What We’re Playing: Tabletop H through W

The upper end of the alphabet leans into games played with friends who prefer casual fare.

Hot Streak

Four hapless lower league baseball mascots race. You place your bets and contribute a secret card to help your wagers. Ridiculous silly fun playable by almost all ages and all but a few temperaments. This Boardgame Geek introduction sums it up.

Legendary: Game of Thrones

One of my designs, turning Devin Low’s wonderful semi-cooperative Legendary deckbuilding system into a fully competitive cutthroat contest between rival houses. I’m happy with how gameplay worked out and I’m happy with hand-painted card art, one artist per great House. Not as happy with an oddity of the game’s production, that somehow put terms on the playmats that don’t correspond to terms used during any stage of the game’s development.

Huh.

I got interviewed about the design of the game and the video eventually showed up on Youtube when I wasn’t looking. Here’s a link to that interview, featuring me blinking in and out of my very fancy background.

Richard Garfield’s Carnival of Monsters

This is another game that works well for most of the casual gamers we know. The land = buying power feels a little like M:tG but it’s a drafting game, pick one card and pass the rest on, trying to give a fickle public the monster shows they want to see that season. I think the game might have sort of fallen between the cracks because it had a flawed crowdfunding campaign that got called off. Published as a normal game, it’s fun and replayable.

Our favorite moment playing the game came from a game with Jonathan Tweet, who wasn’t paying careful attention as we began. As we played he grew increasingly complementary about several clever mechanics. Normally he is not impressed by many games, so this was a change of pace. The third time he thought something was really smart he said, “This is really well designed. Who did this?” Lisa got to lean forward and say, “Jonathan. The name of the game is RICHARD GARFIELD’S Carnival of Monsters.”

Sanibel

This is Elizabeth Hargrave’s new game of tide walking and shell-collecting. I’m not sure I’m the target audience for the game. People who like to organize things? Our house is full of wonderful talismans and we’re not the folks who need them organized. I suspect I’m going to give the game to friends like Lee Moyer and Venetia, since the collection/arrangement patterns of the game seem like their happy place.

Three-Dragon Ante

We’ve been playing a version of the game with a deck made of favorite dragons and mortals. It’s easy to bring out when visiting non-gamers or casual gamers say they want to try one of my games.

At the moment the only version of the game that’s in print is the Giants War expansion. I’m hoping to get the core game back in print soon.

Unidentified New Card Game

We’ve played a new card game of my design five times with different groups and it’s working great. Next steps: business related.

Hmm, that makes the process sound a lot quicker than it was. Depending on how you count, this final version of the game is the 5th or the 6th draft.

Wingspan

We still play this game with mostly North American birds, because Lisa uses the game partly as ornithology practice. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to play a game with the Central and South American hummingbird expansion soon!

Skill & Strategy in Legendary: Game of Thrones

Despite the subject line, today’s blog is not a strategy guide! Instead, it’s a look at a couple of cards from the about-to-release Legendary: Game of Thrones showing how I redefined two Hero classes whose names make sense in superhero games but don't apply as well to GRR Martin's fantasy world.

Legendary uses five card classes, aka colors, to define the heroes of all the various Legendary deckbuilding games. The five colors are Tech (Black), Ranged (Blue), Covert (Red), Strength (Green), and Instinct (White). It’s the first two classes—Black and Blue—that needed to be redefined for Game of Thrones.

Blue is for Skill

Ranged (Blue) is about blasting things, usually with energy beams, lightning, lasers, psychic powers, and so on. Yes, Daenerys’ dragons could muster convincing energy attacks, and there’s at least one flaming sword in the world, but ranged/energy isn’t a rich source of character concepts in GoT. I called Blue “Magic” when I designed Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, but that’s not right for GoT either, where magic is usually hidden and covert instead of showy and explosive.

So I went with a concept that’s extremely important to the great Houses and their warriors: Blue is now Skill. “Skill Heroes (Blue) have prowess with weapons and combat, especially the combat styles practiced by trained warriors and knights.” It’s not about brawn, it’s not about instinct, it’s about skills recognized by other great knights, like the skills possessed by Loras Tyrell, who shows up as a Skill Hero on one of the cards from the Great Warriors hero set.

Two of Jaime Lannister’s cards are Skill cards, including one of his two common cards, Kingslayer.

Jaime’s defining act, earlier in his career, is so infamous that everyone expects him to do his worst. That’s how I think of the part of the card that forces you to choose an enemy to draw a card, Jaime has a bit of a deathwish and he’s a provocateur. In a two-player game you obviously know who’s drawing the card, it’s in multiplayer games that the lobbying becomes interesting, though you’re usually attempting to help the enemy who seems like less of a threat.

Meanwhile, Sword Mastery is the GoT set’s version of the Conqueror ability. If there’s any Ally in the Sword range-space, the space in the middle of the range track, Kingslayer provides another +2 Attack that can only be used against Masterminds. Since Kingslayer is a Common card, you might draw multiples in the same hand. When Sword Mastery triggers, an enemy Mastermind tends to follow the King into oblivion.

Black is for Strategy

The other card I’m showing today is the rare card from Jaime Lannister. It’s a Covert (Red card) that plays on the connection between the Lannister twins. They’re so intertwined that Cersei is showing up on Jaime’s Rare card!

The Strategy trigger on Intertwined is all Cersei. And Strategy is what Black has become instead of Tech in GoT. The series’ opening credits have some wonderful tech, but I wouldn’t say there’s much tech to build Hero cards with. So I went with a quality that sets many of the most deadly characters in GoT apart:: “Strategy Heroes (Black) use big-picture manipulation, grand strategic and master plans.”

Cersei is the poster ‘hero’ for Strategy cards. Intertwined’s Strategy trigger offers an unusual amount of choice in how you’ll use the effect, but the story concept is the same: someone is being removed from the big picture.

As you’d expect, Tyrion is another Lannister with Strategy in mind. The Small Council of the Baratheon House has some Strategy cards, but there aren’t as many in the Stark and Dothraki houses. In fact, one of the Stark Masterminds gets weaker when attacked with Strategy cards; Lord Eddard the Hand wasn’t playing the long game.

Legendary: Game of Thrones, Releasing Soon as a Cutthroat Card Game

I love the Legendary deck-building game designed by Devin Low! Lisa and I were in the same city as Devin when he made the original edition, so we got to playtest as the game took shape. Since then Devin has designed something like two dozen sets of various sizes and Upper Deck has adopted the system for a multitude of film and television properties.

I’m still most fond of the freeform Legendary approach, where stories you tell yourself grow out of deckbuilding, instead of the guided storytelling of the Legendary Encounters boxes.

I designed a Legendary set a few years ago, sticking close to the original model but filling the Big Trouble in Little China set with the dynamics Lisa enjoyed—game design as gift. And now I’ve designed Legendary: Game of Thrones, in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products and HBO, coming soon to local game stores!

The challenge posed by Legendary®: Game of Thrones was to turn a competitive co-op game into a cutthroat battle. In Legendary; all players are heroes, competing to be the best at defeating villains. The heroes win together or lose together, but one winner is more equal than others. Well, a lot more equal, but when players take selfish actions that screw the other players, many tables point out that ‘we’re all supposed to be on the same side.’

That doesn’t make sense for Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones needs to be an epic battle where no one blames you for using powers that hurt your opponents. It’s a battle with one House winning.

I’m going to introduce a few of the mechanics that combine into direct battle in a series of blog posts, starting today with a note about each player’s Hero line-up.

Your own Hero line-up: Let’s take the simplest case, a two-player game, Starks vs. Lannisters, using the Full Allegiance starter game so that you’ll each use all four of the Heroes from your House.

If you’re playing the Starks, you want to buy Stark characters for your deck. Playing with Lannisters in your Hero hand would feel all wrong. So, as a rule, you don’t. Instead of a single shared line-up, where all players compete to buy the Hero cards they want from a common pool, each player has their own line-up of five Hero cards. It looks something like this, to switch Houses for a moment and show the King's Landing player board that is part of the game’s initial image releases:

Adding Pressure: If you were the only player able to buy cards from a Legendary line-up, you’d have a low-pressure opportunity to acquire more and more of the cards you want. In other Legendary games, you have to keep track of what opponents are buying and hope they don’t take the cards you want.

Legendary®: Game of Thrones has card interaction that makes you care about what cards your foes buy, but the key dynamic of putting some time pressure on Hero purchases from your own line-up is handled with a new mechanic: Events.

A random assortment of 16 different Event cards (there are 2 copies of each) is shuffled into the single central Allies deck, the deck of antagonists that your Heroes defeat or support, depending on their House. At the start of each player’s turn, they draw a card from the Allies deck, exactly like drawing a card from the Villains deck in the original version of the game.

If you draw an Event, the first thing everyone must do is Cycle a card out of their own line-up. Each Event specifies the space the card is cycled out of.

Here’s an example: Escalation. Before resolving its text, every player has to take the card out of the third space of their line-up, the center-space, put it at the bottom of their personal Hero deck, and replace it with the top card of their Hero deck. It could be the lousy little card you don’t want to see again, or it could be cherished 7-cost rare that you’d already started building your hopes around.

And then you get the fun of the Event text! Escalation shakes things up because it lets everyone interact with their line-up at an unexpected time. Even if the card you really wanted was in your third space, you’re still generally able to improve your deck somehow.

Of course, not all Events are helpful. But playtesting gradually winnowed away the Events that were just hurtful. Your Heroes and your Allies that are in the central Ally deck are going to hurt your opponents plenty; Events are now most often interesting effects that can affect multiple players.

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.

Big Trouble in Little China!

GenCon is going to be fun this year!

In addition to however many volumes of 13th Age we have out by and for the show, I'll be enjoying the release of a new game from Upper Deck based on my favorite deckbuilding card game.

I've been a Legendary fanboy since Devin Low invited me to early playtests. You'll find my wife Lisa and me in the playtesters list for most of the Marvel Legendary sets. So it was wonderful to design a Big Trouble in Little China set intended to be playable with the Marvel sets.

The Villains and Masterminds and Schemes can all add something new for people who want to draft big trouble into their Marvel games, and Iron Fist could pay a visit to Little China. But BTiLC is very much its own experience, with interlocking characters and mechanics that want to be played together, as well as new Schemes that pivot around Chinatown. I'm particularly happy with the story-oriented solution for handling the starting heroes, but it's a little too soon to spill those beans. I'll say more about the game's design goals and solutions in future posts.

This was so much fun to make! The result is sort of a love letter: Legendary is Lisa's favorite game, and Big Trouble in Little China is designed to be Legendary the way Lisa likes to play it. Except for the worst of the Masterminds . . . Lisa saw that Mastermind and said "Oh. You just designed this to screw me, didn't you?"

Me: Not you. Your play style.
Lisa: The world.