Elemancer preliminary playtest
After months of build-up, Elemancer is finally in a place where I can test out the components and get some sense of balance and game flow. There are a few key end-game features that aren’t yet implemented, but there’s enough of the early and mid-game, as well as all ~700 Shrine and Temple cards. So I walked through the game with some basic rules and started channeling the Elements. Here are some notes and observations I made.
The board will ultimately be large enough to contain the cards on each zone tile. We’ll get there.
The strategy in the early game for a 4-player game might be to just go in 4 separate directions and hold onto a hand that can allow you to get one or two (with some luck) cards on turn 2. One rule I ironed out is that you gain 3 Gems of any color at the end of your first turn, which could be tied to ending your turn in the starting zone, but I don’t want to encourage people to stockpile Gems for like three turns and then head out. So alternatively, it could just be a first-turn special. Regardless, the first several turns were spent gaining cards around Tier 1 and venturing into a neighboring Tier 2 zone. It wasn’t until turn 7 that I felt I could take a turn to fight a monster.
My build started out with Fire abilities, and I noticed that I stayed in one zone mainly. This meant that I started to stockpile one kind of Gem. This prompted me to implement a Gem exchange, which I’d flavor as transmutation, that can allow you to exchange any 4 Gems for 1 Gem of your choice. This set of rules also allows you to “mine” Gems from the current zone by discarding any 3 cards. I haven’t implemented any Channel abilities that gain Gems more efficiently than that generic action, but I was waiting until I had more data to decide if that would be a necessary ability.
When fighting monsters, it was often necessary to use my entire hand to guarantee victory. In particular, some of the random effects of my Fire abilities (i.e. “discard your top 4 cards, +2 damage if a Fire card was discarded this way”) felt too risky (at least before my deck was mostly Fire). So generic monsters may need their HP to be tuned down. Channel abilities also need to be able to be activated during combat, so you shouldn’t be forced to Channel your extra Firestarter pre-combat before you know if it’s worth using.
While there’s only a 1/10 chance to hit them, Horror monsters might not be as good as I’d thought. The Escalation mechanic is interesting, but I don’t foresee opponents discarding cards to make the fight harder, especially when they don’t know your damage output capabilities. Using VP for Escalation costs is much less intrusive, but there needs to be a requisite risk for the active player if they can’t defeat the enemy. As such, the defeat penalty may need to be ratcheted up, and likewise the rewards will also need to be inflated. This really comes down to granularity.
Around turn 14 I had my eye on a Tier 3 card, so that’s when I ventured out into the wilds. I haven’t implemented any gating mechanisms between zones, but it’s definitely a consideration. I think this should be a one-time deal for Tier 2 zones and Tier 3 zones as a whole, and it shouldn’t cost you cards (though maybe a Gem tax…). How I envision implementation is basically like fighting a monster: there’s an HP/damage value that you need to surpass using the cards in your hand. The difference here is that it’s more of a theoretical combat that allows you to put the cards back in your hand. It might be prudent to immediately fight a monster in the new zone, and I’m alright with encouraging that play pattern.
Confirming my intentions and suspicions, it’s really not safe to hunt monsters in the same zones where you’re getting your cards from. This is simply because those monsters will likely resist those same Elements. Monster cards need to be improved, as they are not face-up, unlike Temple and Shrine cards. But I think it’s reasonable to inform players of the monster’s potential HP range, and maybe even add the Element and its potential weaknesses/resistances.
Requiring Gems of specific colors on cards for Temple quest requirements is difficult without some kind of cycling mechanic or a lot of planning. I may implement a generic action of discarding 3 cards to draw 2. One issue is that some Ice (and eventually [redacted]) abilities like you to have fewer cards in hand, and Time abilities may care about discarding.
Around turn 20 I transitioned into a hybrid Time-Fire build by getting several cards from a Shrine in the same turn, Tributing off-Element and my remaining starter cards. Without other player disruption/competition, I had 30 VP by turn 23. With this in mind, the wandering/boss monsters in higher Tier zones should probably be worth the same or fewer VP as normal Tier 3 monsters, with the upside of a very strong ability.
This is about where I called it a night. The Chronomancer engine felt pretty fun, allowing you to store cards for next turn, and Pyromancy could output decent damage, though mono-Elemental builds looked much more difficult to pull off than I first imagined. I stayed in 3 main zones, straying into 3 other nearby zones to fight or maybe collect Gems or just a couple cards. I didn’t focus too much on combat, moreso on travelling around and gaining cards.
My final deck was 13 cards, and I Tributed 17 cards (including all 10 starting cards). The final deck was mainly Tier 2 Shrine cards (hence the high number of Tribute). It was exclusively Time and Fire cards.
The next steps will be to simulate two players and to hopefully test out some other Elemental builds.
