blownmindedRC

Yo! I opened an account just to get involved with the development of this game concept, this is fascinating and awesome that you guys are actually working on bringing a fictional game to life using descriptions in the books. I also apologize if I retread anything, I read the rules doc but have only skimmed this thread. I am partial to games that are less crunchy to make it easier to onboard new players, so I wanted to submit an idea that rounds the corners a little bit for accessibility. Flatface variant? Winedrunk Cousin variant? The idea is simple, and in part it's because I find the terrain setup and execution to be a little cumbersome, especially since the terrain cards are the same size as the army cards and you're meant to pick up and move units throughout the game. A simple card game called Lacorsa uses a pretty similar mechanic to this game, in that it uses a basic 13-card suit decks to function as a game with metaphor. And with expansions they added a really cool, simple mechanic: Track cards! Though the game is still played on the same incredibly simple board, the track cards add a new condition and little bit of narrative to the game. For example, if you are playing at Monaco, a track that is notoriously hard to overtake on, players can only make one overtake per round, etc... So that's kind of where I am deriving this idea. So instead of building the terrain piece by piece every game, I suggest assigning a Battlefield to every face card. You either draw it randomly or agree upon the battlefield before playing, and just have that sucker face up next to the play area, with a little cheat sheet printed out to remind players of the condition. Your conditions could be something like this: Shattered plains: Unit movement limited except for Shardbearers (turn the 2 card into a bridge crew that must be crossed?); Lowlands: Attack bonus to cavalry; Unclaimed Hills: Shardbearers have reduced defense, etc... I'm just rattling these off the top of the dome, but that's the idea! This gives 12 battlefields per deck and potentially adds some RNG/OP balancing and will force players to mix it up with their strategies. Another thought I had concerns Shardbearers. That killing these guys is a win condition is kind of a game breaker concept, because as soon as they come out the opponent will obviously be gunning for them single mindedly. I haven't playtested it yet but the idea of having a "General" unit that is easy to defend but can be killed at a lose condition instead of the shardbearer, creating a chess King/Queen dynamic. That way killing a sharbearer is like a shiny temptation when the base objective remains to the capture/protection of respective generals. Also, if the opponent kills a shardbearer in an early round, I think that unless it would break the game they should be allowed to field it in a following round. After all, that's what any Alethi army worth its salt would do! Anyways I'm not a professional game designer or anything, just a hobbyist whose imagination got lit up reading this thread and wanted to bang ideas around with anyone interested. Excited to talk more about this!