Equipment

Welcome in a new development diary post about the Descendants of Volos board game.

If you’ve missed the previous posts, you can find them in the menu by clicking the button located at the top of this page. Or by clicking the following links:

Post 1 – Game announcement

Post 2 – World map and Tutorial

Post 3 – Event cards

Today we’ll show the equipment cards. What they look like, and how to use them. But first I’d like to mention again that everything we show may change and improve until the release day. A good example is the player panel that we’ve shown in the 1st post. Within the last few weeks we’ve modified it a bit to make it look cleaner and easier to understand.

We made the fatigue bar (0-4 fields) cleaner and easier to understand. Health bar has been revamped. Previously, we had health tokens that became difficult to handle when you reached up to 20 tokens. We have redesigned those tokens completely (more details soon). We’ve also improved the overall clearance of the entire panel. So, as you see, whatever we show in these posts, is a work-in-progress.

Today we’ll explain (by using the pictures from our tutorial book) how to put on, use, and store the collected gear.

As you can see, to put on gear you simply place it in the slot with he matching symbol: left hand, right hand, both hands, head, etc. Either horizontally, or vertically. The same thing applies to the armour. There are vertical item cards that cover a full body (like a robe), or two horizontal item cards that are either upper-body or lower-body.

Throughout your adventures, you will acqure quite a number of items. Some of them may be useless for your class, or you may be simply not able to use it yet. You put them in your inventory on the right side, so you can for example carry them to the town and sell in the store for some gold. Almost all items have requirements that must be met in order to make it possible for you to put it on and use.

For example, you must be strong enough to be able to fight with such a heavy 2 handed sword:

Or agile enough to be able to use a bow effectively:

And the same with magical weapons. One must be intelligent enough to be able to fight as a mage:

Some items may require only one of two given attributes.

You are either strong to lift that shield, or very agile and use some special technique to operate it.

Some items do not require a specific attribute value, but it’s enough that a given attribute is a dominant one.

So in this example, there is no number next to the agility attribute icon, which means that it requires this attribute to be the dominating one.

And finally, there are a few items that don’t have any requirements at all.

Equipment types

There are two types of damage in the game: Physical and Magical. You can tell that by looking at the icon on each weapon card.

The combat rules are a bit different for physical and magical gameplay, however both are trivial to learn. Next to the damage-type icon, there is a damage amount number. In the above example, the physical weapon does 7 damage, and 11 critical damage. As you’ve noticed, the magical weapon has just one number – the ordinary damage. That’s because the critical damage amount is random. When a critical damage happens, the player throws a special magical-penetration-dice – which is shown as a dark blue square in the right top corner in the above example. The dice will tell the extra damage which can be much greater than caused by any physical weapon. Each magical-penetration-dice has different color and different critical non-linear values. We’ll tell more about the entire combat loop in one of the next development diary posts.

Not only the weapons has different types. Also the armour is classified into three types: Heavy armour, Light armour and Robe. Each type is represented by such an icon:

The player can put on any type of the armour as long as the attribute requirement is met. However in many cases it is best to wear all of the armour elements of the same type… but not always. You will have to figure it out yourself, what is best for you. Here are the example benefits from wearing the armour pieces of the same type.

That’s it for today. I hope you are increasingly intrigued with the solutions we present. If you are, please remember to share it with your friends. See you in the next development diary of the Descendants of Volos board game.