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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Well it has been over half a year since I last posted about Dragonslayers on this here blog. Since then a lot has happened. The game was and is not dead, quite to the contrary, it evolved quite a bit since my last post, while I have kept it as a side project with other games of mine like Biomechanic Dino Battles: The Deckbuilding Game taking priority.
In this post I want to bring you up to date talking about all the cool new mechanics Rob and me (well mostly Rob and playtesters) came up with in the meantime, provide links to latest rules and cards and will share our experiences from our first playtest session a friend of mine and I had yesterday evening.
So let me start with the new rules and mechanics:
There have been basically 3 major changes to the rules since I last posted a rules update back in August last year (the cards changed a lot as well but I am not going into detail on that as you can download and have a look at the cards yourself - links to the latest rules and cards will be provided below):
1.) Monster encounters:
Instead of having Monsters of different levels in the Adventure Pile/Deck, you now have "Encounter Level X Monsters" cards and seperate, randomly shuffled Monster Piles Level 1 to 5. If you reveal a Monster Encounter card you have to fight the Monsters if the level is equal or lower than the current year. The leader however can decide to fight Monsters of a higher level earlier on if he wants to. When you encounter Monsters, reveal one Monster Card from the respective Monster Pile for every player. Starting with the player with the highest Initiative, each player picks one Monster to fight with his or her band of heroes. There is no retreat once you engage a Monster (Except through the "Teleportation" Spell).
2.) Feats and Energy:
Besides Initiative, Attack, Defense and Life Points, Rob added another stat to the heroes: Energy. Your average hero has 2 Energy which he or she can spend on one of up to 3 unique, once per year "Feats" (Special Abilities) that not only add a lot of flavor to the Heroes, but also create a lot more decisions to the gameplay as well as tremendous options and possibilites for the crafty game designer. It was fun big time to come up with unique Feats for every character. Energy full regenerates at each year end and can be replenished by using Mana Potions.
3.) Ghosts:
This is by far my favorite new mechanic, as it is an elegant way to eliminate the problem of early player elimintation. Each Hero has a Ghost-Version of him or her printed on its back side, with different stats and Feats as the live version. The ghost mechanic was an idea, and a quite ingenious at that of one of Rob's playtesters and works as follows: When your last Hero dies during the game, you do not just lose the game, but flip over your last Hero card and he or she turns into a Ghost version of himself/herself. Ghosts cannot use equipment (except for some magical ones with the "ghostly" keyword) and have different stats and Feats than their living counterparts. Many of the ghost stats improve as the years advance. So you could have a ghostly Hero who gets +2 DEF on year 3, or have attacks like 1D6 + Year for example. Ghosts can still fight Monsters and collect gold in order to enable you buy them back into the game (reviving them) at certain Buildings/Locations like the Temple. Other players can ressurrect you as well which is cheaper than when you do it yourself. However the catch with the Ghosts is this. When the epic end-battle against Grimlock the Cruel starts, all Ghosts are eliminated and players without any live Heroes lose the game immediately. Grimlock can only be fought by players with at least one living Hero.
These are the three major changes to the game rules and mechanics since I last posted. If you want to read the entire rules and are curious about the cards as well, you can download everything here:
http://ap.o-nan.org/2012/04/dragonslayers-rules-v-2-1-as-of-...
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Now to our first playtest session with new cards and rules!
So yesterday evening, my gaming buddy Berni came over to finally test the new version of Dragonslayers with me. I had worked countless hours on assembling the prototype so I hoped it would be worth the effort. So here we go:
The setup:
This is how the game looks when all is set up. Lots and lots of card piles!
The cast:
Berni, patient playtester par-excellence, who was always willing to test any games I came up with in the past and helped me playtest DS since the days long years ago when I came up with the first incarnation of the game.
Andi, game designer, artist, notorious maniac and connoiseur of fine ales (Sorry for the product placement  ) in dire need of a shave.
The enemy:
Lo and behold Grimlock the Cruel, the ultimate draconian scourge. Note the use of littel red wooden pieces to keep track of Life Points. We used blue 6 sided dice to keep track of Defense. Especially in the case of Grimlock (having a DEF of 12 in a 2 player game) that reduces the number of pieces you need tremendously.
I asked Rob beforehand how long his games have taken. He said a solo game would be over in about 45 minutes, so we aimed for an 1 hour game. However it took us a bit more than 2 hours to complete a game, and we even skipped year 4 by attacking Grimlock in year 3. Will elaborate more on that later on...
The game:
So all was set and the game could finally begin. Berni picked Thorulf Hammerfist as his starting Hero, I chose Halmond the Drunkard (chiefly because of his respectable defense value of 5 and his ability to heal Wounds) - a fitting hero for this game night with beer galore!
So we started our adventure, both bough Armor and Shields at the Woodworker to boost our Defense stats and started encountering Monsters. As we found it a bit distracting to roll dice and fight our Monsters simultaneously, we fought them one after the other. That might be one of the reasons why the game took longer than expected. What was really nice was the rule that the player who has the highest Initiative can pick the Monster which he wants to fight first. So this gives the INT considerably more value and allows for some nice drafting and screwing up the other player if you enjoy that, by picking the easiest Monster if you are weak at the moment or pick the Monster with the most promising reward etc.
Here's a shot of the game in progress:
Note that we kept track of Life Points with red wooden pieces, used little blue D6s for DEF and glass pebbles for Energy.
So after we had fought some Monsters both of us bought an additional Hero. Berni went for Chortle the Slow, who is actually a Turtle that can carry up to 3 Shields at once (don't ask me how he does it  ) and I recruited Talrog the Stout, who lacks in DEF but has a lot of Life Points which even regenerate at each year end.
To give you an impression how long the game took us: The first year (one cycle through the adventure deck) took us exaclty 50 Minutes. Granted we had to get used to the cards and everything first, but we weren't wasting a lot of time with chit-chat, were pretty fast in combat etc. Year 2 took us 45 minutes.
In general, Berni and I found ourselves attacking higher level Monsters (which we wouldn't have needed to attack)to get lots of gold and Treasures pretty early on, without any considerable losses. One time it was close though as we ran into a "Encounter Level 4 Monsters" card while the Terrain "Coast/Tidal Flats/Island" was on the table, reducing the level of each Monster Encounter by 1 while adding an additional treasure to the reward each Monster gets you. So I found myself fighting the mighty Bargost Thundertail as early as year 3. I was able to finish him off pretty fast and without many losses in Life Points due to some lucky dice rolls on my part.
So in year 3, after 2 hours of a quite epic dice-fest, erm, adventure (I am not trying to be sarcastic. I liked it a lot but the game dragged on much longer than expected, the hour was late and the beer started kicking in...) Berni, who was the current leader, decided to end the game, with whatever outcome, by engaging the big old meanie Grimlock the Cruel. However he did that in quite a smart way. He used the Spell "Form Fate" to rearrange the top 7 cards from the Adventure Deck in an order so that we would be able to visit the Hermit (we both had 600 Gold to spare and each of us bought two level III Treasures to improve our chances against the end-boss) before engaging Grimlock.
Here is what the game looked like as Berni decided to attack the all-powerful Grimlock the Cruel:
The fight agains Grimlock was pretty tense and felt well-balanced. Like we couldn't tell if the both of us would emerge as victors in the end, if Grimlock would kill off one or even the both of us. At this point Berni and I remembered we had some leftover Scrolls (actually we did not use any of them before Grimlock, as we simply forgot we had them in the fever of battle) without which our chances to win would have been drastically lower. So Berni's Chortle was taking all the hits from Grimlock, but the moment he was about to die, Berni used one of his Treasures - Elixir - to heal Chortle fully. My Talrog had less luck and eventually succumbed to Grimlock's numerous and fierce attacks on him. In the end we beat Grimlock and how it was done was very satisfying actally. My last Hero, Halmond the Drunkard, on his last Life Point, with his last bit of Energy delivered a mighty "Bodycheck" (A Feat that deals 2 damage to Halmond and 3 damage to a Monster) and knocked the oh-so powerul Grimlock out at last. The end battle felt really tense and rewarding. In hindsight both Berni and I agreed that it wasn't a bad idea at all to fight Grimlock earlier on, as the number of each of his D8 attacks increases with the years (In year 3 Grimlock performs 3 attacks in sequence to every player's weakest Hero - DEF-wise).
So to sum up I would say that the game was an epic experience, an epic adventure, but both Berni and I tend to like shorter games in the half and hour to one hour range better than long ones. And this game dragged on for too long, although the end battle paid us back for our patience. A minor complaint was also that you had to handle a ton of pieces to keep track of everything. However, the use of blue D6s for example reduced the number of pieces tremendously as mentioned before.
What was really a shame was that none of us got "ghostified", meaning we never had our last Hero die and turn into his Ghost version. Maybe we were just lucky this time. I would really have liked to see how the Ghosts would have worked out... Well maybe in our next game. I just hope there will be a next game, as Berni, as I said before, prefers shorter games. And so do my other friends. Also with Biomechanic Dino Battles: The Deckbuilding Game on the table, the chances for DS are not too good.
However I will try to convince Berni to give it another go next week at the very latest!
Well I hope you found my rules update interesting and enjoyed reading the first session report and the many pictures. And stay tuned for more - Rob and I will start to post about Dragonslayers on here on a regular basis again!
Thanks for reading!
Yours,
Andi
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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Due to the tireless efforts of you, my valued playtesters, I can present you now with the most up-to-date, comprehensive Dragonslayers Rules:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/Dragonslayers-Rules-9...
When reading this please keep in mind that I am no native English speaker.
Any questions, suggestions, clarifications, rewording, rephrasing and revisions would be more than welcome!
Thank you very much for everything so far!
Yours,
Andi
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Robert Seater
United States
Ashland
Massachusetts
Director of Game Development at Cambridge Games Factory
Feed me...games...
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I’ve been trying to combine the various suggestions on this threat to create multiplayer DS rules. The hardest part is to get the game mechanics and difficulty to scale up smoothly as more players are added, without adding too many fiddly mechanics. E.g. I don’t want to have to change the deck composition based on the number of player, but I don’t mind small variations in setup. I’m also torn about player elimination – I really want players to worry about getting eliminated, but I don’t want people to have to sit out for a long period because of some early bad luck (especially if the game is going to last 30-45 minutes, and the early fights are going to be legitimately challenging!).
Below is my current mostly-cooperative rule suggestion:
(1) Rotate who is leader each turn, passing that role to the left. The leader decide to fight or flee (when facing a high level monster).
(2) When a monster attacks (when its initiative comes due), it rolls a separate attack against each player. If a player has several heroes, the attack goes against the lowest DEF hero, with that player breaking ties (as in the solo game). If a player has been eliminated, the extra attack is skipped -- there is always exactly 1 monster attack per player left in the game.
(3) Monsters are also harder to kill. For each player number, there is a card you use to augment all monsters. E.g. there is one for 2 player games, one for 3 player games, and so on. We can probably support as many as 8-10 players. The card is two sided -- a red side shows mostly bonus hearts (LP) and some bonus shields (DEF); a blue side shows mostly bonus shields and some bonus hearts. Each monster is either flagged as red or blue, and the corresponding side of the boost card is used. This reduces the extent to which all monsters look the same in a 8 player game.
(4) Each player receives the full gold reward of the defeated monster, but players may not share gold and equipment (except at the Trader location). If there are items as rewards, the killing blow player gets the items, and everyone else gets a gold substitute (50/100/150 for level I/II/III items).
(5) There is a partial form of player elimination. A player who loses his last hero is temporarily eliminated from the game, and he gives all of his items and gold to a single surviving player. At a tavern, you can buy a new hero for an eliminated player for only 200 (bringing them back into the game), instead of 300 to buy an extra hero for yourself. When you bring a player back into the game, they always start with their original starting character, so there is some continuity to their play experience.
(6) If the team defeats Grimlock, all surviving players win (and all dead players lose). If all players are out of the game at any one time, everyone loses.
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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Fellow playtesters!
I made a printer friendly version of the new Dragonslayers cards as proposed by Robert. You can download them here:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/Dragonslayers-Playtes...
I left the stats on Heroes, Monsters and Items blank so you can add them with a pencil and make adjustments easily (speaking of balancing). You can find the current values on the excel spread sheet here:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/draft-overhaul-6-17-2...
Just so as you know: Asking you to print and cut out 15 pages of cards is a bit much to ask so you don't need to go the extra mile unless you wish to do so. You guys helped me out a lot already anyways.
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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Here's the excel spread sheet with all the new cards as proposed by
Robert Seater
United States
Ashland
Massachusetts
Director of Game Development at Cambridge Games Factory
Feed me...games...
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/draft-overhaul-6-17-2...
And here's my question:
Sadly, the old cards I sent you from TGC are already horribly outdated. So would anybody be interested in printing the new cards?
If so I will prepare pdfs with all the new cards this coming week and post them here.
Just tell me if some of you would go the extra mile and have themselves a copy of the revised game printed!
Thanks and cheers,
Andi
Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:13 pm
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Paul Hackman
United States
Champaign
Illinois
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I played my first couple games last night. I think the mechanic I liked best was the terrain cards. By flipping over terrain cards it took an abstract card game and made it feel much more like an adventure spanning a large area. It also added to the replayability of the game since fighting Grimlock in the mountains will be somewhat different from fighting him in the Meadows.
I also love the idea of having the terrains intensify with each passing year.
The part of the game that failed to evoke that same feeling of adventuring was the locations. I'm flipping over cards, wondering what will happen next and suddenly I'm at a generic Blacksmith shop that offers me the exact same things as the other Blacksmith shop I just left. Now I don't have a ton of experience with fantasy boardgames, but I have played plenty of fantasy video games. In fantasy boardgames your party of heroes goes from town to town, stocks up on whatever unique items are sold there, and goes off on quests that the townspeople give you. The towns are all pretty similar, but they are different enough to be memorable.
So how could DS capture this same feeling without a map?
I propose that instead of location cards DS should have village cards. Each village would have its own name. On each village card would be a list of what stores are available in town. So "Idlewild Village" might have a blacksmith and a trader but "Riverstone" might have a spell shop and a tavern. Once a hero or party decided to stop at a village they would be able to use the services of any stores there. For stores that sell things (blacksmith) the player would only be able to choose from the first three cards of that deck. So not every village will have an axe or chain mail. Some might only have swords so now the player has to decide whether or not to pay for a sword for the dwarf, or continue to hold out for an axe at the next village.
So what's the catch? Wouldn't this make the game easier by allowing a player to visit multiple locations in a single village? Well, in these times of roving monsters villagers are not eager to let strangers into town. Whenever you stop at a village you promise to help the village by fighting a certain number of monsters before going to another village. So if my party stops at Riverstone to rest and buy some spells, I then have to kill 3 monsters before I can stop at another village. So I better stock up on potions and spells and heroes before setting out to fulfill my quest.
The main advantage I see here is thematic. It would feel more like you are traveling and questing in a specific land rather than just going from one random event to the next. But I also think this change adds new interesting decisions. Instead of always just thinking about the next monster, players now have to think 2 or 3 monsters ahead. Players also will have tough decisions to make about which villages to visit. At one village I can get more heroes but I can't equip them with weapons. At another village I can buy cool stuff but I can't rest my weary party. If I just keep traveling and traveling until I find the village with everything I need then I've just wasted a lot of time and skipped a bunch of monsters that will come back next year more powerful (if I am interpreting some of the suggested changes correctly).
I would also suggest putting in event cards called "Ambush" in which the player is forced to fight the next monster that turns up, thus making it dangerous to continue to skip over villages.
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Robert Seater
United States
Ashland
Massachusetts
Director of Game Development at Cambridge Games Factory
Feed me...games...
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I just posted a file containing an XLS spreadsheet with a complete revision of the decks. It also lists the rule changes I have been using (on the final sheet of the file). It should get through admin modding soon. A few notes (in no particular order):
- Currently, the game last 4 years, before you are forced into the showdown battle. It makes the game last a little longer, but is seems about fair (and gives you more time with the higher level monsters). The lower cash influx makes the late game quite tense, so I decided not to rush it. That was a recent change, so I'm not quite sure it's right -- it might make the game too easy for some characters or if you get a good start. But so far, I still lose most of the time, so things are looking good.
- I've been playing games in about 30-45 minutes. I lose a lot, but I usually feel like I could have won if things had gone a little better or if I'd made better choices. The end of each year tends to be a bit easy, but then the new year brings new forced battles that are trouble.
- Much testing is needed, especially on the relative value of the different heroes. It's hard to get a lot of data on those, and some heroes are better late game, but have a rough time getting started. Their powers are also weird enough that it's hard to assess them in the abstract.
- In the published game, I think 7 of the 14 heroes will be flagged with an icon meaning "not a good idea to use as your starting hero if you are new to the game". The ones I have flagged right now are
(a) all the ones with an attack of -4,
(b) the assassin, and
(c)the shapeshifter.
Those guys are trickier to play in the early game, and can be a bit tedious and random if you don't equip them properly. As such, they aren't a good play experience for new player but they're good for some variety.
- I'm also curious about win percentages, what monster tends to do player in (when they lose), and how players tend to win (when they do)?
(a) the player kills grimlock before year 4
(b) the player kills grimlock in year 4
(c) the player kills grimlock alone in the showdown
(d) the player kills grimlock with some buddies in the final showdown
- I recast all events (except the Curse) as locations and/or terrains, to simplify things. I was worried at first, but I find that I don't miss them -- and there's no memory at all. Curse might be better named as "winter" or "snowfall" to go with the 'time passing' theme.
- I also added some more ways to get treasures (including buying them from the Hermit). I raised the number of distinct treasures at each level to 8, and I made the cursed items a mix of good and bad effects -- they often mess you up, but they don't completely hose you. I also added a super-treasure, the "weapon of legend" which can be bought for 500 from the witch. The intent was for it to offer a way to win the game with just 1 or 2 heroes, rather than the 3-4 that I normally see. It also shouldn't come out every game, so it's exciting when it does.
- I trimmed down the number of terrains (to 6). This way, the terrain stick around for longer each, and it feels like you're slogging through the landscape.
- On my prototype, I've been using a graphic layout where there is an icon for each LP and an icon for each DEF, which I cover up as damage is dealt and wounds received. That reduces the math that I have to do, which I find helps further de-fiddle the game.
- This is still just a revision of the solo rules. Now that the basic game is harder, I feel like I'm ready to catch up on the multi-play discussions that have been going on.
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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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Thanks to your tireless efforts, Dragonslayers has changed a lot and is evolving very fast. While this creative process is vital to turning DS into an exciting, satisfying and fun to play game, the original playtest copies I sent out to you are already horribly outdated.
In an effort to solve this problem, I will post here links to pdfs of blank card templates for Heroes, Monsters, Events, Terrain etc you can print to add the new cards to the game and to enable you to update it more easily. Simply add the stats and info to the cards with a pencil, so you can erase and change them easily, as the game is bound to be undergoing a lot of changes and balancing still...
Here you can download the blank card templates:
Events:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/blank-events.pdf
Heroes and Monsters:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/blank-heroes-or-monst...
Items and Treasures:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/blank-items-and-treas...
Locations:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/blank-locations.pdf
Potions and Spells:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/blank-potions-and-spe...
Terrain:
http://ap.o-nan.org/wp-content/uploads/blank-terrain.pdf
Hope these templates are helpful to some of you!
I know printing stuff yourself is much to ask, so you need only do it if you really want to. For a current list of the contents of the Adventure Pile read Rob's post here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/2989/making-the-deck-h...
(read comments to see the newest version of the Monsters).
Another thing:
Rob and I were thinking of adding more weapons to the Blacksmith inventory. How about this weapons line-up:
Sword: +1 ATK (50 Gold)
Bow: two-handed, +3 INIT, +1 ATK, -1 DEF (50 Gold)
Battleaxe: +2 ATK (100 Gold)
Mace: +3 ATK, -2 INIT (100 Gold)
Spear: +3 ATK, +2 INIT (150 Gold)
Halberd: two-handed, +4 ATK (150 Gold)
Tell me what you think. Two handed weapons don't allow the use of a shield while equipped (or a second weapon in case of Ulg the Oak).
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Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
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I definitely want to have a (female) Elf character in the game, so I came up with this:
Add a new item to the Blacksmith: Bow, cost 50 Gold: +3 INIT and -1 DEF (Two-handed: Cannot carry a shield when wielding Bow)
There are currently 16 Heroes in the game. I improved Balmir and gave Halmond and Magnifex new abilities. Check the chart I made and tell me what you think.
The hero I am least sure about is Olog, the Troll. Firstly I don't know how his enourmous amount of LPs and his ability will work out (testing needed) and secondly, trolls are ususally bad guys. But that might be interesting: Villain turned hero or something like that. 
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Michael
United States
Nebraska
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So I took Dragonslayers downtown today to the local video/board gaming scene. I played a game of 2p competitive and by the end of it we had 3 or 4 spectators too. They all had notes to offer so I thought I would share them here.
They said thematically it had some issues: The tax collector card seemed a bit off to them. "What's a tax collector doing out wondering through this swamp with us? Can't we just fight him?" They had similar issues with discovering various shops while dungeneering.
There was also some issues during the start of non-turns. By this I mean turns where you don't do anything but avoid a large monster. Since each player has an equal probability of getting these non-turns, it's not really a balance issue as much as it was a game flow issue. The top half of the deck was heavy with strong monsters, so a lot of the game was just passing back and forth doing nothing. My opponent said he would like the game better if there was more action/decision making early on.
The game they most compared it to was Munchkin
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