We’re currently testing version 1.7 of our game. Version 1.0 began the first time we moved from using notecards with scribbled writing to a first printing of draft cards.
There are three main changes to the game, all focused on increasing game balance: deck churn, static actions, discard.
Deck Churn
As we’ve talked about before, for a points based deck builder, users should churn through most, or all, of their entire deck for balance. This ensures they get to utilize all their high point cards. This version introduces a new way to do that.
Each player has a base card draw that starts at 5 cards. At the end of a turn, a player discards every un-played card in their hand and draws a new hand to their base card draw.
Players may spend 1 supply (health) per card to prevent them from being discarded.
In the previous version, players averaged 30% of cards not drawn in their deck. This new version gets most games to 0% undrawn cards.
Static Actions
In every version playtest since version 1.0, there was a dynamic that allowed players to play a location, and get extra actions to take each turn from it. An extra action is a big reward to a player, and we had unsuccessfully been able to balance it out with risk or cost to a player. Players that got more actions first snowballed into victory.
Now each player gets 3 actions, and that’s it. There are some cards that are free actions, or grant you an extra action, which you can pay for in points during deck building. Locations still exist (for now) and grant players increased card draw.
Discard
Previously, all expended cards went into a players discard pile. If the player ran out of cards, they could spend five supply to reshuffle their discard pile to create a new draw deck.
In the current version, cards discarded at the end of the turn during the card draw phase are put into the discard pile. All other expended cards are put into a separate discard pile known as the graveyard.
When the draw deck is empty, a player automatically shuffles their discard pile and creates the draw deck from it. This creates a second play through deck of cards not used during the first play through.
A player can still spend five supply to shuffle their graveyard into their draw deck, and is required to do so if they have no cards left to draw.
We’ll share some additional stats on version 1.7 as we work on balance with the new rules.
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