NotLiamRoss

You're right, I think this was missed. Any clue how we might incorporate advantage/disadvantage cards? Perhaps cards that can be pulled from the terrain deck that instead change how units work somehow? We could also fall back on that they may have been playing a popular variant in that passage if we want to keep the rules simpler for now. I'm definitely open to ideas

Hi and welcome to the thread. I'll answer your questions one at a time. Attacking in my mind works the same way as chess for everyone except for Archers, if a capture happens, the unit occupies the same spot as the enemy piece I answered this in another reply, having the Shardbearer able to "jump" friendly pieces seemed pretty fun and intuitive from my limited playtesting so I think it makes sense. There's no way in the current rules for a unit to end its movement in the same space as a friendly piece, and Shardbearers are no exception. Hadn't thought about this edge case, but my gut tells me that it would cancel out. But then again it could be pretty tricky to dislodge an archer from a fortified high-ground position, so maybe for balance it would be better for high-ground archers to be able to take each other out. We'd have to playtest both variants to see which is more fun would be my guess. The same way any other capture would work. If one player has only a single Shardbearer on the field then that Shardbearer can be captured by any other player's Shardbearer as though it were any other piece. Is there some particular part of that rule which confusing to you? I'm happy to clarify if something's not making sense. This is what we were trying to get at with making Shardbearers vulnerable if they are the only piece remaining on the battlefield. They really can't hold the field without support, as they become much easier to capture in this state. Let me know if there's anything in the rules doc that needs clarifying to make this make a little more sense. As I've said it's a living document. Thanks for your interest and taking the time to comment on the thread (and actually playtest the game :D)

I think that having more information about what is in your opponent's hand makes the game more tactical and interesting, but I'm open to hearing playtest feedback if this makes things too "boring". After all, in chess, you can see all of the pieces at all times, so both players have perfect information about the state of the game and it still isn't boring (if you ask me anyways)! I think I'm going to leave it that no cards are exchanged with the deck for now, but change the drawn cards between turns because people are saying that makes a big difference. I actually played a variant like this with a friend as well. Infantry and Archers could move a single cards-length, Cavalry could move three, and Shardbearers could move two, with Shardbearers also being able to jump over other non-Shardbearer units. It was pretty fun and served to slow the game down a bit and make things a little more tactical. I'm open to hearing what people have to say about more restricted/tightly defined movement overall! Right now I think we're leaning towards single deploy/retreat, but Infantry being able to retreat a whole Formation at once if the entire formation is within your Deployment Zone There are some other comments in here related to retreating units from the middle of the battlefield. With Rules as Written (RaW), troops can only be retreated or deployed from the Deployment Zone as @Ishikk pointed out. I think with that outlined as the rules it should shore up some of those problematic situations you described. I think Hexagon pieces are out for now just because the text states that the game is played with cards and we have no indication that these cards aren't square. It also makes it harder to talk about Surrounding in the case of the Shardbearer in a way that I think might be hard to balance. For the grid, I'm still open to the idea of at least some variants being playable on a grid, but I keep coming back to the scene in the bunker where they play without any mention of a board or grid and only play with the cards. I think that's enough for me to keep the dream alive of playing with just the cards. Square pieces however are definitely supported by the text at least somewhat, using the cards only to represent Troops in hand, and deployed Troops being rendered by pieces of some sort. For sure this is a way to play which the text supports, but again I don't think it should be required as outlined by the text. I think adjacency requires cards to be completely aligned along one of the 4 orthogonal sides. Since I think we're moving away from the idea of rotating cards, this should be fine and clear enough to adjudicate, either short side to short side (top to bottom) adjacent, or long side to long side (right to left) adjacent. In this case, diagonals or partial adjacencies would be right out. Other people can chime in on this, but in my playtesting, always having the enemy Shardbearer to contend with as a threat, and your own as an asset/liability (you lose the game if it's captured after all!) means that you never feel too stuck with a bad draw, or like you can just steamroll your opponent. In games where both players didn't start with a Shardbearer in hand, the player with the Shardbearer almost always won handily, which wasn't very fun. I'm not sure what you mean by "cheap" here as well. Maybe you can elaborate on the feeling for me to understand better? As for comments about Troop point values and how they would affect combat, I'm going to leave that discussion to happen separately. I'm all for Troops having some sort of point value associated with them, but I'm not sure about that value affecting combat just yet and need to think about it a bit more. In the meantime thanks for your thoughts! If people want to start up their own rulebooks go ahead! I'll keep updating mine and we can use it as a reference while deciding all this stuff. I continue to look forward to the stuff people come up with!!

Hey Mattel, love the enthusiasm! I'll write up some responses to stuff that you wrote in your large post as I think there's some stuff that warrants responses. There is the current working rulebook which I've shared in the main post and like I've said it's a living document! Currently, I'm holding onto editing privileges for now just to keep it from getting into a "too many cooks" situation, but I'm trying to incorporate feedback when I can. From skimming the discussion since the last post it seems like things that people are confident they want updated are: Number of cards drawn each round Having a separate terrain deck Adding some idea of a point value to each piece (this is referenced in relation to scoring in the text so I agree something needs to happen here, but I'm not sure if it should apply to combat as well) I'm up for all of those changes and they should be relatively quick to make. As for the other stuff, I also have thoughts and will respond shortly, hopefully before end of day.

I like the idea, but Rosharan ecology (outside of Shinovar) doesn't have forests so I don't think they would factor in. Some Earth (or Yolish) version could though!

I'm curious what you mean by that. During troop deployment at the beginning of the round you are limited to deploying on your half of the battlefield (the half of the play surface closest to you). During play when you choose to deploy troops you can only do so in your Deployment zone (the area one cards-length in front of you on the battlefield). There's no point at which you can deploy troops on the other side of the map I'm not sure I buy this either. Terrain still will block troop movement and attacks even in the case where you could deploy anywhere. You can put archers behind Chasms, hide a vulnerable troop behind Mountains, move your Infantry to shore up a flank with High Ground. I'd argue it still has an impact on the game.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Herdazians and Horneaters both had some Singer ancestry which accounts for their stone nails and harder teeth respectively. This implies that at least as soon as a few thousand years ago, there was some human-Singer interbreeding that could produce offspring. In response to your sapient ape line of inquiry humans literally did this. We managed to interbreed so thoroughly with Neanderthals that Neanderthals as a separate species no longer exist today. It's not as far-fetched an idea as you might think. Now whether or not you would do it personally is your own choice and a different matter entirely, but it definitely wouldn't (and anthropologically didn't) stop many many other people.

This is a nice thought and I think it aligns with the Intent of Endowment pretty well. Similar to how Honor only cares about Oaths being kept, not what the Oaths are, it stands to reason that Endowment cares that gifts are given, not what's done with them after. The shardic Intent of Endowment would be displeased if once the power was given, it could just be held by individuals with no incentive to give the gift up and pass it along. Endowment wants to give the people power, but then it also wants them in turn to give it to each other (even if it means multiple people giving to one person). Ensuring that Awakening only works for individuals with multiple breaths ensures that there will always be SOME "endowing" if anyone is going to get anything out of the system. That said I don't doubt that Edgli's Intent here was to make things more egalitarian (and in fact, parts of the system are very equalizing, no-one can forcibly take someone's breath for example, it must be given with Intent), but Endowment the power could have baked in this incentive under the hood as we've seen happen with other magic systems as well.

Personally, my reading of this is that he is placing wishing in direct opposition to prayer. "All you religious people should pray, I can't as I'm not religious, so I will wish, a way of hoping for something that doesn't require the intervention or attention of an outside force". But I suppose that's up for interpretation. Non-religious people can certainly still be hopeful without the need to be spiritual. Either way, I think your interpretation is valid, but that's just my interpretation looking over that passage as a non-religious person.

I think it's important to mention that Odium's plan was always for Dalinar to lose the contest and become a Fused serving him. This SR copy of him is just an unplanned second-best consolation prize after Dalinar "flipped the table" on the contest. I don't think even T-Retribution would say that the Blackthorn as he was at the time of the Rift is the best choice to lead his army, but at this point, he's acknowledged that the SR-copy Blackthorn (with at least some of Dalinar's memories thanks to the Connection he placed on him in the vision) is the best he's got. I'd argue that that's still better than most Cosmere military leaders that we've seen on screen to this point.

Ain't that the truth for all of us :p. The overlap between my boardgame friends and my Cosmere friends is thankfully non-zero, but it's still single digit for me and a few of us live in different cities. Playtesting has definitely been slowed down because of this Hmmm I can definitely, see how this would happen... Maybe with the updated movement rules for Infantry it makes sense to set up terrain and then Deploy troops as normal going turn by turn (Move, Attack, Deploy). This would likely make it so that you need to dynamically build up your lines and it means you probably won't get your perfect defensive position every time. It probably makes things more dynamic too. Anyone want to try out that variant? It's entirely likely that two Infantry lines can't make progress on each other without other Troops involved, and I think this is a feature not a bug. If the Infantry lines can't access each other's flanks without making their own flanks vulnerable, then this is when you need to swing in with Cavalry, send in your Shardbearer, or try to maneuver your Archers onto high ground (maybe escorted by your shardbearer or a second formation of Infantry). I kind of equate this to closed positions in chess, where the pawn structure can be such that no pawns can make a move, this isn't a failing of the game in my mind, and in fact it serves to highlight the power of the minor and major pieces in chess.

Nope! But cards remain in hand between rounds so you can choose to deploy the terrain at the beginning of the next round. It also conveniently bluffs that you have troops in reserve waiting to deploy and surprise the opponent! To be 100% clear, the only time you can deploy terrain is at the very beginning of the round. With current rules there’s no way to deploy terrain mid round, maybe there’s room for a Soulcaster variant which can turn squares into terrain (this is hinted at by the text) but for now we’re just trying to pin down some basic rules of the game

Hi VanWagon! Nice to see lots of new people commenting on the post, welcome to the Forum! I think currently the size of the battlefield is just the size of your play surface. This naturally means that some battlefields will be larger and some will be smaller depending on where you are playing, which I view as part of the whole "Terrain is important" thing listed in the text. That said it could be that casually it can be played on any surface, but in more competitive environments there's some standardized shape or width, I'd just rather have us discover what a fun size of board is through playtesting rather than try to declare it by fiat. This was just a coincidence and was because I didn't want to have to fill the whole space with black squares. Theoretically, the largest formation you can have would be all 10 of your infantry (the cards ranked 2-6 from both black or red suits) but I'd expect it to be pretty rare to actually have one that big!

Okay here we go. This is a big change so feel free to either take it or leave it, but upon playtesting, this seems pretty fun and makes Infantry into a more interesting Troop type IMO. Infantry Movement and Formations With the rules as they were currently laid out, there were some obvious pitfalls with Infantry that friends pointed out Infantry didn't feel right being able to zip around the battlefield as fast as cavalry. Infantry should be more plodding, and focussed, acting more as mobile terrain than shock troopers. Any move made by a single Infantry would move it away from its supporting units making it vulnerable, which led to a lot of sitting around staring at each other without much progress. As pointed out by several people (@newMania and @Haydes in particular as I can think of off the top of my head) it's very hard to surround enemy Troops, in particular the enemy Shardbearer when you can only move a single unit at a time. As Infantry are the most common unit type (and I think they should be) having them be un-fun to command kind of makes the whole game less fun. The solution to the first point was to restrict their movement, and the solution to the rest of them was to be able to move multiple Infantry at once. To solve both problems at once I suggest the creation of a new concept, the Formation! A Formation is any collection of adjacently continuous Infantry. The following are all examples of valid Formations (where white squares represent infantry and black squares represent empty spaces on the battlefield) □□□□ | □□■■■ | □■■□□□ | □■■■ □■■□ | □□□■■ | □□□□■□ | □□□■ ■■■■ | ■■■■■ | ■■■■■■ | ■■□□ The following are not examples of Formations (or at least not examples of a Single formation) □■□■□■□ | □□■■□ | □□■■□□ | □■■ ■□■□■□■ | □□□■□ | □■□□■□ | ■□■ □■□■□■□ | ■■■■■ | ■■■■■■ | ■■□ Any Formation of Infantry may move together using the same Movement action, but must all be in the same direction and can only be at most a single cards-length in any orthogonal direction. This moving may mean moving all of the infantry together as one (say across the battlefield), or moving only some members of the Formation which results in either the Formation changing shape, breaking into multiple Formations, or both. Some examples of valid Formation Movements are as follows □■■■■□ ■■■■■■ □□□□□□ > □■■■■□ ■■■■■■ □□□□□□ ----------------- ■■■■■■ ■□■■□■ ■□□□□■ > ■□□□□■ ■□□□□■ ■■□□■■ ----------------- ■■□□■■ ■■■□□■ ■□□■■■ > ■□■□■■ □□■■■■ □□■■■■ Some examples of Invalid Formation Movements are the following □■■■■■ ■■■■■■ □□■■■■ > ■□■■■■ Diagonal Movement is not allowed, only orthogonal ■■■■■■ ■□□■■■ ----------------- ■■■■■■ ■■□□■■ ■■□□■■ > ■■■■■■ All units in a single movement must move in the same direction ■■□□■■ ■□■■□■ ----------------- ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ □□■■■■ > ■■■■□□ Movement can be at most a single cardslength □□■■■■ ■■■■□□ This made Infantry maneuvering a lot more interesting in our playtests and led to fun traps where overextending into an opponent's formation could lead to your troops being surrounded and cut off from support/retreat. In our rules, a formation could retreat together (required they all fit within your Deployment Zone) but individual Infantry needed to be deployed one at a time to build the formation up. Let me know what you think, but although this adds some complexity to the game, I think the fun quota you get from adding these rules more than makes up for it. But let me know what you think and feel free to playtest more yourself! I look forward to hearing your feedback More info to come on alternate win conditions (I know lots of people have been thinking about these) in a little bit, maybe tomorrow. Today's my first day back to work in the new year so I probably should get at least some work done today. Let me know what you think of what I've posted so far!

First off, hi! And thanks for the detailed response! I'll respond to some of your comments in line here, many of which I agree with and have already updated in the rules google doc. I think enough people have mentioned this that I'm happy to change it, and already have in the rules doc. This has caused some confusion for my friends who have playtested as well. I've added rule 3.05 explicitly stating that any Troops/Terrain still in hand, remain in hand for the next round. I think this makes sense as it gives a definite Strategic advantage to someone who is willing to recognize a lost battle and retreat the field. It also makes for an interesting push and pull for the player who's ahead "Do I push my advantage now for the definite round win? Or split up my troops and spend my movement for a few rounds to retreat some troops to have for next round?" I'm not and I'm unfortunately not much of a discord user... I suppose I could look into getting it set up though! For now there's so much good discussion in this thread that I'm loathe to split the discussion by pulling it somewhere else if that makes sense. This rule I have tweaked a bit to make things play a little smoother. Rather than being fully surrounded, now the requirement is that if they are ever surrounded on three sides, without a friendly troop covering the final side, they are vulnerable. This was suggested by a friend while playtesting and I think it does a few interesting things It disincentivizes charging with your Shardbearer into a heavily fortified position. If your Shardbearer were ever to fly into an enemy line which was two units deep then it would naturally be surrounded on three sides and become vulnerable to counter attack It incentivizes you to keep your Shardbearer with the rest of your forces and keeping it adjacent to at least one friendly troop makes it impossible to capture. This both balances play, by making sure that the Shardbearers aren't flying all over the board all of the time, and matches the text as Shardbearers are often seen to have a rearguard of regular Infantry (such as in the siege of the Oathgate in Azir) This matches the text even further as Kaladin, when trying to remember the rules to a card game (which may or may not be Towers) mentions that the "King" (Shardbearer in our lingo) can be captured if attacked by 3 enemy units I've got more thoughts about particularly Infantry movement and alternate ways to win rounds to avoid stalemate, but I've got to run off for now. I'll update the post with those thoughts this afternoon. I also updated the main post to have a link to the google doc to make it easier to find for people. If you're new to the thread, please check it out as it's (slightly) more concise than the full discussion had in the thread