Some of you may recall that, a while ago, I was working on a card game called Skullduggery. Well, it’s still under construction, and I had a playtest session with my friends Tad and Chris on Friday night. It went pretty well. There were some unclear rules and some things that needed to be shored up, but overall I was pretty pleased with how it went. It seems like I’m starting to get it to where I want it to be: fast-playing, easy to learn, easy to play.

My intention is for it to be more a casual, beer ‘n’ pretzels kind of game than a hardcore game; as such, there’s a fair amount of luck involved, and you don’t necessarily have to pay attention to every little thing that happens. There is some skill involved, mostly involving good timing of a heist and minimizing your risk before attempting one. I’m also thinking of introducing an element of gambling to the game, allowing you to wager Infamy on a heist in order to reap greater rewards (but at the risk of greater penalty for failure, and greater potentiality for your opponents to screw you). I’m not completely sold on the idea yet, though.

Alright, some news: Gamecraft 2.0 is no more.

Wow. That was misleading. What I mean to say is, the project is still happening, but the name is changing. Gamecraft 2.0 has always been a working title for me, and I’ve been wanting to change it for a while; it’s too wordy, and the system has never really been that similar to the original Gamecraft System. More a spiritual successor than an actual successor. Thus, I’ve changed the name to Saga.

Oh, and one more thing: it’s done. Sort of. The system is mechanically complete, but still under development. To put it in computer terminology, it’s entered beta phase, and is ready for open testing. As such, I’m releasing it on this website, in this very post. Feel free to download it, peruse it, play with it, and give me feedback on it (please). Also note that it’s being released under a different Creative Commons license from everything else on this site; effectively, you can use it, modify it, and create and sell a commercial product with it, as long as you give me credit for its original inception (the full license is in the document, itself). Anyway, here you go:

The Saga Rules System (Version Beta 2)

The Saga Character Sheet

[Edit 5/18/07: Saga has been updated; specifically, the rules on using skills and tokens outside of conflicts have changed.]
[Edit 6/10/07: Another Saga update. Mainly rules clarifications, but the rules for pushing have been improved, too.]
[Edit 2/6/09: The file that you used to be able to download from Lulu was corrupted somehow, and I'm unable to replace it. I'm now hosting the file directly on this website.]

HeroCard: Cyberspace is the most recent addition to TableStar Games’ HeroCard series of board/card games. The fundamentals of the card battle system are the same as in all of their previous offerings (read this if you’re unfamiliar with the basics), though there are a few new (and very interesting) rules introduced via some characters. The board game, however, is pretty different from any of their other HeroCard games, and is both strategic and engrossing. I feel, at this point, like I should mention something: Cyberspace has been, for a while, the HeroCard game that I’ve been least excited about, so I felt some trepidation when I sat down to review it. My opinion has, in many ways, reversed, however, as I’ll explain in this review. It’s not that Cyberspace is without its faults; like all the HeroCard games, this game is not perfect. However, like the other games in the series, this is a very good game, both in its own right and as an addition to the series as a whole.

Characters and Card Play
Cyberspace introduces four new characters, and this is actually somewhat of a departure. In the other three current HeroCard titles, the core game comes with two heroes, while you can purchase two additional heroes for each as expansion decks. Not so with this game; all four heroes come packaged in the core box, and there are no expansions. The game includes the Bouncer, the Sinner, the Bioengineer, and the Cryptomancer. Thematically, there are some problems here. The game takes place in cyberspace, a virtual world; however, only the Cryptomancer really seems to embrace this idea; all of the other characters rely on attacks and blocks that are thematically physical or social, rather than virtual. I suppose it could be argued that these characters are simply virtual avatars, and that their attacks and blocks are imaginary constructs, representations of their manipulation of the code of cyberspace. This, to me, takes a bit too much justification on the part of the player, though, and I’m not sure everyone is willing to meet the designers halfway on this.

Despite these thematic problems, though, some of the characters are really interesting to play, and the Cryptomancer in particular provides a dramatically different way to play the game. The Bouncer relies heavily on attacking, attacking, attacking, and is the only character who has restricted base attacks; this means that he is (barring some fancy card-play) the only character who can attack twice in a single turn. The Sinner has a lot of card-denial abilities, forcing her opponent to discard cards and, thus, weakening her opponent’s position. The Bioengineer has cards that allow you to twist your opponents’ attributes, making them unavailable until he discards three cards from his hand, as well as a particularly nice card combination that allows you to play a card, then clear it from your attribute stack, then get it back in your hand, then play it again. The Retrovirus, Bioremediation, Recycle, Retrovirus combination is particularly devastating to an opponent, effectively twisting two attributes (which requires a total discard of six cards). It cripples an opponent’s attack and defense for a turn or two, which can be pretty nasty, and you don’t even have to be in the middle of an attack sequence in order to use it.

The Cryptomancer is probably my favorite of the four; most of his cards are deployed first, then played; this means that you lay the card face-down on the appropriate attribute stack instead of playing it immediately. A deployed card can’t be played in the same turn that it’s deployed, so you have to plan ahead, but it frees up room in your hand and the cards themselves are incredibly potent. Myofibril Spasms, for example, clears all of your opponents’ block mods and reduces his block total to 0, meaning that he has to play more block mods in order to have a hope of fending off your attack. Relay allows you to duplicate an attack aimed at you, aiming it at the player of your choice. First you resolve the attack aimed at you, then you attack your target with the same base attack, playing whatever attack mods you want on top of it. So, you get to attack on someone else’s turn, and it doesn’t use your exclusive action for the turn. Malware is a +9 attack mod, for only 4 mind points (all of the deployed cards have a cost of 4). The fact that 80% of the Cryptomancer’s cards are deployed cards means that you absolutely have to plan ahead, but it also means that, if you do plan ahead, you’ll have some really nasty surprises lying in wait for your opponents. It’s a new and interesting play style that I really enjoy.

The Game
The Cyberspace board game is actually a tile-laying game, with passing similarities to games like Carcassonne. The game comes with 24 triangular tiles, each containing a client or a server, as well as connecting pathways and sometimes nodes. Connecting pathways have to line up with each other, and you place tiles in order to form networks, essentially chains of clients and servers. Servers are required to control a network, and you can’t score points without them. However, servers aren’t worth any points on their own; only empty clients are worth points at the end of the game, and only if you control one or more servers in that network. Nodes are the endpoints of pathways, and you can place links or firewalls on them.

The game doesn’t introduce new types of cards like previous HeroCard games have, unless you count the program card. Each player gets a program card and three program tokens, small translucent disks. The program card consists of nine circles: three idle circles and six program circles. Your program tokens start on your idle circles, and you move them to your program circles when you execute those programs; each turn, you can execute three programs. You can probe cyberspace, allowing you to draw a new tile and lay it down on the board. You can remap, allowing you to move an existing tile somewhere else, provided that tile is a ‘pendant’ tile (a pendant tile can only be touching one other tile, not two or three). You can spawn avatars (each player can spawn up to three). You can login, which is a pseudo-techie way of saying ‘move’; you can move an infinite number of spaces, but intervening objects (like other avatars) block your path. You can create a link with one of your three link tokens, allowing you to move between different networks as if they were connected. Finally, you can create a firewall (again, with a link token), which blocks both movement and attacks. You can also attack and perform other card-based actions, as you normally would be able to in other HeroCard games.

Cyberspace is all about building a network, and then securing it as best as you can. If you get a secure enough position, you can think about expanding into other peoples’ networks, but doing so from the outset is a surefire way to wind up in a bad situation (which I found out on my first play session). True to its theme, it’s extremely difficult to protect a network once it’s in place; there are any number of things that hackers can do to worm their way in, and the larger your network is, the more difficult it becomes to protect it. There are often dilemmas during play, as well. It’s much easier, for example, to protect a network with no (or few) nodes than one with many, but you need nodes in order to close the network (because a closed network is worth more). However, those very nodes make your network vulnerable to other players linking to it. So, you can place your own links or firewalls to block them, but you’ve only got three link tokens to use, so you have to budget them. It’s a very strategic and cerebral game, and the person who out-thinks and out-plans her opponent will usually win.

Things I Liked: The strategic depth of Cyberspace is really apparent a few turns in, and some of the characters are a lot of fun to play. I like the tile-laying aspect of the game, as well as the fact that you can move tiles already in place. The game becomes extremely tense in the last few rounds of play, as everyone tries to take as many networks as they can and devalue their opponents’ networks as much as possible. Thematically, the fact that networks are so vulnerable once they’re truly established is very true to life.

Things I Didn’t Like: Some of the characters seem at odds with the theme. While they’re certainly based off of standard cyberpunk tropes, they’re not necessarily thematically appropriate in cyberspace. Also, the game uses a sort of faux-anime style that just doesn’t sit right with me. I think I’d rather they had used computer-generated graphics, as they did with Galaxy; I think it would have been more in keeping with the theme, and probably would have looked a little better. Finally, the figures and tokens are made of a strange, very pliable, somewhat sticky plastic-rubber substance that looks like candy. I have no particular problem with this, except that it seemed to lead to some of the figures being bent out of shape when I opened the box.

The Bottome Line: While Cyberspace was the HeroCard game that I was least interested upon reading what was available on the website, after playing it I actually like it a lot. It’s not apparent how deep and fun the game is just from reading the rules; you have to actually play it to really see. I’m a fan of the HeroCard series in general, and if you’re not, I’m not entirely sure that this game will convince you otherwise (though the manual does provide a variant called ‘bit duel’ that eschews card duels in favor of flipping a coin when you attack). If you liked the other HeroCard games, though, you could do much worse than to buy this game.

This is just a quick post, the the promise of something bigger later (probably over the weekend). I’ve got a lot of packing and stuff to do and, frankly, my spare time right now is being spent gaming. Some of that gaming, though, has been HeroCard: Cyberspace, TableStar’s most recent entry into the HeroCard series. Overall my impressions of it are pretty positive, though that’s far too simple a statement to really sum up how I feel about the game (there are nuances, you hear? Nuances!) I’ll give it a full review sometime this weekend. Anyway, back to the acid mines.

On Saturday, I went to my friend Mike’s house and ran a Wild Blue session with him and my friend Rich. I thought it was awesome. This was the first time that either of them had been introduced to either Gamecraft 2.0 or Wild Blue (aside from what I’ve shared on this website), so I had to take about forty minutes to explain both before we actually got down to playing. We didn’t finish the scenario I wrote up, but we did get to do a few short, non-combat conflicts, as well as a number of out-of-conflict skill rolls.

I’m pretty happy with the way the system is shaping up, and I got some good suggestions from them. I’m working on allowing assets to scale better (that probably sounds like gibberish to those who haven’t actually played this system with me, and for that I apologize), and I realized one other thing: Gamecraft 2.0 is kind of hard to teach people. Not necessarily time-consuming, and not necessarily that hard to learn or play, but hard to teach, to some extent. I think a lot of this is going to get easier as I explain it more and more; the problem is that virtually everything in the system is interconnected, and it’s kind of difficult to explain one thing without first explaining another. What I need to do is get the system written down in a sequence that makes it easy to pick up, read, and learn; right now it’s sort of mish-mashed, reflective of my thoughts while creating the system, and that’s not necessarily conducive to learning or explaining the system. Once I find a logical starting point, I’m sure it’ll flow easily from there.

As for the session itself, it was a lot of fun. Mike and Rich played a couple of lawmen, big-time lawmen in a small town, investigating recent murders. Mike’s character was a gunslinger, a trained killer, but one with a lot of faith and a deep belief in doing the right thing. Think of the mentality that the Operative had in Serenity: building a better world, but one that he has no place in. That sort of approaches his way of thinking. He knows he’s a killer, and he doesn’t really like killing all that much, but he does it anyway because he believes it’s a necessary evil. Rich’s character was much less moral; he was a rogue and con-man turned lawman, the classic example of using a thief to catch a thief. He drank, he caroused, he insulted people, and generally had a good time, but he also did his fair share of investigating (though a lot of it involved breaking into peoples’ houses to snoop around). They both played their characters to the hilt, and I tried to reward them for that using the mechanics of the game (which is a design goal of mine).

I did more prep work than I have in the past for Gamecraft 2.0, largely because this was a mystery, and I wanted to keep everything straight and not get caught mixing things up. Basically, I figured out what had happened before the players got there, and I came up with short bios on all of the important inhabitants of the town, as well as on important locales. I was careful not to plan out anything that was going to happen though; I let Mike and Rich determine that, and I reacted to what they did, dropping breadcrumbs only very occasionally. It worked really, really well.

I plan on running this scenario again with another group, so I won’t share any specifics until afterward. Expect to hear more about that later.

Monte Cook just did an interesting post on his blog. I must say that I do agree with this position. When it comes to board games, stories are great, but it’s the gameplay that’s the real clincher. I’m a big fan of games with themes, and I sometimes make my decisions based, at least in part, on the theme of the game. Take BattleLore for example. Now, Memoir ’44 uses the same basic mechanics, but I probably won’t buy it. Why? Apart from already owning BattleLore, the fantasy theme of the first game appeals to me quite a lot more than the WW theme of Memoir ’44. That said, though, I’m a huge fan of the Command and Colors system that both games use, and if BattleLore didn’t exist, and I played Memoir ’44 at some point, I’d probably like it a lot and wind up buying it, despite the theme.

And that is exactly why I love it when game designers put manuals for their games in electronic format on their websites. I suppose that you could make some argument against that, invoking things like piracy, but it would be a pretty silly argument. Reading a game’s manual, if that game has mechanics that I’ll enjoy, only gets me more excited to play the game, and makes me want the game that much more. It’s a far more powerful form of advertising for your game than simple, story-based ad copy.

I guess I spoke too soon when I said that the Gamecraft 2.0 skill list was final. I did a little tinkering, and decided to take out the Survival skill. When I created the skill list, I wanted each skill to be general enough to cover a wide variety of uses. For example, Awareness covers virtually everything having to do with sensory perception (or extrasensory perception), including things like danger sense, tracking, and crime scene investigation. Survival was just too . . . narrow. It coved finding food and shelter, both in wilderness and settled environments, but that just seemed like it was too limited in utility, and in practice, playtesters didn’t really use Survival all that much. So, I dropped it. But that left me with eight skills, and that seemed like too few. Nine was a good sweet spot, and I designed character creation around nine skills; any fewer and I’d have to re-examine character creation, and I’m actually quite pleased with how it works now. So that begged the question, what should I replace it with?

While answering that question, I came up with and discarded a number of options. The main problem with virtually every single one was that, while they each covered things that the other skills didn’t, they weren’t universally applicable to different settings. A realistic modern urban setting doesn’t need a Magic skill, and a high-flying Wuxia setting has little use for Pilot or Drive. So what then? The answer was staring me in the face: Skill X.

Simply put, Skill X is a create-your-own-skill slot. The idea is that, when you create a setting for use with Gamecraft 2.0, you decide what Skill X is, and tailor it to the needs of your setting. In a fantasy campaign, you might have Magic, while in a cyberpunk setting you could have a Cyberspace skill. If you want the Survival skill back, it would probably be pretty useful in a post-apocalyptic wastelands-type game, or some other setting where living off the land and finding shelter is important. I’ve already decided that, for Wild Blue, Skill X is Sorcery, and this decision allowed me to create a much better, more flexible magic system than I had originally designed.

I’ve decided to announce my candidacy for President of the Universe. No, not really. Happy April 1st.

This past week was my spring break, and I got a chance to do some gaming and watch some really good movies. In no particular order:

• I got to play some Runebound this week, which was great. I haven’t played Runebound in a while, but I thoroughly enjoyed playing it again. The first couple of times that I played this game, it took 4-6 hours to resolve each session, if not more. My friend Chris and I have built in some house rules (more starting gold, soft knockouts, lower experience costs for levelling up, and more gear in the towns) that bring this down to a very respectable 2-3 hours, without detracting too much from the feel of the game. If anything, it makes you feel like more of a badass even sooner, as you’re starting to cleave through yellow encounters fifteen minutes into the game.
• The last time this week that we played Runebound, we played with the Sands of Al-Kalim expansion pack. Highly recommended. One problem that I always had with the original game was that it was, at its heart, a competitive game, but it felt very much like a cooperative game until the last half hour or so. Let me rephrase that; it felt like it should have been a cooperative game. Thematically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that the various heroes of the land would be competing with each other to be the first to save the world from Margath and his dragonlords. Shouldn’t they be cooperating with each other, fighting the greater evil? The theme was somewhat at odds with the mechanics. This problem is pretty much alleviated in Al-Kalim; players are competing to be the first to gain fame, glory, and immortality by embarking on and completing four legendary quests. They’re not trying to save the world, they’re doing it for their own aggrandizement which, while less noble, causes the competitive mechanic of the game to make a lot more sense. Besides that, it’s an excellent expansion with some truly cool and fun additions to the core gameplay. There are day/night mechanics, a new ‘story step’ that you can do when you’re not adventuring or exploring a town, and the legendary quests themselves are actually a lot of fun to undertake. It’s an excellent expansion, and I highly recommend it.
• The Pursuit of Happyness was very, very good. Will Smith continues to amaze me with his talents (I mean, he was the Fresh Prince, after all), and the storyline grabs onto you from start to finish. There’s a real sense of desperation during this movie, and a real sense of relief when he gets just a little bit of a break from time to time.
• Speaking of movies, I also saw Children of Men, which was also excellent. The movie does a great job of painting a very bleak, yet very believable future, without too many sci-fi bells and whistles that might have detracted from the feel of the movie. The acting is superb, the special effects are flawless and, for the most part, very low-key, and the last half hour or so of the movie, I think, kept me from breathing. Great stuff.

Anyway, that’s it until next time.