Today I started working on balancing some of the numbers for a few of the decks! A while back I got to playtest the decks I'd already created with some friends!
The general feel of the game was well received but the numbers were WAY off (as expected from an initial run). The powerful cryptid felt pitiful against the onslaught of 2/3 of the players while the third felt uninvolved due to the decks design being counterintuitive to the flow of the game.
As a result I'm working on a few things:
Reworking the numbers of the decks
Redesigning turn order
Redesigning the deck where the player couldn't really contribute
But how is this going to be done?
Reworking the numbers of the decks
One thing that I noticed when trying to explain the decks to people: the numbers were very unintuitive for instance a "strong" attack would do 5 damage, a medium attack would do 3 but then upgraded attacks would do 10-15, so where is the logic? why is the 3 there? When adding other effects like multi attacks, buffs that would add 4 damage, additional hits, the numbers got very confusing very quickly.
Simplifying the numbers seemed to be the best best, so for the time being I'm testing 1-5 represented as 10-50. This means half the damage can be easily represented when attacks are blocked, i.e. 5/15/25. This'll make tracking damage numbers much easier to do as well as balancing as time goes on.
Redesigning turn order
This one was tricky, initially it worked as follows: Players would take their turns, then the monster would attack. This would cause a few problems:1. Why would you attack a player that's spent all their turn stacking armour
2. Players with reaction-based decks had nothing to do during their turn
3. The Cryptid was unable to achieve much as the players would be able to set up negation for attacks
The simple fix: Monsters go first!
The cryptid going first would allow reactive players to jump in ahead of time and use their energy where it's needed and gets them involved in the process.
Redesigning the deck where the player couldn't really contribute
This was a tough one, I wanted players to collaborate to take down the monster, but one of the issues faced was the deck was entirely support-based. This was pretty unfun for the player as everyone was able to self-sustain, and they found themselves sitting on a full hand of cards contributing very little, this was a big no-no.
As a result I'm keeping the core gimmick but widening how it's applied and the decks MO, the idea was well received but the application was wonky, this calls for one thing, a redesign! There are a lot of other changes being tested at the moment to bring the Cryptids into being more of a threat as well as making sure the decks feel independent, strong, and fun! Stay tuned, we're just getting started.P.S. Shout out all my friends who've helped me so far! Looking forward to bothering everyone with more playtests as time goes on.
