#1: Three resources – Food, Iron and Spirit
Goal and vision
I knew I wanted the game to be an area control game, where heavy emphasis would be on claiming land and expanding your territory. A great way to incetivize this I thought would be to have different area types which would give you different resources if you had buildings in those areas. The more you expand your race, the more resources you get! Depending on your strategy you could choose which areas you’d expand into.
Implementation
There were three different resources: Food (for recruiting troops), Iron (warrior oriented, for upgrades and orders) and Spirit (shaman oriented, for upgrades and orders). Each player had a unique race with its own three resource tracks, where one race might excel in producing food while lacking in iron production for example. Non-built buildings would be placed over the slots on the resource track and at the beginning of a new turn a player would get resources according to the revelead resource slots (kinda like in Terra Mystica). If a player’s building were destroyed the building would be placed back on the resource track, hampering production and awarding the attacker with victory points.
The spread sheet for the different races’ resource productions. The value in the darker cell was the starting resources each race begun the game with.
Very early testing of the resource system with the building tracks in the first image and an insanely crude map in the second image, with the cubes acting as buildings. The different colors on the cubes were used to differentiate between the resources at the start (and also the letter F, M or S (Forest = Food, Mountain = Iron, Sands = Spirit) were used to notate area type.
Analysis
Snowballing
Once someone got a lot of buildings out that player got more resource than the others which in turn lead to greater expansion and better combat capabilities. Possible ways to alleviate this might have been to make it more benifitial to destroy other players buildings, increasing in value depending on how many they currently have in play (giving incentive to go after the leaders).
Taking focus away from the core mechanics of the game
The main focus of the game were area control, the cards and troop positioning. While people enjoyed the resource management to some extent they felt it needed too much attention of them which took away from the other game aspects.
Too many buildings
In total you could theoretically build up to 9×3 = 27 buildings which is an insane amount of buildlings looking back on it. There really was no need for the number to be this high and I wanted to cut back on it.
#2: A single resource
Goal and vision
Instead of having to worry about building placement and careful resource management I stripped away the variety of the resources and just kept a single, general “Resource”. Later on this resource got called Spirit, the lore being it was the resource which motivated the troops to perform actions (bit of a stretch with the name to be honest). The idea was to keep the focus on area control while still keeping the resources as a way to let players make choices on the power level of the cards they wanted to use.
Implementation
All races had the same starting resources and resource accumulation was still determined depending on the player’s building track. The number of buildings were halved as well, making each building more impactful.
A player board for the faerie guild, where the building slots (and resource income) are the squares underneath the Resource area.
Analysis
Snowballing
This didn’t really come as a surprise since the change itself didn’t aim to fix the snowballing problem. The real problem was that destroying the buildings didn’t give resources, but rather victory points. This in turn meant that while a player gained some victory points they would still fall very far behind in economy and then lose in the end anyways. One possible fix would probably to have been to award resources (and possibly victory points as well) for destroying buildings, not sure why I didn’t do it back then as a fix.
Easier resource model
The players enjoyed that they didn’t have to plan their building placement as much with regards to resources. More buildings = good, regardless of where they were placed. Instead they focused on more strategic locations for their buildings (can I defend these buildings if I build here, or should I do something else instead?)
Lack of customization / progression
The players did however say that all the races more or less felt the same now, with just slight variations. There was no real theme or “feel” in the cards anymore. Having different resources was fun for the strategical choices and would’ve been nice to implement in some other way, other than through building placement.
#3 Card Flavours – Hatred, Xenophobia, Greed, Pride, Madness
Goal and Vision
I had this progression system combined with economics in mind when I thought of this. Kinda like when you level your character in RPGs such as The Elders Scroll: the more you use something/invest in something the more specialized you become in that area. I wanted to let the players do the same thing here where depending on what cards they played they would get a special resource depending on the card suit, which in turn could be used to empower cards with that suit’s “flavour”.
The original base resource would still be around but this extra card-specific resource could only be acquired through playing cards.
Implementation
I started off with just three suits at first: Hatred (offense), Xenophobia (defense) and Greed (economical). After a bit of testing I expanded the suits to also include Madness (utility/movement) and Pride (victory point generating). I won’t go into more detail regarding the card design (I’ll leave that for another chapter) but the main idea was that whenever a player played a card, he would get a token of that card’s suit. E.g. if I played a Hatred card I’d get a hatred token. These tokens could then be used to empower other cards which accepted the hatred token as currency.
The above cards are some examples of what the resource icons looked like (as a placeholder at least) and how they were used. The tear-shaped icon was the base resource and for each card suit I simply used the first letter in a circle (e.g. H in a circle for the Hatred resource). To play Fire Nova a player would have to first spend 2 base resources and a Hatred token, then had the option to empower the card further by either paying 3 more Hatred tokens for the first additional effect listed at the bottom, and/or pay 1 Pride token to get the second additional effect.
The base resource also acted as a joker, where 3 base resources could be used as an equivalent of any card token.
The resource tokens I used were colored flat glass marbles (not very colorblind friendly). The second image is from an early play testing session with some friends showing how the resources organized next to the player board.
Analysis
It was confusing timing wise when you gained the card token
One common question was if you gain the card token immediately when you play the card (so you can use the token to pay for the card itself) or if you get it afterwards. The answer was that you get it after the card has been resolved and paid for, but it was surprisingly easy to forget to collect it. As a reminder we put the card token on top of the card and collected it when the card was being moved to the discard.
Playing many cards = many resources
The cadence of the game was that each turn each player played X number of cards (X varied between testning but was usually around 2). There were, however, reaction cards which could be played as soon as a condition was met, and exceed the amount of allowed cards per turn (e.g. you were about to be involed in a fight). At first these reaction cards also yielded card tokens but this had to be removed since it made the reaction cards even stronger due to their economical impact.
Card suits: Flavour vs Mechanics
Whenever a player needed to reshuffle his discard pile because he had no more remaining cards on hand he also got to gain a new card. He choose what suit he wanted, looked at 3 cards from that pile and chose 1. Often a player wanted a card with a specific mechanic (e.g. needing to recruit more troops, or have more movement cards) rather than a certain flavor. What usually ended up happening was that as soon as a player got a card with an empower ability he liked, he’d gain cards of that suit and just play them for the resources so he could empower the actual card he liked.
Planning depending on other players’ resources
It was quite intuitive and very fun to keep track of other players’ resources to play around certain cards and effects, kinda like paying attention to your opponents mana in Magic the Gathering. This was in general an aspect the players enjoyed taking into consideration. The issue with flavour vs mechanics was still present though, where even though a player had ran out of a specific token he could still achieve the same effect using another kind of token.
Flexibility with base resources as joker resources
This design actually panned out quite well. It was an expensive exchange for hte players (3 base resources for 1 card token) because you also needed to use the base resources to pay for the cards. The flexibility this offered was however a very liked mechanic.
#4 Back to just one base Resource, but also added an order resource
The card suits were a fun idea but I didn’t quite like how they played out in general (I’ll go into detail on that in the card design chapter). After the card suit iteration the game underwent two big changes were I just simply used a base resource again. The additional thing I added however was an order cost.
Goal and Vision
Once again, I wanted to try to minimize the snowballing factor but still reward player progression. One way to handle this I thought would be through an order point system. I took a lot of inspiration from Android Netrunner where each player are given 3/4 points (clicks) each turn and can spend these on standard actions or by playing cards from hand (paying their credit cost). Could I achieve a similar thing but with an area control game instead?
Implementation #1 – The Trading Card attempt
Even though the card suits were gone I still wanted some differention between the players, so instead the races got their own unique decks. This was actually a very fun way to structure the game and to be fair I can’t remember exactly why I chose to abandon this route. I think I just mainly had gotten tired of the strange fantasy-ish setting and finally wanted a more foucsed and coherent atmosphere, and in that conversion dropped TCG attempt after a few months and went on to the next iteration.
One big, important change was that buildings no longer generated any resources, but instead generated victory points (denoted AP for Ascension Points in the image below). This revelation stuck with the game and is still a design principle in the game’s current state.
In the first image we have the player board with its standard orders, slots for keeping the order token in, a place for the leader card and a building track at the bottom. Some cards were used instantly, while other cards (second image) were kept in play and were essentially additional standard orders the players had at their disposal.
Implementation #2
The game changed drastically in the next iteration, going from the TCG attempt back to the original vision while keeping the base resource/order resource mechanic. In this implementation the game became, for the first time, Norsefolk. It got its viking theme and the cards a player could play only costed order points as a base resource, with the option to empower the cards through a base resource (coins).
Three different action cards. The base cost is gone and is instead replaced by an order point cost (depicted by the scroll icon in the middle to the far right of each card). The card could be empowered by using coins which could only be gained by special means (depicted at the bottom of each card)
Analysis
Equal playfield
With the introduction of a resource which remained the same for the players throughout the game (the order points) each player had the same boundaries to work within. The base resource was still present in the game to give players a strategic option to go an “economic” route to gain dominance on the board.
Feeling of every route being the same
The order point system was nice but once again players were feeling that something was missing. Everyone could go every route (e.g. mass recruitment, powerful shaman spells, mass expansion) at every time and it was fairly difficult gauging what the other players’ strategies were.
#5 Four different resources – Growth, Prosperity, Warfare & Presence
Goal and Vision
I liked the idea of having a certain amount of points to spend for each player, but I also wanted to make it easier to understand what another player could do based on their available resources (based on mechanics and not on flavour). I also wanted a system which, resource wise, didn’t snowball out of control if one player got too far ahead.
Implementation
So, now we’re at the stage the game currently is at. Four different resources exist:
- Growth: Recruiting and restoring troops
- Prosperity : Building, defending and gaining glory (= victory points)
- Warfare: Fighting and dealing damage
- Presence: Moving troops, increasing range on abilties and decreasing the source requirements of abilities
Each player starts with 8 resource points in total, distributed as they like between the four resources. This marks their maximum capacity of their resources. Whenever they like they can spend a turn to “Rest” to regain all of their spent resources, as well as increase their max capacity by 2 (either 2 in one resource or 1 in two different resources).
A Player board with 2 remaining Growth and 3 remaining Presence. The max capacity of each resource is the slot to the left of each black cube (where the black cubes act as a sort of ceiling). The building track at the top gives the player a continuous income of glory.
Two action cards and one reaction card. The base cost is written in the middle rectangle, while the empower cost is listed in the description of the card.
As you can see from the examples above, many of the cards also have a split cost where you can pay using either one of the two required resources. This was a way to add a bit of more flexibility and a way to balance the cards, as well as trying to keep the cost within the flavour of the card. “Pure” cards (like Overpower) still exist and require very specific resources.
Analysis
Clarity
Thanks to the different resource and the resources being tied to game mechanics, rather than flavour, it made it a lot easier to plan your turn. Did a player just invade your territory but has no Warfare? Well, he’s probably not going to attack you then. The split cost somewhat undermines this though and I might have to be more restrtictive of using the split cost.
Resting and tempo
The only way (so far) to regain resources, and to increase their capacity, is to “sacrifice” an entire turn to rest. While you do get stronger (gain additional cards, gain more resource capacity) it also gives the other players a turn where you can’t do anything else but react. We still haven’t tested enough to see if it’s easy to exploit this, e.g. by resting the first 3-4 turns just to gain more resource capacity and cards, or if that would set you too far behind.
Flavour
The players felt that Warfare and Presence have been incredibly intuitive regarding their purpose and what to expect from card effects. Growth and Prosperity are clear for some but a bit unclear for others. I think I’d like to keep them as two separate resources but it could be argued that they should be just one.
Summary!
Map presence to generate income
Regardless of resource system I never got this to work. The snowballing effect always got too strong, so once one player started getting ahead with expansions and gained more income than the others, it was very difficult to stop them. Another issue was that losing buildings if you had only a few was a huge blow to you, since it reduced a bigger percentage of your income than taking away a few buildings from someone with like 10 of them (going from 2 -> 1 resource income is a 50% cut, while going from 10 -> 9 is a 10% cut). Even if you traded evenly with the leading player they still came out ahead.
One possible way to solve this might’ve been to never put the building back on the resource track. I.e. once you unlocked a resource income slot you always had that income. It feels like this would’ve created other problems though, and might’ve required a more controlled way for everyone to build at the same cadence (sort of how the Growth part in Spirit Island works, even though that’s a coop game).
Different resource types vs a single resource
While players at the beginning felt confused and annoyed to manage their resources, they also thought it became a bit stale and difficult to read others’ intent when only 1 kind of resource was available. By changing the way the resources were gained the management issue disappeared.
Tempo and card value
This kinda belongs in another chapter but I want to mention it because it touches on the card cost balancing. I tried different turn structures:
- Play a card during your turn.
- Play as many cards as you like during your turn, as long as your resources allow it
- Play 1-3 cards (depending on iteration) per turn, where the cards’ initiative determine who goes first (this is what Norsefolk has now, where each player plays 1 card)
Depending on turn structure it becomes important to a varying degree of doing as much as possible during your turn. I found it important not to make cards too powerful in the current iteration because then a player would play that card, rest, play it again etc. while other players needed several turns to achieve the same effect. This could possibly be solved by the cooldown system I tried in one iteration, or a Gloomhaven-esque solution where powerful cards are one-use only. Currently I’m just trying to keep the power level of each card within reasonable bounds though.