Yore Playtest I : In Which Frost and Fire Make Everything Damp

I spent a feverish eight hours brainstorming ideas for the combat system and then twelve hours designing, plotting, printing, and preparing the cards for it.  Twenty minutes of playtesting later, I was left holding the scraps of my original system, wondering, "Why did I think those mechanics were good ideas?"

Synopsis of the Combat System

In the game, you have an item and three stats: magic, mental, and combat.  The item corresponds to an stat and modifies its abilities while each stat determine what abilities you can use.  Your abilities can chain together (notice the chain images on the sides of the cards) and you can keep going.  Magic abilities add afflictions to your opponents.  Other abilities consume those afflictions, doing extra damage.  Mental abilities allow you to draw more cards.  Most abilities do damage.  During your turn, you have a few deck management options (trading some of your abilities, discarding unusable ones).

The three card types.

In hopes of achieving the unique, choice-driving combat system, I added one major mechanic:  You do not shuffle your deck.  Since the backs of cards partially reveal the content of the card, it opened too many opportunities for cheating during shuffling.  By not shuffling I also hoped to add more importance to how you play the cards.  As the game progressed players could stack the deck, building a sequence of powerful abilities to take down increasingly difficult monsters.  That was the theory.

While the game is collaborative, I had the idea of making the playtesting a versus challenge.  Everyone had access to the same spells, but we used them against each other rather than against the monsters of the game.  If you ever want to test balance, you'll get the most vocal reactions in a player-versus-player environment: unfairness stands out much more when someone is using it against you.

Problem I: Spell effects

The first major problem was spell effects (frost and fire) that the magic abilities applied.  Two of us focused our stats in magic.  The results were polar opposite.  I ended up with a beautiful balance of spells and a finisher, along with a wand that helped out.  Laying down the combination as my first move was very satisfying.  The other player had all finishers, which do nothing without a spell effect present.  She was not satisfied.  When we dueled, I ran into the same combo (via the not shuffling effect).  I dealt 8 damage, she dealt 3.

A spell chain.

Problem II: The same cards over and over

The other player meanwhile floundered with the same combo over and over again.  Because he could not win any matches with the combo, he had no way of getting additional abilities.  Additionally, he had two cards that he could not use, so he had to skip turns to get them out of his hand.  This was the second major flaw of the non-shuffling mechanic.

Problem III: Play Order

Because this was versus mode, the question came up of how each player lays down their cards.  I didn't have an easy solution for this.  I had thought both players would lay them down at once.  That was anticlimactic.  We tested one card at a time, but that went awry.  Once one player ran out, it was easy for the other player to put down as few cards as they needed to win.  Neither solution felt entirely natural.

Solutions:

To solve those problems, I decided to try the following.

1. Spell effects will not stack.  There is a card you flip over that tells which has been applied.  One spell effect overcomes the other when cast.
2. Bring in the monsters so that the game flow is more natural.  This would allow players to build their decks faster, as they would win far more than 50% of the time in the beginning.
3. Like solution II, I hoped moving to the players versus game setup would fix the play order problem.

Note: The placeholder art in Yore comes from Lorc's icon pack.