Update on the Ranger and the 13th Age 2E Gamma Playtest Doc

The 13th Age Second Edition Kickstarter is rolling strong! I’m working on finishing two pieces that weren’t in the document while Jonathan is refining monsters, cleaning up rules, and going through our long list of desired improvements.

Last night in my Spearpoint Dwarfoids playtest campaign, Jonathan played a 5th level ‘wood dwarf’ ranger. (That's not a wood-dwarf ranger above, that's a gnome ranger and her badger, a 2E illustration by Simone Bannach!) This new version of the ranger class had a great first playtest, no rules hassles and it held its own. I think the ranger’s major design issues are solved. Now I need to finish all the math and paragraphs that make a class fully playable.

When that’s done, and when we’ve finished revising the intro adventure, we’re going to release another version of the Playtest Packet. I believe that will happen shortly after the Kickstarter ends. Call it the Gamma Packet. Pelgrane will also update the current-draft that people who back the Kickstarter are getting.

The Gamma Packet will also have many corrections fixing typos, redundancies, errors, pratfalls, and ideas swiftly revealed as bad. We’ll put out a playtest questionnaire along with some pregen characters after the Gamma Packet when the draft has less static for people to cut through.

In other news, I've been getting interviewed by good people lately. Here's an interview by Teos Abadia from a couple days ago.

Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War Notes & Variants

Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War is an expansion of Three-Dragon Ante, just out from WizKids. (Earlier blog post here.) The set plays off D&D’s story of an ancient war between dragons and giants. Most of the new cards are based on D&D’s familiar giants: frost, fire, storm, stone, hill, and so on, along with Giant God cards for the bigger-than-I’d-originally-remembered giant pantheon.

You need the original 3DA set to play using Giant Wars, because every gambit awards one stake to the strongest dragon cards and the other stake to the strongest giant cards.

Time & the Endgame

Three-Dragon Ante has always played differently with different numbers of players. With two stakes that can be won each gambit, instead of one, Giants War increases the distinctions between three-player, four-player, and larger games.

So far, in my experience, three-player games are the most likely to invoke the variant end game. If no one has won after you’ve run out of cards in the main deck and shuffled in the middle game, score three more gambits and end the game after the third gambit’s toast. To win a three-player game before the toasts, you sometimes need to push the ante heavily instead of giving opponents time to recover. That’s true in all forms of 3DA, and more true when there are three players and two stakes per gambit.

Even if you’re not playing 3DA as a drinking game, I recommend raising beverages as you toast these final three hands. And if you’re making the toasts aloud, the final toast echoes better as “To fools like us!”

Variants for One-Stake Games

If you want to play a straight 3DA game with just one stake, all three of the new dragon suits will work so long as you shuffle the Mortals and Legendary Dragons (including the new Io and Shadow Invader) into a separate Legendary deck at the start of the game. You’ll need to play with either or both of the new Copper Dragon and Gold Dragon or the Legendary deck will be untapped. The new Gold Dragon from Giants War will always get to draw a Legendary card as long as someone else has played a card in the gambit, but if you lead with the Gold Dragon, you’ll only get a regular card.

I haven’t tried this variant. It seems like the Legendary deck will be kind of slim without all the Legendary giants, so I believe you should skip shuffling cards from the Legendary deck into the main deck at the start of the game.

If you’d rather play strictly with dragons and the original 3DA rules, skipping the Legendary deck, the new cards to add to the game are Io, the Shadow Dragon suit, and the Shadow Invader.

Both the new mortals—the Emperor and Ranger—will work in either variant. In fact, they’ll be more powerful than they are in Giants War games.

No Emperor’s Gambit

And speaking of the Emperor, yes, this is a very different version of a card that was at the core of the Emperor’s Gambit expansion for the original version of 3DA.

People often ask if the Emperor’s Gambit set that WotC published in 2010 going to be reprinted or revised. I’m pretty sure the answer is no, because hardly any of the dragons that were the core of Emperor’s Gambit have been brought from 4e forward to D&D 5e. 3DA licenses D&D’s dragons. Even if one or two of the iron, adamantine, mercury, earthquake, etc. dragons that populated 4e show up in 5e, I doubt the rest will appear.

So while we wait for dragons that probably aren’t going to show up, I’ve recruited some of the characters and mechanics from Emperor’s Gambit, including putting the Earthquake Dragon’s heavy-roller power on the new Fire Giant.

The Start-Small Variant

One more variant before I go, which started as an accident when I forgot to shuffle cards from the Legendary deck into the main deck at the start of the game!

Instead of correcting the mistake and re-dealing, I thought about it a second and decided it wasn’t bad to start everyone out with normal cards as their first hand. It feels a little bit like the “no dirt on the first trick” rules that some people use in Hearts. So, the Start-Small variant rules that you shuffle the 6 Legendary cards into the main deck after each player has been dealt their starting 7-card hand. Yes, ‘dirt’ in the form of a Legendary card might show up as you draw cards during the first gambit, so that’s a tiny bonus for people playing to draw.

Games I've Got at GenCon & Scheduled Panels

I'll be seeing some of you at GenCon in the next few days!

Mostly I'll be at the Pelgrane booth, booth #423, talking with people about the news for what's coming for 13th Age, and the wonderful Drakkenhall book that's out at this show:

Here are some panels I'll be involved in for Pelgrane or with Pelgranistas. . . .

Friday August 5th, 12:00-1:00 p.m. [Hyatt Studio 1] Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff. Robin has to stay in Toronto, so Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and I are joining Ken to talk about roleplaying, conspiracies, writing, and conspiracies about roleplaying writing.

Saturday August 6th, 4:00-5:30 p.m. [The Stadium: Meeting Room 8] Swords, Spies, & Shoggoths: The Pelgrane Press Panel. There are a lot of fun projects surfacing soon that I didn't know about until the pre-con planning session, so I know panel attendees will be pleasantly surprised.

Sunday, August 7, 11:00 a.m.-12 noon. [Hyatt Studio 1] 13th Age Monster Workshop. Attend the panel and make suggestions. Or heckle. Our rogues gallery of 13th Age designers and developers and a publisher will spin the suggestions into a publishable baddie. I slated this madness for Sunday since it tends to leave us punch drunk.

Other fun.... All con long, Dara Studios at Booth 2400 will be running demos of the Storybook Brawl board game I wrote about last week. I'll be there when I can, or you can ask me about the game when you find me nearer Pelgrane.

And Wiz-Kids at booth 1715 will have copies of Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War to show off, but I don't believe they'll have enough copies to have them on sale. It was close, so that means the game should be out in retail soon.

Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War

Ante again! Some time around July 2022, WizKids is releasing my sequel to Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition, a 100+ card set called Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War.

This new set of blue-backed cards introduces 4 colors of good giants, 4 colors of evil giants, 3 colors of dragons, a full pantheon of giant god cards, and rules for fighting for a giants’ stake and a dragons’ stake each gambit. (Hint: you only score your flight for the stakes you are strongest in, so feints and strategy-shifts abound.)

The backstory of the game is based on the Thousand-Year War between the giants and the dragons, back when the world was young. The history of the war appears on page 19 of Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Short version: the giants lost their world-spanning empire. The game might be a bit of a sore spot for the giants. . . or maybe they like the reminder that they were once in charge, and could be in the future?

I’ll have more updates later. For now, let’s go through the three cards shown in this preview image!

Frost Giant: One of the four colors of evil dragons, of course. Relishes competition, when its power triggers you collect gold from anyone else competing for the same stakes. If you’re playing first in the gambit, or slipping in to try and take a stake without any competition, you’re not giving the Frost Giant the fight it wants, so it won’t earn you any extra gold.

Surtur: Yes, the set comes with the full pantheon of giant gods! The giant gods, dragon gods, legendary giants, legendary dragons and legendary mortals get shuffled into a single Legendary deck at the start of the game, with six cards from that deck shuffled in with the normal deck of giants and dragons. Many cards’ powers let you draw a card from the new Legendary deck, so there’s a decent chance that Surtur might be competing with other gods. He’s worth at least +2, a total of 12 for the Giants, if his power triggers, and when your opponents are taking a gambit seriously he could be worth more.

Copper Dragon: A new Copper Dragon card! The original Copper Dragon is still great for games that don’t use giants and the Legendary deck. But the original Copper Dragon power, that adds a random card to your flight and triggers its power, is not much fun when you’re carefully managing which stakes, dragons or giants, you’re fighting for. So the new version plays off the Copper’s gregarious nature—your weakest opponent gets to draw a card, and then you draw a card from the Legendary deck. This type of sympathy for the weak isn’t the type of thing the new giants cards go in for, but you’re fighting for the dragon stakes and maybe setting yourself up with a power card.

Playing Three-Dragon Ante Across Two Zooming Tables

Last night we played four-player Three-Dragon Ante in two households. We played with Ann and Rob Dorgan, friends you'll find in the 3DA: Legendary Edition playtester list. Ann pushed past my qualms and we tweaked the game on the fly. 

If you feel like playing 3DA across multiple physically isolated tables, here are some recommendations for a two-table game.

First, I think you need at least two players per table. The ideas that follow assume you don't have any single-player tables mixed in.

Tracking Gold
You're going to need to figure out how to keep track of everyone's gold across split tables. We dared to maintain the game's physical presence by creating stacks of gold for the players across the Zoom-divide and moving gold in and out of both stacks, banking for the players who weren't in the room. It worked, usually, but we clearly weren't entirely up to the process, the game is too distracting to perfectly track coin-movement for players who aren't in the room. So if we do it again, I'm going to vote to have a banker who will keep track of all gold, probably on a google doc or the like, though it could be on paper.

Gameplay
Unless otherwise mentioned, the normal rules work! (But tell me if you play and run into issues we didn't.)

Deck Preparation
Each table creates its own deck using the 70 standard cards and 10 random Legendary cards. Yes, the game could end up with two Druids, one per table!

Camera Set-Up
Set up the cameras and computers so that the flow clockwise around each table matches the positioning of the video of your friends in the far room! It needs to be obvious which players are on your left and right, everyone will have one side occupied by a player beside them and one side occupied by a player in the other room, unless a table has a third player sandwiched in between.

Strength Flights
Go ahead and let Strength flights pick up the ante cards at their own table, if any. If there aren't any left, that's too bad.

No Stealing or Gifting Cards Across Tables
The specific card power revisions below nearly always hinge on the fact that we aren't stealing or passing cards from one table to the other. A power that's going to steal a card from the player next to you at your own table can work the same as ever, but if the card would steal from a player in the other room, it's going to have a slightly different effect.
    The card revisions that follow also apply to Legendary versions of the same powers.

Brass Dragon: If the player to your right isn't in the room, they just give you the gold instead of having the option to hand over a stronger good dragon.

Bronze Dragon: Take the weakest card from the ante at your table. Then draw a card. If there are no cards left in the ante at your table, just draw a single card.

Green Dragon: Same situation as the Brass. If the player on your left is in the room, they can choose what they want to give you. But if they're at the other table, they just pay you the gold. The Green Schemer's left-and-right version of the ability can end up with one opponent being forced to pay and one opponent getting to choose.

Red Dragon: If the strongest opponent is at the other table, they must discard a random card. Well, let's be clear: the opponent next to them chooses a random card from their hand and discards it, because that's more aggressive, like stealing! For fun, everyone sees the card that got discarded. And then you, the player who triggered the Red Dragon, get to draw a card and keep it secret.

Illusionist: Maybe don't play with this one!  This card is all about the fun of swapping Mortals and it's hard to swap across tables, so I'd say you should feel free to skip it, take it out of the game before you choose the 10 random Legendary cards. But if you do play with it, and are prepared to hurt your brain just a little, you could say that it works normally if you swap at the same table . . .and if you swap to the other table, then you all have to use your virtual reality parallel-thinking skills to swap the Mortals for the duration of this gambit. At the end of the gambit, the two Mortals go their tables' discard piles as normal, but for part of a gambit you were caught in the ill-uu-shee-on.

New 3DA ability and archetypes for tournament play

WizKids is running Three-Dragon Ante tournaments on Friday and Saturday of PAX Unplugged in Pennsylvania, December 6th and 7th. They had the fun idea of having people play in-character using the roleplaying rules for meshing 3DA with D&E 5e!

I thought a bit about how the current roleplaying rules would work in a casual-but-still-competitive tournament. My feeling is that the Ante Manipulation abilities (page 26 of the rulebook) aren't right for tournament play. They're OK in a home setting where players are accustomed to picking on each other week after week, but they're both vindictive and distinct from the way the game usually takes players' money, so no Ante Manipulation abilities in this tournament.

To help the fighter/barbarian types who are most likely to have the Threats & Promises ability we just ruled out of the tournament, here's a new Card Draw ability that's for characters with muscles. Like the other Card Draw abilities, Getting Angry Now lets you draw two cards when it triggers.

Getting Angry Now

Pre-requisite: Strength 16+

Trigger: You just lost a gambit with the second-strongest flight, or tied for second.

I'd say it makes perfect sense to let it be used if you're the second weakest when the Druid has awarded the gambit to the weakest. You're gonna be angry. 

If you bring your own character, the folks running the tournament will help you you select abilities that are right for the tournament. If you're showing up to play and you don't have a character ready, here's the short list of possible character archetypes I put together for WizKids to work from. These archetypes use the abilities as printed in the rulebook, with one exception: the Desperation ability is fine, but could get irritating if used too many times in a game, so for tournament play I'm suggesting that each player with the ability can only use Desperation once per game. Since it's therefore one of the weaker abilities, characters with Desperation will also have another ability that's on the weaker side, so they'll never be entirely out of options. 

3DA Archetypes

Drow Rogue

Card Draw: Versatile Trickster

Dragonborn Fighter

(Player chooses their color!)

Card Draw: Draconic Ancestry

Card Draw: Desperation [[but only usable once per game]]

Gnome Bard

Card Denial: Cutting Words

Card Draw: Fast Hands

Half-elf Paladin

Card Draw: Inspiring Leader

Half-Orc Barbarian

Card Draw: Getting Angry Now

Card Draw: Desperation [[but only usable once per game]]

Halfling Rogue

Card Draw: Gambling Background

Human Cleric

Card Draw: Blessing of the Trickster

High Elf Wizard

Card Denial: Mystic Discouragement

Card Draw: Practice Counts

Wood Elf Ranger

Card Draw: Desperation

Card Draw: Practice Counts

Other heroes…

The halfling rogue’s ability is fine for any player character who has a lot of experience gambling.

The half-orc barbarian’s abilities work for any strong fighter-type.

The wood elf ranger’s abilities work for any character who otherwise doesn’t belong at these tables!

Three-Dragon Ante Designer's Diary

Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition should be on sale on Thursday, September 18th! For a bit more of a preview and notes on a couple of the game's origin stories, check out the Designer's Diary that came out today on Boardgame Geek. 

I saw the finished cards and the sturdy new game box for the first time yesterday. That's me above, squinting in Seattle's single moment of sun yesterday afternoon, timed perfectly to celebrate the arrival of the shipment from Wiz-Kids. 

And in what looks like a smoky tavern but is actually just a photo taken with my fuzzy phone-camera in my garage studio, here are friends Rob, Michael, and Sunga playing our first gambit with the actual cards. We played three games in the style that the game terms 'among friends'--playing with ten random cards secretly selected from the thirty mortals and legendary dragons. You find out which special cards have been added to a particular game by playing the cards or having them played against you. As our trash-talking and brutal ambushes revealed, among friends could be a dangerous style in a world where everyone is armed with daggers and lightning bolt spells. To emulate the games  played by gamblers in D&D worlds who want to reduce their chances of being slashed or electrocuted, maybe you'll want to play show 'em style as explained on page 14 of the rules! 

Three-Dragon Ante Legendary Edition Preview: A New Archmage

Today we’re looking at one of the mortals from the original 3DA that always struck me as a missed opportunity . . . and how it has changed now that I got the opportunity to revise the cards that were the least fun.

The Archmage

Here’s my honest assessment of the Archmage’s power in the original 3DA set: I can’t remember it. I remember every other card. I can never remember what the Archmage did unless I had the card in front of me. When we published the Emperor’s Gambit expansion for 3DA I started playing with custom decks and the Archmage hasn’t been invited to my table for years.

So I have to look at the original cardset again. OH. Right. It used to read, “Pay 1 gold to the stakes. Copy the power of an ante card.” Let’s count the ways that was bad.

First: The Mortal Tax

Why did mortals cost 1 gold to play in the original set? It wasn’t for play balance. Back when I came up with 3DA I had the notion that it was meant to a game all about dragons. Mortals, I thought, might have wild powers, or might not, but there needed to be an expected cost for playing them. The same reasoning originally led me to rule out color flights of three mortals.

By the time I designed Emperor’s Gambit, I understood that forcing a 1-gold cost for playing a mortal was a silly/meaningless game mechanic with no story payoff. The mortal tax went away and it hasn’t been missed.

Second: Oddly Weak Power

But speaking of story, what was I doing making an Archmage, a powerful wizard, so dependent on ante cards that are by definition almost always cards that someone has decided aren’t worth playing? Maybe the card offered a hint of a gambit-opening tactic: “I could put a high card in the ante, make everyone ante a lot of gold, and have a good chance of using that card’s power through the Archmage as the first player in the round.” Maybe, but so what? That tactic seldom qualified as the smartest use of good cards. Even when it triggered its power, the original Archmage was usually reduced to stealing a few coins or cards from the ante. It rarely seriously affected the game.

the new Archmage

New Arch-Magic

The first goal with the new Archmage was to live up to the card name with a power that feels magical. The second goal was to change the power into something that can affect the way you play. Playing the new Archmage early in a gambit may paint a target on you for your foes’ Red Dragons but it’s also going to ensure that the high or middling cards you plan to use to challenge for the stakes will trigger their powers no matter how puny the flight of the player to your right.

As powerful magicians who generally favor the side of Law, it’s not surprising that Archmagi would rather not team up with Copper Dragons! If you play a Copper Dragon after triggering the Archmage, you must want to throw a little Chaos into your flight.

Incoming

Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition should be on shelves in about a month!

Three-Dragon Ante Preview: Copper Trickster & Gold Monarch

Unlike games with the original 70-card 3DA set, games with the Legendary Edition start with 70 cards made from the 10 standard dragon colors and add 10 unique cards chosen from 15 Legendary Dragons and 15 Mortals. You can customize your deck with the cards you enjoy playing with most or choose randomly for an unpredictable mix.

Today we’re introducing two of the new Legendary Dragons. The Copper Trickster is first, pictured alongside a standard Copper Dragon. 

Copper Trickster

As you can see, we’ve used the normal dragon art by Craig Phillips for the Legendary Dragons but set them apart with different card graphics. The Copper Trickster counts as a Copper Dragon for purposes of creating a color flight, though this may be a bad example to highlight, since Copper is arguably the most difficult color flight to attain!

Gambling with a Copper Dragon’s power when you don’t have any other good ideas is a time-honored method of inviting luck to solve your problems. As the legendary representative of its color, the Copper Trickster applies the luck to where you need it most. Unlike a normal Copper Dragon, the Copper Trickster discards a different card from your flight and replaces it with the top card of the deck. Unlike normal Copper Dragons, that can sometimes trigger powers that are actively bad for you, you can trigger your new card or not, as you choose.

The Copper Trickster has a way of shaking things up when your opponents thought they understood the probabilities. Your top deck card draw may fail you, but at least it’s going to put a scare into everyone else.

 

Gold Monarch

Timed correctly, Gold Dragons are a huge helping of awesome. Win the gambit with high cards? Check. Draw lots of cards? Check. Search for a color flight of Gold Dragons while drawing those cards? Triple-check.

Therefore, I felt fine about giving the golden Legendary Dragon a touch of noblesse oblige!

The Gold Monarch’s drawback doesn’t kick in unless you win the gambit. If you’re going to whine about it, you’re whining as the winner, so try roleplaying draconic majesty instead. You've carved a slice of high moral ground covered in treasure! 

Three Dragon Ante Preview: The Dracolich & the Dragonrider

Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition aims to replace the long out-of-print core set originally released by WotC in 2005. As explained in my previous post  on the contents of the new set, Legendary Edition is a mix of the original cards, a handful of Mortals from Emperor’s Gambit, updates of a few cards from the original set that have been revised with more interesting mechanics, and 17 entirely new cards.

Today I’ll show off an update of one of the original cards and one of the new Mortals.

Dracolich

Back in 2005, the Dracolich’s power read: Copy the power of an evil dragon in any flight.

That wasn’t the game’s worst power, but it wasn’t great. Occasionally you could pull off a combo with evil dragons you’d played earlier in a gambit. But not often. Usually you were somewhat reliant on the cards that your opponents had played. That type of reactive play wasn’t all that interesting, especially since a couple of the evil dragons in the core set had weak powers that have been slightly improved in Legendary Edition!

I didn’t think it was worth trying to hold on to the original ability. Instead, the new Dracolich, pictured above, wants to trigger its power when it’s played alongside other evil dragons. A bit like the Emperor from the Emperor’s Gambit set, the Dracolich is capable of boosting your flight’s Strength without giving the foe to your left a better chance of triggering their own powers. It’s obviously not much use alongside good dragons and Mortals, but if you can hold on to the Dracolich until you’ve got two other powerful evil dragons you should be capable of fighting above the evil dragons’ normal weight class.

It’s also worth considering as an opening bluff. Convince opponents it’s not worth fighting you this gambit and you may be able to take the stakes with middling cards.

Dragonrider

Illustrated by the wonderful Craig Phillips, who has now created all the illustrations for the game, this new Mortal can also play for Strength or for misdirection. If you can trigger its power in a flight with two strong dragons, you’re riding a winner. Played early in a gambit it can let you feel out the opposition. Is anyone going to rise to challenge? Or is an opponent clearly setting up a Druid, at which point you might even be able to challenge for the weakest flight!

In fact, one of the sneakiest uses of the Dragonrider is to team up with a Druid! Trigger the Druid and the Dragonrider alongside another Mortal and your 0-Strength Dragonrider can win through weakness!

The Rules

For more on Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition, see the rulebook that WizKids has put up on Boardgame Geek.

Four Notes about Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition

Wiz-Kids has released more info about the new edition of Three-Dragon Ante, so I can start explaining a bit more about what's in the box.

Little Bits: The new edition isn't just cards and a rulebook: it also includes enough gold and platinum pieces for up to six players, along with six 3DA Ability disks for to use for playing a 3DA game as your D&D characters.

100 Cards . . . : This Legendary Edition contains 100 cards. This includes 70 cards for the same ten colors of dragon that were in the original Three-Dragon Ante game, the five familiar chromatic and five traditional metallic dragons of D&D. Seven cards per dragon color is a bump up from the original game's six-per-color. I've noticed that people enjoy playing 3DA with big groups, and in the biggest groups it was possible to *almost* run out of cards and have to shuffle small discard piles too often. Adding a new intermediate-strength dragon card for each color means less shuffling for everyone.

. . . including 30 Special Cards: You don't play with just the seventy-card deck. The standard rule is that you play with 80 cards each game. The extra ten cards are selected from a pool of thirty special cards, split into two types. Half the special cards are Legendary Dragons, either powered-up versions of the ten familiar dragon colors or something special like Bahamut, Tiamat, and the Dracolich. As an example of what I mean by 'powered-up versions of the familiar dragons,' take the Legendary Dragon named the Red Destroyer. The Red Destroyer can be part of a color flight of Red Dragons. A normal Red Dragon steals a card and 1 gold from the strongest opponent; the Red Destroyer steals a card and 10 gold.

The other 15 special cards are Mortals. Yes, there are several new Mortals in this set, with new art by the original 3DA artist, Craig Phillips!

The standard way to play is to randomly select ten of the thirty special cards to add to a game, but the rulebook contains other sample deck configurations. You can customize or randomize each game.

Strengthening the Fun: There were a few cards in the original game that I thought were weak or not enough fun. I'm not going to detail all the changes, yet. But I will say that cards like the White Dragon and Black Dragon have stronger powers than they did in the original card set. Meanwhile, cards like The Priest and the Dracolich are no longer kind of meh; now they have  interesting powers that can be worth planning around.

Brutal Self-Promotion: As I'm posting this blog, the Kickstarter for my new game, Wrestlenomicon, designed with Shane Ivey & Dennis Detwiller of Arc Dream Publishing, has 18 hours to run. Check it out for fun whiskey-and-pretzel gameplay, wonderful art by Kurt Komoda, and grievous Lovecraft puns from Shane and Dennis.

The Return of Three-Dragon Ante!

I've kept quiet for months, but the hatchling is out of the nest! The photo below is from W. Eric Martin's Board Game Geek report on this year's New York Toy Fair. 

WizKids will be releasing Three-Dragon Ante: Legendary Edition later this year. I'm overjoyed to have the game coming back to print and I think both long-time players and newcomers will find something to like in this edition. I apologize for announcing the upcoming game without explaining more about its contents and intentions, but WizKids hasn't made the detailed product announcement yet.

If you're not familiar with Three-Dragon Ante, it's a card game of luck and skill that I designed to be something like Hearts in terms of complexity and playtime, though not in technique. In some respects, 3DA is the opposite of poker, since instead of folding out of hands, savvy players milk their cards for as many micro-rewards as possible, setting up later success. As an in-world game based on the iconic chromatic and metallic dragons, it's what heroes and other tavern-goers play for gold in the worlds of D&D, and you'll find it referenced a few places in the D&D Players Handbook.

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.

Three Dragon Ante mix, with coins

We played Three Dragon Ante a few weeks ago, just a couple days before the coins from the last Campaign Coins Kickstarter showed up in the mail. So for next game, I'm ready with metal coins. It's a benevolent circle, given that 3DA helped inspire Campaign Coins to start making gaming coins!

Later this year we'll be able to play with dwarven towers from the 13th Age Coins and Icon Tiles kickstarter, which sure looks like it's going to fund in style and will probably be making the twelve-sided icon die from our 13 True Ways kickstarter available again. (You can find a few of the square dwarven tower prototypes anchoring the coin pile above.)

For those of you who have both the original Three Dragon Ante and the Emperor's Gambit sequel, here's the card list I'm playing Three Dragon Ante with these days, a mix of dragons and mortals and dragon gods from both the sets. This set-up has a good mix of card drawing, outright theft, and manipulation of the ante cards. If people have other mixes they play to get different effects, I'm curious to hear it.

Evil: 
Earthquake
Gray
Green
Purple
Red

Good: 
Adamantine
Bronze
Iron
Silver
Steel

Mortals & Li'l Dragons: 
Hatchling
The Dragonslayer
The Druid
The Emperor
The Queen
The Sorcerer
The Spy
The Thief
The Wyrmpriest

Dragon Gods: 
Bahamut
Io
Tiamat