Wrestlenomicon vs. Epic Spell Wars ! ! !

That's pro-wrestling-style hype for a grudge match that's more likely to be a team-up!

Three of the card games I’ve designed are somewhat similar to Wrestlenomicon’s style, play time, or ambition. Here are notes on fun elements of Three-Dragon Ante, Inn-Fighting, and Epic Spell Wars and how those elements compare to what’s going on in Wrestlenomicon.

Three-Dragon Ante

3DA is a game world artifact, the card game people in D&D worlds entertain themselves with in taverns when they’re not brawling.

Ambition: Like Wrestlenomicon, Three-Dragon Ante features a simple mechanical innovation I was surprised hadn’t been used before. In 3DA’s case, that’s the idea that high cards help you win the stakes but cards lower than what your opponent just played provide micro-rewards that set you up for later success. That makes Three-Dragon Ante the deliberate opposite of poker, that rewards folding out of bad hands instead playing through.

Wrestlenomicon’s ambitious streak, mechanically speaking, is that it models big slow cosmic wrestling attacks by giving them no immediate effect when played, except for moving a previously played attack (or attacks) further down the track towards Ground Zero, where attacks go off. This style of obvious-incoming-attack and uncertain-momentum seems to me to do a pretty good job of modeling a wrestling match, and I was amused to come up with a fun mechanic that apparently hasn’t been used before.

Inn-Fighting

A card and dice game of tavern-brawling.

Play-style: This one is a bit more like Wrestlenomicon in that it’s definitely a fight that rewards offense more than defense. There’s a lot more uncertainty about what you’ll be able to accomplish on your turn—dice are like that. So it’s much less strategic than Wrestlenomicon.

Inn-Fighting is also a game that is meant for multiple players, not a great two-player experience. In that, Wrestlenomicon is different than all three of these games. Wrestlenomicon was designed as a two-player game.

But towards the end of the development cycle, Bebo Boe asked me why Wrestlenomicon couldn’t be played by more than two players. My answer was something like “I tried it and that didn’t work,” which didn’t exactly satisfy her. So I thought about it some more and came up with an easy solution for making it a three or four player game. (More players are possible, but relatively slow.)

Even if we don’t do more decks right away, you’ll be able to play good three or four player games as grand melees or team matches if you have more than one copy of the game. If the Kickstarter does well and we publish more decks soon, even better.

 

Epic Spell Wars

ESW is definitely the closest of my little card games to Wrestlenomicon, if only because it benefits so hugely from co-creators card concepts and sense of humor!

I submitted a game of dueling wizards to Cryptozoic. But by the time ESW was published Cory Jones had changed nearly every name and written an entirely new art order. So the punch-drunk names and wild art by Nick Edwards in ESW, that add so much to the game, well, they weren’t how I’d handled it.

Likewise, in Wrestlenomicon, Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller came up with all the card names. They’d handled the art direction and Kurt Komoda handled the art before I joined the team. So instead of the ESW situation, where I actually had no idea what cards were going to accomplish by looking at the final art, since everything had gotten moved around, with Wrestlenomicon I got to design every element of the mechanics to match and live up to the art. I’d say it was inspirational but it went a couple steps past inspiration. I scrapped the first two attempts because I needed to create a game that was enough visceral fun to live up to Cassilda’s Thong and Tentacle Necktie!

I’d say that ESW and Wrestlenomicon end up as similar crazy-fighting fun. ESW is lighter, but as a two-player game, Wrestlenomicon is faster. You can usually play a full two player Wrestlenomicon game in between twenty and thirty-five minutes, sometimes even less. Longer games are possible, but rare.

Even so, the decisions you’ll make each Wrestlenomicon turn, and over the two or three turns you might be trying to look at least half-way ahead, are more decisive. Play skill matters more in Wrestlenomicon, despite the apparent randomness of the dice. It’s possible for one game to pivot mostly on the dice, but if you play two or three games, patterns emerge.

If you’re curious to see more of how Wrestlenomicon plays, click here for a how to play video from Bebo with bonus wrestling violence, and then check out the full rules and initial DIY card set that are available in the first update for Kickstarter backers. Any pledge will get you through the gate to see the DIY kit. If you’ve read this far, chances are that you’ll like it.