Greetings, Friends!
Yesterday we did the first playtest of Revision IV of the card design for the Western Shores game.
A quick reminder — the game is about Viking Explorers braving the unknown.
Some changes in the rules and in the card design were immediately scheduled and here is my report of what is new today.
A double exposure of a print screen of a change and one of my watercolor illustrations for the project.
What you see here is...
A set of nine cards, only three unique designs among them. They were all changed for a better balance.
The resources that a card can cost are:
W - Wood
F - Food
A - Attack Value
P - Population Value
S - Ships Available (not anywhere within this image).
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Marketplace
had to change the When of things. That effect bellow shouldn't be on each of a player's turns so I changed it to only when you play the card as a tile on your map. More on game rules — soon.
The regular bonus it provides then changed to what was previously only triggered on Discard.
Duelling Grounds
combined its previous version with the card Sacrificial Site. We shall pass on sacrificial practices for now. It also gained a point of value and it costs more.
So, two cards which had 2 copies of each before and cost 4 resources total each, are now combined in one card with 4 copies of it and a total cost of 6.
Gathering Hall
You can see the old version top left and the new version bottom right on the image.
Providing P or A would make it the same as Duelling Grounds. So it's only P now, but the Discard option changes to Drawing a card which is more in the sense of a village Gathering Hall providing the community for its various possible needs.
I made lots of changes like these today and I am heading back to another round of testing.
What I had to do since yesterday includes:
Defining a better Turn Order;
Shifting cards to different stages of drafting during the game;
Reducing some Population costs;
Changing some of the resources that cards provide to meet the needs for more...workforce;
The Major-Major Change Is
The Draft now puts cards directly into players'hands instead of into the Discard piles which later feed their recycled decks...which should speed up the game quite a bit and eliminate a lot of frustration. Maybe that was the change that we needed to make the game more fun and more dynamic.
We shall see...
Crowdfunding the project — Current State Info
I have created the @thewesternshores account as a fund and it will be set as a beneficiary to receive 50% of the payouts.
The first goal is to fund the illustration process. There will be about 70 unique artworks. Of those, about 21 are done. The remainder will take about six more months of work at least.
The total sum we're aiming at is 7,500 USD. Other channels will be used but here's the beginning of it.
Any support counts. Even your feedback through comments.
You can directly donate to @thewesternshores.
A gallery with digital rewards for backers, as well as more info about the game, coming soon.
Here's another almost random previous post about the project.
Thank you for being with us!
Yours,
Manol
