more efficient at being a beat down deck, utilizing overwhelm to the fullest. The basic strategy is straight up face-beating goodness, while an experienced player could find the real power in Grok, Orc Captain in combination with Battering Ram or Crushing Victory.

I suppose the cool thing to do is to "spoil" the cards I've mentioned above, or else I'd sorta be a dick. More playtest notes and general news on the way, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!!!!!




Overwhelm ? ?At end of battle, drain 1 influence from the defending player for every 2 points of Combat Total this battalion has greater the defending battalion.?

EDIT: Picked a new name, as is evident by the ever changing thread title. Step in the right/wrong direction? Weigh in!

[Dragoon]

REMINDER TEXT ON CARDS!
No seriously. It makes it easier for new players.

Admirer of Legends. Is it Combat Effect or Battle Effect?
Grok, Orc Captain. "If it is," > "If you do so,".

Also, "Select battalion gains overwhelm until end of turn"? What?

Unough nitpicking, cards look great.

[Trevor]

If you used black text on a white background with a font like Times New Roman, you could fit a lot more text in the field and have it still be readable. Your current text seems fat and bold, and it doesn't need to be.

[Cyrus]

Figured I might be able to get away with no reminder text like all the other "living card games" I've been playing recently, since there's only about 4-5 keyword abilities and they are easily located on the back of the rule book. Unlike ccgs, which you have to buy packs and hope for the best, then track down rules somewhere, this game will be packaged like a board game, and you'll be expected to actually read the rules before you play. That being said, on the cards that have room, I will add reminder text because there's no reason not too, these are just playtest mock-ups, so they are missing that.

Good eye on Admirer, honest mistake there. They should all be called Combat Effects

The wording on Grok would have to be completely redone to sound right that way, but I'm not completely against that. The other possibly wording would be "You may assign a Combat Dice assigned to this hero to all heroes in same battalion. If you do, ignore all other Combat Dice assigned to those heroes." This seems better, honestly, so I'll probably change it to that.

Overwhelm is a Battalion Ability, meaning that a hero with Overwhelm grants the ability to his entire Battalion. This is explained in better detail in the rules, which is another reason it'd be confusing to put reminder text for it. I suppose it should read ...

Overwhelm ? ?At end of battle in which one of your heroes in your involved battalion has Overwhelm, drain 1 influence from the opposing player for every 2 points of Combat Total the battalion has greater than the opposing battalion.?

Obviously in the rules I'd need a glossary explaining the finer points of what makes a battalion "involved" and "opposing," but it seems straight forward enough for you gamer types

Select is the term I use for "Target" essentially. When something says "Select this does a that" it means you choose a "this" to before "that."

Nitpick all you like, it only helps me work out the kinks better!

Trevor, you're right, for some reason all the cards are in Georgia font. That'll be obnoxious to fix but necessary, not sure how that happened, just never double checked it I guess :/ I don't want to change to black text on a white background though, I think white on black is fine. Most people complain about reading black on white and not the other way around, in my experience at least.

[Dragoon]

Well, I guessed 'select' as your target word, but the wording is just weird. 'Select a battalion to gain overwhelm until end of turn.' somehow sounds better.

I wish there was some more nitpicking on my game.

[Cyrus]

Progress has been slow as other parts of life have started to pick up. Can't complain there, so to keep myself from complaining here, I put a little work in today. I'm working on an example few turns sorta thing that'll make learning the game way easier. Already got a couple turns done, but making a ton of example images takes forever, especially if you mess one up >:|

Anyway, I also had some decent mechanic/keyword ideas.

Static Abilities:
Expendable ? At end of battle, dismiss one of your heroes with Expendable involved in the battle.

Triggered Abilities (triggered when a combat die matches a combat effect with one of these keywords)
Lethal ? At end of battle, you may destroy one hero assigned a lower combat die than this hero.

Revive ? If your hero is destroyed during battle, return it to your hand instead.

Protect ? If your hero would be destroyed during battle, dismiss this hero instead.

Explosive ? At end of battle, destroy all heroes involved in the battle assigned a lower combat die than this hero.

Sabotage ? At end of battle, you may destroy one worker at the battleground.

I think I need to alter the test decks/rules a little/general way I think of the game by adding more workers to the decks. This has basically spawned from me playing a lot of RTSs recently, and noticing one golden rule: never stop producing workers! I think it makes sense for a game like this too, obviously the more resources you are generating the better, plus it will speed up the game, which was sort of an issue during playtesting. Hmmm things to ponder upon

[Dragoon]

Erm, what does "If your hero..." means. Does if affect all your heroes or do you have a single hero as your commander or what?

[Cyrus]

In magic terms it means "If a hero you control..." You attack with multiple heroes, so I think it's at least fairly clear

[Cyrus]

Worked on the cards today, startin to come together pretty good I think. Gonna print up some proxies tonight and get to work on playtesting this bad boy some more. Found some guys through playing EDH that live down the street from me and are into playtesting, so that should be some good news there.

Some notes on archtype design in this game, for those who may care...

1 - Efficient Beatdown - Using the most cost efficient face-beaters to gain an early advantage in achievable combat totals, effectively holding off more than a 1 or 2 location expansion (if that). Take out players with Overwhelm. Good matchup against expansion, bad matchup against control.

2 - Expansion - These builds take advantage of cheap "exclusion" effects to ward off serious threats while playing more and more locations and workers, until they are so far ahead in resources that they can play too many heroes for other decks to keep up with, and gain serious advantage with influence drains. Takes longer to set up, but is a more secure style of play. Good against control, bad against beatdown

3 - Control - Control decks in Realm play more like land and creature destruction decks from other games, and greatly benefit from a small expansion back-up plan. Early game they are trying to pump out workers or expand to one or two locations while using resource denial cards to keep other players as behind as they are on actual "meat" cards. Later down the road they use high-costed but deadly removal and lockdown cards to seal the deal, usually alongside a Paladin to deal the final blow.

4 - Swarm - More on this one coming later, still designing deck ideas...

[Dragoon]

Wait, you can't win with politcally backstabbing? Shame T_T

[Cyrus]

That's more for the player's to decide, isn't it? The control deck will have the highest concentration of diplomats and political effects, and its always in controls favor to make an ally early on so they can establish better, and obviously there can be only one winner, so you're going to have to backstab them at some point

[Himalayas]

I really like your cards, they are well made and original!

[Ascent]

They need better fonts, but they're beautifully designed otherwise. (The font is fine for the upper-right number, but the rest of the text is a bit unappealing. I believe the design is half the game. I reject any game of which I can't bear to look at the cards. And the mechanics on your cards look pretty interesting to. I just might give your game a try when it's ready.

However, as we're learning in the SWTCG, you need to cut back on the text where possible. We've gotten a lot of feedback lately about how players don't like the walls of text.

[Cyrus]

The walls of text are pretty much going to be a must because of the mechanics. Having to put a separate ability for different die rolls means having to have a lot going on on a card, hence the simplicity of the design, allowing for a ton of text box space. I understand what you mean though, I just feel like it might be a necessary evil for this game.

I didn't realize because I just wasn't paying enough attention, but the fonts were not all Times like I thought they were. Stupid program defaults. The newer versions have better fonts, I'll have to upload an example soon

As always, thanks for the comments

[Himalayas]

Stupid program defaults. The newer versions have better fonts

What program are you using?