Reliquary Prototype 1 Play test 1

PROTOTYPE 1

I spent about 6 hours yesterday scrambling to get the first playable prototype of Reliquary ready. I was meeting up with Shane around 9:30 and wanted to have the first play test that night.

Below is the details of gameplay for Prototype 1, then i'll get into the actual play test and notes. I apologize for the crappy resolution of the images, they were all made with my 2megabit phone camera.

Dungeon Map

This is the dungeon map and it's the most uninspired part of the game so far. I literally drew out the concentric circles, wrote in the fighting spots with little thought that was pretty much it. It looks boring, and it WAS boring. Prototype 2 will see a lot more thought put into the dungeon map itself.

Players start out on either town slot, this is the location you go to when you die. The blank slots were essentially "Card draw" locations. every turn a player could chose to move his piece one spot, or stay in their location. If it was an inner circle white space then you could also choose to regen 2 HP as a third option. If they ended on a bank then they drew a card. If they ended on a "fight" then they drew the appropriate type of monster and fought it. The only exception was the "shrines" which are on the very top and bottom of the outermost circle. These were put on with little thought as well, and when on a shrine location you could draw a card OR heal up to your HP max.

The Cards

I developed three different tiers of monsters. One stack of 9 weak monsters which you draw from when ending your turn on the outermost circle's "fight" locations. The cards were made by writing the monster stats on a piece of paper, then slipping a Rebel Alliance card from the old Star Wars CCG plus the slip of paper into a penny sleeve to give it some bulk. All the weak monsters were rebel alliance cards so you could easily tell which stack is which from behind (and cause the alliance is full of pansies). I balanced the weak cards so that it was impossible for any of them to kill a character on the first turn. This means they really are quite weak, but dying due to a bad luck card draw on the first turn is something I want to absolutely prohibit.

Another stack of 9 harder monsters which were associated with the inner circle. These were put with Empire cards due to their awesomeness.

Then one last really hard monster who I called the "Relic Guardian" who was always what you fight in the very center, and also happened to be the end game winning condition upon beating it.

The last type of card was "Dungeon Cards" which i put in with magic cards to diferentiate:

I am very excited about this idea I came up with, obviously influenced by parts of many other games i've played (mostly Tomb Crypt master and Android at the moment). Every dungeon card has a top and bottom, the top helping the player who plays the card, the bottom being a detrimental effect targeting an opponent. The cost to play the card was EXP, so there was alot of analysis on whether using it was worth the cost in the end after a monster was killed (or in preventing the opponent from getting exp from a monster). I made it so that all very expensive pros had very cheap cons on the same card, and vice versa. This way you hypothetically never had a card that was useless to you due to costing too much. You could always use the cheap side and hurt your opponent for example.

Combat

Combat is relatively simple, and in line with my eventual goal of attrition based fighting. First opponents have the opportunity to pay EXP against you, then you can play a card from your hand to help yourself before combat. Limit of one Con card and one Pro card per combat. The effects of the cards lasted all combat rounds this turn. Damage is done simultaneously through multiple rounds until either the player is dead or the monster is. The starting stats for each player are 6 HP, 1 Dam, and 1 D6 dice roll. The dice roll was for a potential additional damage, and was a hit on a 3-6. I added in dice to add some excitement to the game, I don't want it to merely be number crunching. So each round the character will do at least 1 damage to the monster, and a potential additional damage. The monster does its damage back even if it dies this round. This way even if your character is completely awesome later in game, a 2 HP 1 dam creature will still hit you for 1 which can add up.

I had no rule for what happens when both the monster and player kill each other on the same turn. Shane and I discussed it and decided that if the player "overkills" the monster by doing at least 1 more damage then it has health left then the player will survive combat with 1 HP and get all the EXP. If they do not overkill then both the monster and player dies, and the player gets the EXP before the half exp penalty on death was instituted. We also decided that at any point mid combat the player can choose to flee the battle. The penalty for this was going down to 1 HP and having to discard a card from their hand. As you can see there was alot of mid-game developing going on, mostly due to me not working on the rules much before the game and instead focusing on the components.

Player Character Sheets

This is where I spent most of the development time for Prototype 1. The Player sheet has the Skill Map which is the core mechanic behind the entire game, and then a bunch of stat keepers so you know where you are at without having to add it up again by moving our Skill Map tokens around.

The player starts with a dime on the central location of the Skill Map. There is a key to the side of it but it's hard to read. Moving your dime to a white skill slot costs 2 exp, yellow skill slot is 6 exp, green skill slot is 8 exp, and blue skill slot is 10 exp. There are three themes to the skill map depending on which direction you go. One is gaining more HP and protection from monsters, one is gaining more damage and attack die, and the last is gaining more EXP from monster kills. Placing a permanent upgrade skill token down where you already are costs an additional 10 exp, but this allows you to keep the skill slot while moving your dime elsewhere. Shane came up with a great idea before we started playing that when you place a permanent skill token, it warps your dime back to the center. This is sort of a penalty so that you are essentially saying you are "done" with that section when you place a permanent token, but it gives you a head start into the cheap skills for a new direction.

Rules Conclusion

The game ended when one player was able to defeat the Relic Guardian, and thus take the Relic....and win! The theme is pretty deep at this point, I know. Honestly about half of the above rules were made on the fly while playing or right before starting due to my focusing on getting all the materials ready for the Play Test. I literally started making the dungeon cards an hour and 15 minutes before I left for Shanes house. Here is a picture of what it all looked like mid-game:

PLAY TEST 1

After discussing the rules for almost an hour, Shane and I decided to start the game. Since both players start with 3 EXP, he used 2 of this to immediately head in the +Dam direction of the skill map. I also wanted to do this, but in the interest of testing I decided to try heading in the +HP direction instead.

We were neck and neck for most of the game despite going in different directions, my larger HP pool did a pretty good job of counter acting my very weak attack. Likewise his heavy damage killed monsters quicker and therefore he went through less combat rounds and was able to survive with less HP. At some point we both died during the game, though the penalty of losing half of your EXP seemed like nothing considering we were almost alway at or close to Zero due to there bieng so many EXP dumps in place. I didn't realize how powerful 2/3 hitting dice would be, and once Shane was able to pick up the SKill that was +1 Dam, +5 Dice in combat the game swiftly shifted in his position. I made that spot waaaay too powerful but thats what testing is about I suppose.

To counter act this I dropped a permanent token giving me lots of HP and a little damage and immediately headed in the +exp direction. I hoped that killing little things for huge exp with the bonus could counteract his disturbing damage. I figured i would have lots of EXP to play big mean dungeon cards to cause him to die more often. Unfortunately I ran into one bit issue with Proto 1, and that is it was actually quite hard to GET cards into your hand. The best spots on the board were next to the shrines. Then you would run into the inner circle, barely survive but get bit EXP and then run back and regen up on the shrine...but not draw a card.

In the end Shane made a blitz for the end boss. I dropped a pretty bad card on him, but he managed to survive despite the odds being against him with a particularly good dice roll. I'm OK this that little bit of randomness though, it caused there to be a ton of tension and was quite fun in the end. Plus it was my fault for creating that ludicrously overpowered skill on the map! and then not getting it myself! bah.

But it was a big success in my mind, it played in about 2 hours even with all the constant stops for debate over rule variations etc. Plus we both agreed we had a lot of fun and the game is going in a great direction. There is a long way to go of course.

NOTES AND THOUGHTS

Below is a list of points I wrote down during and after the game to be addressed with Prototype 2.

- The dungeon cards are too expensive! Both Shane and myself spent most of the game not playing most of our hand due to it not being worth the EXP loss. We spent the majority of the post-game discussion talking about how to work on this. Ultimately we decided that a new type of currency is required for card play to be more effective. I want cards to be played all the time, but still have strategic and difficult decisions associated with them. We discussed three options most:

1. Having a new currency (lets call it energy) that you generate at a rate of 1 a turn or 1 a kill. This seems awkward to me though, and it will still be hard to get big cards out due to having to wait a while.
2. Blatantly ripping off Android and having a good/bad meter where cons push it in one direction and pros push it in the other. This mechanic is elegant, and I am very interested in it but am worried of the moral repercussions of blatantly copying it.
3. Having all cards also have a discard value on them (like descent) which discounts the EXP cost of playing a different card. Crap this is a copy too...

- There needs to be more opportunities to draw cards on the game map.

- The game board simply needs to be made much more interesting

- Shrines should be tucked farther out of the way so players can't pop back and forth between battles and full heals.

- Death penalty of half exp or even all exp seems to be too light, this might change after changing the card play resource. Thinking about adding in card loss to death penalty.

- Dice hit WAY too often. for now I need to change them to 50/50 hits.

- Maybe add mini-bosses to unlock deeper levels

- Homogenize skill upgrade types throughout the entire Skill Map so characters don't become so one dimensional (all damage no Health, all exp no damage or health, etc.)

CONCLUSION

Holy crap this turned into a long write up.

Holy crap I have a lot of work to do!

Leave comments if you have any ideas or suggestions at any time please :)