Armello: The Board Game

It’s March 29, 2024, and I’m in the kinda unique position of reporting that a game I had a blast designing has already made a treasure-trove on Kickstarter and still has about a week to roll. It’s Armello: The Board Game, a deckbuilding adventure board game of furry animal heroes with swords questing to take the throne from their corrupt King . . . over each other’s (temporarily) dead bodies!

Armello: The Board Game is being published by friends at King of the Castle, aka the wonderful creators of Campaign Coins. I’ve been writing occasional design notes you can find in the Kickstarter page’s updates and the game has just hit a stretch goal where I’ll loop back into the game to design two fistfuls of magic Amulets. It’s time I stepped away from an all-out push to finish 13th Age Second Edition’s next playtest packet to talk about the game that’s already being crowdfunded!

This board game version of Armello inherited a huge trove of goodness from the earlier digital game from League of Geeks. The digital game originally featured on Kickstarter and was supported with new cards and hero clans and game expansions for many years. Hundreds of beautiful cards, cool custom dice with magical symbols, and cutthroat anthropomorphic animal heroes on a quest to usurp a Corrupt king has translated into a competitive deckbuilding quest-and-combat boardgame . . . though ‘translated’ isn’t the right word. I aimed to create a game in a new medium that captured the spirit and evoked the feel of the original.

Digital games can do a lot of things that aren’t repeatable on tabletop. Then midway through the design, I turned the digital game’s more traditional style of cardplay into a deckbuilding experience. Partly that’s because I love deckbuilding games. And partly it’s because deckbuilding felt like a great metaphor for character growth and experience. Each hero has their own unique starter and experience decks as well as cards they can buy from the market or win as treasure.

There are six days to go for the Kickstarter, plus some time in the post-crowdfunding phase. I’m not sure I’ll be designing for more stretch goals, but I do know that the design note I just wrote talks about a possible expansion.

If you do nothing else, check out the cool Kickstarter video! When you play the digital game, you’ll recognize the narrator as the voice of the King.

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.

Speeding Up, Letting Go, What the Hell

For a person who always loved games, it took me too long to learn that I'd be able to play more often if everyone enjoyed playing with me. I wasn't a bad loser, or an intolerably bad winner. I was just soooooo slow. I played "well" because I analyzed all options and wasn't quick about it. When my wife Lisa started talking about using a timer, or just not playing some games with me, I got the message.

These days I work at playing quickly, carving off a couple slices of analysis and putting the rest in the "yeah, things might get messy there" bucket. It's not always easy just-letting-go, and sometimes I have to roleplay reasons that I'm not going to work hard at being clever.

For example, playing Lanterns, I limit myself to a one-minute turn, and the last game I played when it felt like I might be making a mistake, I said something like "Well, we dropped the oars and were scrabbling around in the bottom of the boat when we should have been lighting lanterns. So we've gotta dump the lanterns overboard before the boat catches on fire, now!"

Playing Commands & Colors: Samurai Battles for the first time a couple months ago, I played from the beginning saying that my commander was nursing a bad hangover. Did a good job of roleplaying that too, since I ended the game by charging disastrously with the wrong unit, snatching defeat from victory. Ee ja nai ka!

Playtesting new games with skilled designers and tournament players, I sometimes run into a variant of the same problem. Even in their first game, players who don't really understand the rules yet tend to want to analyze everything instead of just-playing-through.

So I've recently been starting introductory boardgame and testing sessions with roleplaying advice: "Pretend we're drunk! We're not going to get everything right. You don't know the system and I'm not gonna do a perfect job explaining things all the way through, so you won't make the right decisions, let's just plow through and if something goes wrong, well, it's my fault, what the hell!"

[[art by By Kawanabe Kyōsai - National Diet Library Digital Collections, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2183868

Storybook Brawling onto a Tabletop

The art above is called Flights by Moonlight. It’s the first storybook image we got from our amazing artist, Ekaterina Chesalova, for the Storybook Brawl boardgame I’ve been working on the past year with designers from my company, Fire Opal Media, and other designers from Good Luck Games.

One of the coolest things about designing games is that sometimes the games you play turn into games you’re working on. In 2021, I was playing a lot of Storybook Brawl, the digital auto-battler-style game of twisted fairy tales on Steam. I knew some of the designers. I loved the game. My business partner Jay Schneider and I got in touch and we ended up signing on to design a board game version of Storybook Brawl!

If you’ve played the digital version, you’re probably aware that most of the mechanics that make the digital version tick don’t translate into a board game. The truth is that it can be liberating when mechanics are so untranslatable. We had to evoke the feel of the digital game, and the fun of its brawls, in a board and card game environment that would stay fun for players of many ages instead of gradually eliminating people until only one winner was left.

I love this type of challenge!

Sometimes my early designs are reasonably close to the final design. This was not one of those times. Jay and the rest of the development team did so much work and redesign, and along the way we realized that the way to set up the brawls at the heart of the game was with a storybook that would double as a scenario guide!

The Flights by Moonlight picture above? That’s one of the early scenes from Act II: Home Realms, showing the moment Mrs. Claus and Pan’s Shadow meet after their stories have been shuffled together. The storybook’s opposite page gives each player a choice between three Plot Twists before that round’s brawl: Workshopping (just some gold to buy better cards); From Up Here, Everybody Else Looks Tiny (the right to buy cards from your shop for a tiny price this round); and Moonlit Reconnaissance (banishing a random card and acquiring two new cards).

Yes, it’s a deckbuilding game of sorts. And each brawl leads to another story later on in the storybook, until the grand finale. I’m thrilled with the game and in love with writing storybooks for it! It’s one of those games I’m going to struggle to keep a copy of because my wife Lisa is gonna be giving it away as a gift. (Seriously: I’ve had to borrow copies of Three-Dragon Ante and Epic Spell Wars from friends because all of our copies had been gifted!)

The Storybook Brawl board game is going to be published by Dara Studios. It will go on Kickstarter later this fall. Come by booth 2400 at GenCon next week to see a prototype, check out the storybook, and to play a demo for between 2 and 4 players.

I’ll usually be at the Pelgrane booth, #423, and though I’m mostly doing 13th Age things there, I’ll be happy to talk about Storybook Brawl and will probably be at booth 2400 running/playing games now and then.

I’ll post in the next couple days about the Pelgrane-and-other-things I’ll be up to at GenCon.

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.

Wrestlenomicon: Cultist Rules

 

(all art from the wild pen of Kurt Komoda)

I’d always hoped to add servitors of the elder gods to the game, cards that would have the same card backs as Cultists. When we started the Kickstarter, I presumed that new Cultists would be a project for the future. But the future arrived during the KS. Shane and Dennis found a way to add The Dead to Hastur’s Cultists and recruited the Deep Ones for Cthulhu. Kurt handled the art, I did some mechanics, and ta-dah, mission accomplished. But maybe I missed a step: I didn’t adjust the Cultists paragraphs on page 13 of the rulebook to account for these KS-exclusive cards. Some people have asked about it.

So here’s a rewording of the rules to account for the new Cultists. I’m going to phrase these rules to reflect the way I use the Cult tile, which is different than how the rulebook recommends using it. I’m also not going to use the terse style that saves space in a rulebook. This will be wordier.

Cultists

Cultist cards are in a separate category from the other cards in the game, distinguished by their own card back to prevent them being mistaken for cards that are part of your normal deck and your normal hand.

Before the game, shuffle your Cultist cards and place them face-down as a separate Cultist deck on your Cult tile. Use as many Cultist cards as you have available for your god. (For Kickstarter backers who bought everything, Cthulhu will have 8 standard Cultists, 5 Willing Sacrifices, and 5 Deep Ones. Hastur will have 8 standard Cultists, 5 Willing Sacrifices, and 5 The Dead. If you’ve ended up with fewer Cultists than that, don’t worry, just use what you’ve got.)

Neither player starts with any Cultists, but some cards can grant them to you. When you gain a Cultist, draw the top card from your Cultist deck and keep it on the edge of your hand of cards so that it doesn’t get mixed up with the rest of your normal hand of cards. Given that there’s not a lot of text on the Cultist cards you’ll need to refer to often, my method is to turn them upside down so I don’t confuse them with the cards that are officially in my hand. You could even just turn them backside up so that all you can see is the Cultist card back. Because a Cultist card doesn’t count as a card in your hand, you’re just holding it with the rest of your cards to keep track of it as an available resource. If you feel like setting it somewhere else, go ahead! There’s no limit to the number of Cultists you can accumulate.

 

(upside-down Cultists on the left of a three-card Cthulhu hand)

When you sacrifice a Cultist, place it face-up into a separate Cultist discard pile. You should have room on your Cult tile for both the Cultist deck and the Cultist discards. If you ever need to gain a Cultist and don’t have any left in your deck, reshuffle your Cultist discard pile.

 

(using the Cult tile as the spot for a Cultists deck and discard)

The full rules for each type of Cultist are printed on that card. In other words, if the Cultist in your hand is one of The Dead or Deep Ones, you won’t be able to use it for the standard Cultist sacrifice.

When you use a standard Cultist or one of The Willing Sacrifice bonus art Cultists, Cultist sacrifice works like this: When you advance an attack on your track (using Momentum), you can sacrifice one or more Cultists you’ve gained earlier to move that card an extra space for each Cultist sacrificed. (If you move multiple cards due to exclamation point momentum, each Cultist sacrificed moves a single card.)

At the moment the Willing Sacrifice cards don’t accomplish any more than the normal Cultists . . . aside from the possibility of making a mid-game sacrifice of a loved one (or the first friend I played D&D with) who strongly supported our Kickstarter! But when the game has expansions down the road, we’ll find a way to add some zing to the Willing Sacrifices.

 

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.

Guest Post: Tweet's Projects

Since Jonathan Tweet is temporarily between blogs, he occasionally posts on game design here. He's something of a minimalist so I added italics and boldface.

Jonathan says. . . .

Here’s a list of my current projects, from a game that’s done and in the publisher’s hands to games that are just in the beginning stages of design. I always have several projects “live” at a time, although sometimes a single project takes over most of my schedule. Over the next months and years, here’s what you might see from me. 

Design complete: A science-oriented kids’ game with a new publisher. 

Largely complete: Sourcebook for a new publisher, offering a new take on a well-loved setting. 

Design underway: A new edition of Everway, where I can apply what the free-form roleplaying game design community has learned and invented over the last 25 years. Working with the Everway Company, comprising people I’ve known since Everway’s debut. 

Underway: Monthly 1,000-word essays about my history in RPG design, posted on EN World. 

Underway: Sourcebook for another new publisher, also offering a new take on a well-loved setting.  

Underway: In the tradition of Grandmother Fish, another lovable picture book that teaches evolution science to pre-schoolers. 

Maintenance: Every year, I update the content of the game-design course I teach each fall through the University of Washington. 

Beginning stages: Head-to-head card game. Latest brain storm. 

Beginning stages: A story-oriented supplement for 5E with a new publisher. 

Beginning stages: Possible relaunch of a quirky trading card game from the 90s. 

Back-burnered: Non-fiction book, Jesus for atheists. 

Gaming this week: Book of the Underworld, Wingspan, Cypher System

The wonderful car-web photo above was taken by Lisa Eschenbach, and I'm using it to acknowledge that I finished the development phase on Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's Book of the Underworld earlier this week. Yeah, it took a few weeks longer than I expected. The book is now with the editor. All the art is coming in on schedule so it won't be too long before it's in layout.

Also this week, I made huge progress on two new designs. The secret card/boardgame I've been designing for my own personal satisfaction has achieved harmony. Players have been enjoying it for awhile, and now I'm also simply having fun rather than seeing things that need fixing. Notably, I'm no longer winning every game. There's a specific type of imbalance when the designer's advantage in knowing what might be unbalanced pays off too often. Happily, I'm losing now, so that development phase is over.  I'll be looking for a publisher soon.

Meanwhile on a different unannounced boardgame project that has a publisher already, I solved the last of the design problems that was bugging me and am making a pass through the cardset and other components to live up to the new solutions. I'm looking forward to playtesting next week.

I also enjoyed a couple first-plays this week. I've only been able to find the European supplement for Wingspan, but friends Brittany and Miguel brought over the core game. We all loved it. Lisa used the Audubon app on her phone to accompany turns with the calls of the newly played birds. Brittany arranged a ridiculous combo and stuffed what she called a 'Christmas goose' with 20 VP, so curses accompanied the bird calls.

I also got to play my first game of the Cypher system, in a highly diverting fantasy genre session run by Bruce Cordell. I had fun as a Resilient Speaker Who Keeps a Magic Ally. Specifically, I'm playing a priest of a war god that died in apocalyptic fashion (the god I mean), and now I get my spells from random deities, changing every day, who are using me as an experiment, or a bet, or something. More or less a One Unique Thing that will definitely make for fun prayers. Also: I'm a kite-fighting and bocce ball aficionado. My comrades are considerably doughtier (more on them next time), so all shall be well.

And though we didn't play The Gods War this week, it launched a Kickstarter with Gloranthan gods of War, Secrets, and Magic, and I'm pretty sure I never shared this method-acting photo from our Gods War game. From right to left, Sean pulled faces as Chaos, Jonathan was a stickler-for-rules Solar, and I was a Storm player who never rolled a 6 after mistakenly using a wargaming plan in an area control universe. The sword was an attempt to compensate for 6-less-ness. Paul, the Darkness troll photographer, ate us all.

Wingspan: Vote of Confidence

For about 36 hours, I owned a copy of Wingspan. I taught the game to a nine-year old who coincidentally shares his name with a bird. That's his younger sister on the left, she realized the game was too much for her and instead she gleefully punched out birdfoods. When the nine-year old loved the game as much as I did, he took it home to his nest.

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! 

Legendary Marvel Deckbuilding Fun

The photo is from playtesting the first of the two new Legendary: Marvel Deckbuilding expansions that Devin Low is designing at the moment. Lisa has just identified the troubling details of the Faustian bargain that one of Devin's new game mechanics has offered her. She is turning the bargain down, hard.

Devin, meanwhile, is still chortling over the fact that so many players *will* accept the bargain, rubbing his hands together evil-mastermind-style to try and get Lisa excited about the possibilities.

Lisa said, "I read Faust in the original German. I'm not falling for this." And Devin/Mephistopheles had to be content with future souls.

I obviously can't provide details or even the names on the two expansions, but I can say we loved them both. The new mechanics provide a couple different assessment/achievement levels that are separate from the usual rubrics of Victory Points and slimmed-down decks. Trash-talking and roleplaying around the new mechanics is fun and fits the storylines that the expansions are based on. Fun new mechanics that are also funny? A big win.

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.

Elder Rumble: Multiplayer Rules for Wrestlenomicon!

The Wrestlenomicon Kickstarter is in its final 25 hours. We've kicked, and now we're stretching towards the goal that will add the third elder god to the game, Nyarlathotep, who in Wrestlenomicon terms is less a crawling chaos and more the Chaos that performs an Elder Ollie On Your Head. 

To honor the many backers who are putting in an extra $15 to $30 *before* we've reached the Nyarlathotep stretch goal, pushing us towards the line, we thought we'd share some of the current multiplayer rules. (The Nyarlathotep deck will cost $15 plus shipping and handling, and people adding a full $30 are hoping to also add Yog-Sothoth.) 

These are the rules for three or four player games where it's every god for itself. This is the first draft, details may change as we playtest more and if Shane and Dennis decide they want to revise my placeholder names. 

These rules are fun, even just playing with multiple Cthulhu and Hastur decks. A couple of my friends who started by playing three-player games think of Wrestlenomicon mainly as a three-player game, they love the shifting priorities created by the attack arrow. 

Elder Rumble

Elder Rumble matches three or more combatants against each other, fighting until only the winner survives.

Set-Up: Each player uses their own track, meaning you’ll set up more than a single track of space cards. Add a line of space cards for each additional player. For example, for a three-player game, set up two sets of space cards so there are three columns. Cards are placed between the space cards, one column/track per player. 

First Turn: As usual, each player chooses a card simultaneously. High Momentum takes the first turn. Break ties with alphabetic order.As usual, the first attack to reach Ground Zero slams. But only that first attack. Even if a following attack lands before the target has a card on Ground Zero, that later attack does not slam.

Turns go clockwise: Once the first player has taken their turn, proceed clockwise around the table.

The Attack Arrow: Each player in an Elder Rumble has an attack arrow that sits down under their Ground Zero and flips between left and right. Each player's first attack goes against the foe whose track is on their left (or around the table to the player on the right if you’re the left-most player). As soon as a player attacks, and their attack is totally over, they flip their arrow to point at the enemy in the other direction. In other words, you’ll attack a different enemy with your next attack that reaches Ground Zero. Keep alternating attacks back and forth.

Important multiplayer rule: All card and rule references to “your enemy” or to effects that are meant to hurt a specific opponent refer only to the player you are presently aiming to attack!

Rumble Bonus: When your card is the card that take out an enemy’s last Guts card, you gain bonus Guts equal to the number of players who are left in the game. Draw the right number of cards off the top of your deck and place them on your Guts pile.

Remove the dead god’s track. If there are still three or more players in the game, keep using the attack arrows. When the game is down to two players, remove the attack arrows and bash each other like a regular two-player game.

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.

Bring on Squishyface!

Lisa hanging out with someone clean cut for a change

We've played soccer together for 33 years and card games for 30, so really, I should have known that Lisa's favorite card art wasn't going to be something subtle! Her favorite Wrestlenomicon move is Squishyface, a Combo for Hastur that will enter the deck when we hit our first stretch goal and expand to 70 card decks.

Back the Kickstarter! Summon the Squishyface!