Expansion

Welcome to the development diary blog of the Descendants of Volos board game. If you haven’t seen the previous posts, just check them out in the blog section at the top. Today we’ll talk about…

Expansion

Originally, we had planned to make expansions only after a successful release, and only if the public showed that they liked the game and they wanted expansions! However, there turned out to be some important reasons which made us decide to change this plan. At some point back when making this game, we decided to cut things away because it had become too heavy. There were simply so many cool game-play elements that we had to cut, because although players had fun, not all of them felt they needed so much content. We can now proudly say that we’re satisfied with the “big simplification,” as we like to describe it. However, some details were so nice that we really didn’t want to give up on them. So we’ve decided that we’ll move them to an expansion. This way, players who don’t mind having extra elements can still enjoy them. We separated one game mechanics, a wide range of adventures, enemies and item cards related to that mechanics, and some other elements that bloated the game box and are not “must haves” to enjoy the game at its best, while their absence will very much lower the price of the core box.

Expansion content

Six playable characters:

• Hunter
• Paladin
• Druid
• Mage
• Marauder
• Elementalist

One additional organization – “Foreseti”.

Around 24 cards of new enemies.

Some cards of new items, combats, adventures and story sequences.

And a replacement marker for the primary attribute that we call the “Traits”…

Traits

This is a small addition to the game mechanics that gives extra taste and immersion when you build your character. With this expansion, the player will replace the “Primary Attribute” marker with a completely new one. Except that this time, depending on which attribute is your primary one, you choose a different marker. Every time your primary attribute changes (and once at the beginning of the game) you choose which side of the marker you want to make the active one (you put it face up). For example, if you’re strong then you can choose either the Perseverance trait or the Heroism trait, when you’re agile you can choose either Athletics or Mechanics, and when you’re intelligent it’s Diplomacy or Perception.

Three additional trait tokens – shown as the obverse and the reverse.

There is no such thing as a bad choice. The traits affect situations which are random (by pulling random adventure cards), so there is no way you can min-max your character by favoring one over another. There are plenty of cards added to the game together with this expansion, and those cards are account for the mechanics of the traits. Here are some examples:

The amount of cards referring to each trait differs a bit, but usually those rare ones give much better rewards.

We expect that the expansion will be available as a pledge on the KickStarter. However, it may be finalized and manufactured a bit later (together with other language versions of the game).

If you like our project, make sure to follow us, and to subscribe, so that you don’t miss the KickStarter campaign. See you soon in the next development diary blog of The Descendants of Volos board game.