Elemancer v4 update
The latest updates have been focused on adding the game-spanning questline, more player interaction, and nailing down the endgame (as may have been obvious by my recent blog posts). Following playtesting v4 I will have to run another pass at ability and monster balance.
Questline
The questline will have multiple steps, and at each phase you will have to complete two of three tasks. This will unlock travel into Tier 2 and 3, a free card from Tier 2 and 3, Tier 2 warp points, allowing you to fight Tier 3 bosses, and allowing you to return to the start for the final showdown. Most tasks will involve gaining cards or absorbing ‘Essence’ from fighting monsters. The running total of Essence will be a part of most phases, but swapping the rewards of monster fights from Victory Points to Essence means that they can increase exponentially in higher Tiers. It also means the victory condition is not a unbounded amount of VP, which is a good thing.
Interaction
Player interaction is mainly discard effects at present, and those can be found in mainly Tier 1 and Tier 2, while Tier 3 cards are mainly focused on your own synergies. Tier 2 and even Tier 1 cards will still be an important part of your deck when fighting bosses and likely during the final showdown. I’m keeping the possibility open for effects that add junk cards to your opponents’ decks, though I may save that for an expansion as a new mechanic. Playtesting will determine whether interaction is at a good rate, but it shouldn’t be something you get to do every turn. You don’t often play Militia every turn in Dominion, nor do you always draw Imperial Fighter in Star Realms. But such cards should have enough of an effect on the game just by being in your deck. As noted in recent posts, Elemancer doesn’t have the same level of indirect interaction as games like Dominion, Start Realms, and Ascension. Alongside the fact that these discard effects will mostly be Channel abilities that will require you to make a decision on how to use the card means that they may not be used for their interactive effect every time either. With this in mind, I will likely have to increase their rate. Then again, having the option puts the power in the players’ hands.
The next section will get into more details, but the finale is now a head-to-head competition between players. While players may not be fighting directly throughout the game, this should be a nice conclusion that allows players to showcase how they’ve built their deck.
Endgame
I’ve moved away from victory points as it could potentially lead to ‘farming’ monsters for VP and potentially never ending the game. Initially I planned the final task/quest/boss to be a golden snitch type situation, where it gave a lot of VP but not enough to guarantee that the first person to finish was the winner. As such I was going to have a kind of ‘DPS check’ that gave you a variable amount of VP depending on how much damage you could do to the final boss. This final boss would largely be a target dummy where you had to hit thresholds of damage rather than have a set amount of HP like other monsters. For example, you would get more VP if you dealt 50 damage against the boss compared to if you only dealt 40. The finale is still like that in some ways, but instead pits the players against each other directly. This still presents a similar issue of balancing the max damage output between Elements. And that is where Arena effects come in.
The Arena for each game will be semi-randomized. I’m unsure if I’ll base it off the Tier 3 zones available (i.e. each has their own Arena and one is picked randomly) or if this will be a static set from which one is randomly selected. I also haven’t decided if the Arena should be known from the start or selected when the first person returns to the start to kick off the finale. Anyway, each Arena will have different effects depending on the Elements of cards played by each player. This provides another ‘knob’ (designer lingo for something you can adjust on a card/entity) for balancing Elements against each other. For example, if Electromancy is too strong the Arena could reduce Chain, or if Hydromancy is too weak the Arena could buff Water abilities or allow you to change the Element of another ability (without triggering its Arena effect). Another way to implement Arena effects is for Elements to affect their antagonistic Elements negatively.
There’s still a ways to go, but it’s getting closer to a self-contained playable experience. I’d say at present (v3.5) it’s a playable experience but is unbounded, as there’s no strict victory condition. I think that captures the RPG aspect of sinking time into an immersive world, but that doesn’t quite work for this board game, unfortunately. I don’t intend Elemancer to be a 4+ hour epic, I’m hoping to hit the 1-1.5 hour range.
