More Improvements

Welcome everyone. Today we’ll continue listing all the changes we’ve recently made to our board game project “The Descendants of Volos”. If you’ve missed the last post, here it is. Or simply click the Blog button at the top of this page to see all updates we’ve been writing in the past.

So, let’s begin:

Dice

We’ve removed the numbers from our D12. They were used so rarely that we’ve decided that it’s better to remove them along with those few cases where they were needed.

Old combat dice

New combat dice

The only symbols are now: hit (sword) and critical hit (red sword or attribute symbol – the “animal,” if it’s your primary) when cast as attack, or defence (shield) when cast as defense. We’ve also divided their functions into 2 separate dice. The black one is used by the player, and the blue one is used by the enemy. The blue one doesn’t have any numbers or attribute symbols (the “animals”). Instead it has a skill activation symbol.

Influence tokens

We’ve removed the organization-specific skills from the influence tokens.

Old influence tokens

New simplified influence tokens

Many players had problems remembering that those skills even exist. Although having a good memory for things like that is part of the challenge in this game, we’ve decided to simplify these tokens. This loss will be compensated, however, so that choosing the right faction will still give you benefits. We came up with a couple of ideas which we’re testing right now. We’ll give you the details soon.

Teleporting and Air-ship transportation

Moving through the teleportation stone and using air-ship transport works a bit different now. The starting and the destination fields act now as the same field, so they don’t count into the distance traveled.

Example from the tutorial, the “Map and Travel” chapter about using the air-ship

Example from the tutorial, the “Map and Travel” chapter about teleporting via a Runestone

Weapon Mastery

We’ve simplified the weapon mastery. In previous iterations of this feature, we had various types of bonuses. However all solutions required the player to remember that they exist. Now, the player just needs to know that those are the weapons that you get extra benefits if you use them. What benefits? It’ll depend on what combat cards you manage to build in your deck. And you won’t forget about those bonuses when you read your cards in hand during the fight.

Example of weapon mastery in a character’s record section

Sample combat cards referring to your character weapon mastery

Weapon mastery mainly exists to discourage players from breaking the immersion and running around the world as a barbarian with a magic wand. Obviously, you still can do that if you want! You can increase your intellect as a barbarian and try to win with a wand, but then you wouldn’t benefit from your barbarish skills nor the extras from using the weapon that you have mastered.

Open Merchant

This is something we changed long ago, but I just realized that we’d forgotten to mention that. Merchant is now in an open form. Which means that some of the items that one can buy are visible to all players.

Image from the tutorial, the “Items and Equipment” chapter about open merchant

Extra cards are added to the open pools over time.

Image from tutorial “Items and equipment chapter” – about adding more cards to the open pools.

And even more every time any player visit one of 4 merchant locations.

Image from tutorial “Items and equipment chapter” – about adding more cards to the open pools.

Regardless if player buy anything or not, every visit at a given merchant location makes this pool growing.

Other changes

• We keep iterating the Dungeon Book. We renamed it the “Grimoire handbook”. It no longer contains only the details of all dungeons, but many other useful things that the player may want to know, such as: a one-page summary of the dungeons, guides that remind the player how the combat loop works, how the daily loop works, etc., some information on the dice chances (per the dominant attribute) to help find out  what are the player’s chances for a succesfull attack/critical/defence depending on how many dice the player casts. It’ll contain all the things that players most frequently ask for.
• We’ve renamed some item decks, and they’re called now as follows:

Renamed item card decks

• Hundreds of cards were tweaked and balanced. We’ve collected a large feedback on many adventure cards, and refactored them accordingly to remove confusion or misunderstandings.

That’s it for today. See you in the next development diary of the Descendants of Volos board game.