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Archive for Julian Fox
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Hello again,
After a mammoth amount of effort I have managed to get the low colour versions of the PnP cards together for the Human and Sylax races. I am currently working on getting the full colour ones up and should have them up in the next few days.
So feel free to play, have fun and let me know what you think / suggest improvements etc. We have done a fair amount of guided playtesting so some blind playtesting seems in order 
Current Rulebook - v0.2 (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/Forefront%20Rules%20v0.2.pd...)
Sylax Cards - Low Colour (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/PNP%20-%20Sylax%20-%20Low%2...)
Human Cards - Low Colour (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/PNP%20-%20Human%20-%20Low%2...)
Sylax Cards - Full Colour (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/PNP%20-%20Sylax%20-%20Full%...)
Human Cards - Full Colour (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/PNP%20-%20Human%20-%20Full%...)
I would suggest starting off playing with 2 players and extending the game to 3 or 4 by printing additional sets of the Sylax and Human ships. Stick to using private markets for each player (although feel free to experiment!).
For a quick example of the start of a 2 player game refer to (2 Player Example Play)
To play the game you will also need a number of victory tokens, around 20 per player (I currently just use the gems from Ascension).
Enjoy!
Edit: Added links to the full colour pdfs.
Edit2: Added victory token note.
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So, it has been a little while since I last posted any Forefront updates.
Time has been spent on attempting to get the rulebook all prettied up, leading me to realise how awful I am at desktop publishing and finally putting it aside to get someone qualified to do. I have also sent off my first batch of cards to artscow for printing to see what they will actually look like when they aren't hand cut pieces of paper in sleeves. In honour of this milestone the first card I'm previewing is not a card at all, but the back of them.
So not much to say here really but "oh my god it's full of stars". I'm making a space game people... it had to happen eventually! Maybe full of nebula is more accurate as I can only count 3 stars...
With today's preview I decided to break the mould a little by previewing a Human ship along side a Sylax ship. There are a few reasons for this.
1. I like clams
2. Foxhounds don't like clams
3. The two races were designed to be complementary and these two guys hopefully illustrate this well.
First up we have the Pileus, looking like a very staunch defender. But what happens when you have too much defence just sitting around when your opponent attacks? Trade it in for victory tokens I say! You also have the option to get these guys out of the way and let a bit of that attack through for a chance to gain the all important game shifting desperate measures cards.
Alternate methods of gaining victory tokens are important as they can assist in a defensive strategy or help you push through the last few victory tokens you need to win the game when your opponent goes all turtle on you.
Which brings us to the next guy. The Foxhound has a fairly beefy defence rating of 3 but only a measly 1 attack. If your opponents are putting on the pressure early then they can be a smart buy to stem the bleeding. However, sometimes when you turtle you over turtle and your defenders sit around doing nothing. Foxhounds won't work miracles while attacking based on their attack value alone but they do offer a free victory token for the fleet they attack with. A few tokens here and there can add up quick, sprinkling a few of these into a deck filled with diamond symbol ships can get you there much quicker than you might think.
The other thing to note is the "(once per fleet)" text on the Foxhound. A fleet containing a ship with this text may only use this ability once . "Once" is identified by the ships name, so two ships with different names and an identical ability that both trigger will both resolve. A fleet attacking with 3 Foxhounds would only gain a single victory token however.
Hope you have enjoyed this post, I'll keep this to a weekly thing. If nothing else it gives my artist time to catch up 
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Welcome to another card preview for Forefront. This time we have a preview for the Sylax starter deck. The Sylax are an insect race that travel the galaxy in large organic bio-ships. I think Hatem has done a great job with the artwork on these. Let me know what you think.
Each starter deck has a builder ship, for the Sylax it is the Drone. Drones can be wrecked to reduce the cost of Sylax ships for the turn. They can also be used for some interesting board manipulation due to the fact that they can be wrecked even when they are part of a fleet with the added benefit of being able to discard an idle ship from play without the cost of spending an action. Finding creative ways to manipulate your ships in play forms a core part of the gameplay in Forefront.
The second previewed card is the Sylax fighter ship. This ship has the same ability as the human fighter ship except that it gains defense instead of attack. The Sylax may start off as a defensive race but many of their other cards enable offensive strategies. The Sylax also have the capability to turtle up and slowly build up victory tokens through card abilities.
Mon Feb 20, 2012 12:01 pm
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Hello again,
After a number of pieces of feedback I have altered the Forefront rulebook to read a little better. I also did away with the reshuffle rule as suggested by Nate K against the v0.1 post, it greatly simplifies things and makes for a shorter and sharper rule text.
Minor rewording has been carried out and the overview has been tightened up and the turn sequence added (thanks Nick). Destroying has been renamed to wrecking to help distinguish it from Discarding (2 D words could get confusing - shout out to Scott Wilbur).
Without further ado here they are:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/Forefront%20Rules%20v0.2.pd...
Julian Fox
Mon Feb 20, 2012 11:04 am
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Well I managed to finish v0.1 of the rules for Forefront. The rules had been floating around for quite some time as a series of paper notes and half typed up ramblings, all of our playtesting sessions to date had been based on a common understanding of the rules as they stood in these hallowed documents.
It was a lot harder than I thought it would be to make them cohesive, currently they make plenty of sense to me but I don't know how much sense they will make to others. So here they are:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/59995547/Forefront%20Rules%20v0.1.pd...
Any feedback is appreciated
Julian Fox
Wed Feb 15, 2012 10:43 am
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When the game begins each player places a planet horizontally in a line between them. These locations form the starting battlefront between the two players.
Player 1 performs a reinforce action. He places a card at the end of each lane on his side of the board from left to right. He now has 2 actions remaining
Player 1 spends his second action performing another reinforce, placing a card at the end of each of his lanes again stacking them on top of the cards already on the board.
Player 1 spends his final action performing a third reinforce action. Two things have happened here. Three Starfighters in the first lane have ended up stacked on top of each other, this gains Player 1 an additional action to spend this turn. These three Starfighters also form a fleet which will attack next turn. Player 1 has also turned over a location card as part of the reinforce action. He now has a choice, he can either place it at the front of a lane as a defence or place it horizontally creating an additional lane, only 1 location per lane can be placed as a defense. There is also the third option of choosing to destroy the card instead of placing in either position, but as this is early in the game it doesn't seem like the best idea. Player 1 decides to place the revealed location horizontally.
As Player 1 gained an additional action while reinforcing he now has the ability to perform one final action. He decides to perform a fourth reinforcement action figuring that he already has a fleet of three Starfighters, but if he could get a forth on top it would significantly boost their attack due to their ability (Starfighters gain an addition 1 attack when in a fleet of 4 or more). Note that he also reinforces to the newly formed lane created by his choice to place the location horizontally.
Luckily he hits! Now there is a fleet of four Starfighters attacking at the beginning of his next turn for a total of eight damage. This will be a hard one for his opponent to defend. Player 1's turn now ends.
Player 2 now has to try and get a bunch of stuff out on the board to defend with. The best way to start is by reinforcing so she places cards out from left to right on all 3 lanes on her side of the board.
Player 2's second action is also a reinforce, trying to get more ships in the way of the impending attack. As luck would have it she turns over an Asteroid Field. She now has the same choice that her opponent did, to place the location horizontally creating a new lane or vertically as a defense at the front of any lane on her side of the board. She opts to put the Asteroid Field's four defence value in front of the oncoming attack.
Player 2 only has one action remaining but she notices that she has 2 Drones sitting on top of her newly placed defensive location. She decides to spend her last action as a manoeuvre action, allowing her to take an idle ship from the end of any of her lanes and place it on the end of any other lane on her side of the board. She chooses to move the Drone from her middle lane to the top of the stack of Drones she has in the way of her opponents attack. This forms a three of a kind and she gains a bonus action.
At this point Player 2 is blocking seven out of the eight damage heading her way from the attack. Her opponent will only gain one victory point and she will be allowed to use a desperate measures card if she lets it through so she opts to spend her bonus action purchasing a card from the market.
She only has 2 idle ships at this point so is limited in what she can purchase, she sees that the Hunter card has two cogs on it as a cost so she spends her action discarding her two idle ships and placing a Hunter from the market into her discard pile. Her turn now ends.
The first thing that Player 1 has to do on his turn is attack with each fleet he controls. He only has one fleet in this scenario, his four Starfighters. To begin the attack he adds up his total attack power (8) he then compares this attack power to the first card in his opponents lane (Asteroid Field with 4 defense). His attack is greater than the defense of the Asteroid Field so the Asteroid Field card is destroyed (defensive locations are removed from the game while defensive ships are simply discarded from play). 4 of his attack value has also been blocked so far so he compares this number to the defense of the next ship (Drones with 1 defense). His attack of 4 is still greater so the Drones is placed into Player 2's discard pile. He repeats this process until he either runs out of attack or runs out of defending ships.
In this case the result is that the Asteroid Field is destroyed, 3 Drones are discarded and he has 1 remaining attack at the end of the combat. For each point of attack value that isn't blocked he gains a victory token, in this case just a single token for what seemed like a huge attack, this damage is called breakthrough damage. After calculating the breakthrough damage his attacking Starfighters are discarded from play to regroup.
At the end of his combat phase, for each opponent that was dealt breakthrough damage he compares how many victory tokens he now has compared to how many they have. Each opponent that was dealt breakthrough damage and now has fewer victory tokens than the current player may now look through their deck of Desperate Measures cards and pick one to put into play. If a player already has a Desperate Measure in play then their newly chosen card is placed over the old one, negating its effect. This represents a race that is losing the war redoubling efforts to try and overcome a more powerful foe.
Player 2 decides on the Arms Race Desperate Measure card which states that her ships have an additional +1 attack while it is in play. It also states that if she causes breakthrough damage the card should be returned to her Desperate Measures deck, removing it from play.
Play would then continue as normal for Player 1 from there.
I hope this post sheds some light on how the game mechanics work for Forefront.
Julian Fox
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So lets get straight into it. The cards being shown today are the human starter cards. Each player before beginning play has to choose to play with one of the sets of starter decks. There are 4 different races in the game; Human, Sylax (bio-ships), Ordan (high-tech aliens), Wayfarers (intergalactic junkers). Each starter deck contains 6 fighters, 6 builders and 5 locations (2 planets and 3 asteroid fields).
There are several ways to set up the market for a game. You can play with separate markets for each player that only contain their races ships (beginner). Alternatively you can do a randomised pool from all available ships choosing 4 ships per player which anyone can buy from (intermediate). Or for play groups with multiple sets of the game you can construct a pool of 5 ships that you use as your own personal market (advanced). The reason I mention this here is that although you start with a specific races starter cards you can still buy ships from other races during the game if your market set up allows it.
The first image here is of the constructor ship. Each starter race has a "builder" ship that reduces the cost of other ships of that race being purchased. It can be seen where the cost of the ship normally is on the lower left hand portion of the card there is the word "starter" so the starter deck cards are easy to find. The use of the cog symbol on the card as part of the cost of the constructor ability denotes that another "idle" ship needs to be discarded from play to use this ability, note that using a ship ability does not require spending an action unless otherwise specified on the card. Destroying the constructor effectively removes it from the game, thinning your deck. Each player has their own personal destroyed pile, which is relevant for some cards. The constructor here also has a plus symbol in the top left hand corner, this means it can form a fleet with any other cards with plus symbols including cards from other races such as the previously previewed Sylax Hunter card.
The second image is of the Starfighter. Each race has a different fighter card that comes in their starter deck. This particular card boosts it's own damage output when you have 4 of them stacked on top of each other in a fleet. The triangle symbol is used by all fighter cards and carrier cards in the game so these two types of ships can form fleets together. Humans ships are generally more aggressive in nature as you will see throughout the forthcoming previews.
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So... Card design is hard. When I first started putting together prototypes I spent a lot of time playing around with layouts trying to get something that I was happy with. I probably put too much of a focus on making it look pretty rather than something that was functional.
My feeling was that I would be playtesting in a busy store here in Melbourne Australia and that I wanted to catch the eye of any number of the random people that were there for other card and board games. The first design while functional and relatively attractive didn't achieve this and remained until a rule change forced me to rework the cards anyway. So rework I did and ended up with what I hope is close to my final card layout and design.
As a hint to others that are going through an iterative design process; print, print, print! It's amazing how some things that look good on a computer screen don't look good at all in print. How light and dark things are can make a good looking digital image look muddy and unreadable when in physical form. I'm using a cheap laser printer (Fuji Xerox CP205w - around $200 here in AUS) to print all my prototypes, it was an upgrade over my dodgy inkjet which made everything look washed out. Having said that I have been through 2 sets of cartridges so make sure whatever you use doesn't cost too much to refill!
I don't have a huge number of the card iterations remaining due to the storage space required (working in 600dpi each one is about 60-70mb) but here is an example of some of the phases the hunter card went through.
So the first thing to note about this image is that it is using random artwork that I borrowed from deviantart. Originally the card design had a number in the top left corner. What this number represented was the number of ships of the same name you needed to have on top of each other to form a fleet to attack, so this hunter required 3 hunters stacked before it could attack. There also used to be this concept of a "fleet formation bonus" which gave you an extra action every time you formed a fleet that could attack. This got scrapped because imagine what happens when you have a deck that only contains a single type of card? Effectively infinite actions on a turn. This was a fairly common occurrence in early playtesting, figuring out how to abuse card text or game rules to gain infinite actions. Thankfully now most if not all of those strategies seem to have been ironed out.
So the next card design changed things up a bit with a slightly different layout. It introduced the concept of a cost, displayed as a yellow circle here on the midline, previously you just paid an action to buy any ship unless it had text that noted some additional cost. The cost on this card was paid by discarding "idle" ships (not in fleets) with "work value" of a total equal to or higher than 9. The "work value" is what the number in the top left corner was called, the lower the work value the more you got to attack with the ship but the less it was worth when purchasing new cards for your deck. This seemed like a natural equilibrium but ended up getting a bit tricky to balance cards later so it was altered in the final design. The other change of note is that symbols were altered to be more readable and the card name was made bigger as it played an important role when figuring out fleets and bonus actions etc. Card types were moved from a byline to the midline of the card, not unlike a number of other collectable card games. The abilities also changed on this card as it was found that destroying (removing from the game) any card of the opponents whether you knew what is was or not was far too powerful. The way abilities were expressed was also changed to a more standard cost -> effect rather than the "phase usable/trigger" -> effect situation on the first card. Each race also had it's cards assessed as a whole, certain themes and interactions were decided upon making each race feel cohesive.
That brings us to the final design where a lot of effort was put into reworking the aesthetics of the cards. We had a lot of magic players stop by to check out what we were playing while playtesting Forefront, the most common assumption was that the "work value" was the cost. Amongst other things I got sick of explaining it so the "work value" was replaced with a symbol and the rules were altered so that any ships with the same symbols can form a fleet together. This sped up the game a lot and led to symbol theming and symbol ability interactions that would not have been possible otherwise. It also allowed an open format where ships from different races could interact within a single players deck. Bonus actions from forming fleets were trashed and a simple 3 of a kind bonus was implemented instead, due to other rules changes this new bonus didn't have the same pitfalls as the earlier scrapped "fleet formation bonus". Fleets were standardise to forming when 3 ships of the same symbol were stacked allowing for more versatility but slightly less frequent attacking, another bonus was that idle ships were more common allowing more purchasing from the market. The other consequence of removing the "work value" was that costs had to change. I settled on a simple system that involved discarding idle ships from play equal to the cost of the ship, represented by the number of cogs present on the lower left of the card. The cog then became a universal symbol for "discard an idle ship from play" and is used as a cost for some abilities on other cards. The attack and defense symbols were also changed as when you have a bunch of cards stacked on top of each other with just the title bar showing it was found that quite a few people found it easier to count boxes to add up their attack or defense value rather than adding together a bunch of numbers. I guess what it comes down to is representing things visually and clearly as possible improves your game experience (something I'll definitely keep in mind for future endeavours).
Hopefully you have enjoyed this look at how the Forefront card designs have changed over time.
Julian Fox
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Hello again,
I will be adding a couple of card previews every couple of days so you can see what they look like as they near completion. Most of the location artwork has been finalized and a number of the ship images are nearing completion.
On to the cards!
Locations are an important card type in Forefront as they offer both defensive capabilities and the ability to widen the battlefront on which you are attacking someone. Having additional locations out on a battlefront means that when you reinforce you will be placing more cards from your deck into play, but it also means that your opponent gets the same benefit on their turn.
Wider boards mean more frantic and faster play from testing, the larger the front you are defending the more difficult it becomes to prevent attacks making it through. Conversely the larger the front you are attacking the harder it is to organise fleets to get your attack on.
The following 2 locations are planets which have slightly less defensive capability than asteroid fields. The defense value is the number of blue cubes on the top right of the card.
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Well so far I've been dealing in vagueries so I'll take the opportunity now to explain exactly what Forefront is.
Forefront is a science fiction themed deck building and strategy game.
2 to 4 players form battlefronts between them by placing location cards between themselves and neighbouring players which they contest with ship cards dealt out from the top of their respective decks. Each player has 3 actions to spend on each of their turns and may perform actions such as reinforcing a battlefront, buying a ship card from the market or moving ships around the "lanes" formed within each battlefront. Some ships have printed powers that may be used by the player at specific times noted on the card, ship abilities are "free" in terms of spending actions but may require a cost to be met, usually by discarding other ships from play.
Reinforcing is performed by flipping over a card from the top of your deck onto the space below each location in play between you and each other neighbouring player from left to right, forming a stack of ships if there are any already in play. If 3 ships of exactly the same name end up stacked on top of each other then you gain a bonus action. Each starter deck contains 6 fighters, 6 builders and 5 locations (2 planets and 3 asteroid fields). If you reinforce and a location is flipped over onto the end of a "lane" then you have a choice, you can place it at the front of any lane in that battlefront under the stack of ships as an extra defence or place it horizontally as an additional location between you and either of your neighbours.
Buying ships from the marketplace requires spending an action then discarding "idle" ships from play equal to the cost of the purchased ship. The more in play ships you spend the less ships you will have in play if your opponent attacks you so finding a balance is the name of the game. Purchased ships are placed face up in a discard pile next to your deck, along with any ships that were defeated during an attack.
Attacking is performed at the start of each players turns. Each ship card has a symbol on the top left of the card that denotes which other ships will form a "fleet" with it. Ships that are NOT in a fleet are considered "idle". Unless otherwise specified on a card ships are part of a fleet when there are 3 or more cards with the same symbol stacked on top of each other. Each fleet that you control at the start of your turn must attack your opponent over the location it is stacked at. Damage is defended by the ships on the opposing side of the location using their defence attribute. Any damage which isn't defended you collect in victory tokens, with the first person to 20 tokens winning at the end of the turn they gained them. After you have been attacked, if your opponent has more victory tokens that you do then you may play a desperate measures card, which can have some game changing effects!
Moving ships is performed by spending an action then moving a ship from the end of one "lane" to the end of another lane on your side of the battlefront it came from.
You also have a final option for spending your actions. You can elect to "destroy" an "idle" ship by placing it in a personal destroyed pile (effectively removed from the game) hence thinning your deck.
If at any point there are no cards in your deck and you need to place one as part of a reinforce action or card effect then shuffle your discard pile face down as your new deck.
The game ends at the end of the turn in which a player gains 20 or more victory tokens (not necessarily on their own turn).
A full rulebook is in the process of being written up, this blurb has been posted to give some context to the card posts that are to follow.
Julian Fox
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