May The Riftforce Be With You (also: custom guild ideas)

 Riftforce

Riftforce is a recent lane combat game (like Battle Line or SolForge or something) that I've been playing a lot on BoardGameArena lately. I haven't played a whole lot of this type of game in the past, and frankly, the ones I have played didn't excite me that much for on reason or another. I kinda liked SolForge I guess, but that was about it.

But Riftforce... Riftforce is pretty awesome. You start out by drafting a team of 4 different Guilds which will make up your deck. Each guild (or suit) will have 9 cards (4x 5's, 3x 6's, and 2x 7's), and each guild has an effect - how much damage it deals, or in what way, when activated.

On your turn you simply choose from 3 options...

1. Play: Put up to 3 cards (matching guild or value) into play in the same lane, or each in an adjacent lane
2. Activate: Discard a card from your hand to activate up to 3 cards matching that card's guild or value
3. Check & Draw: Collect points from any lane where you have unopposed cards, then refill your hand to 7 (you can't do this if you already have 7 cards)

Activating a card allows it to do its thing - dealing some amount of damage to an opposing card and using whatever its guild effect might be. Cards can take their value in damage before they're discarded.

You score 1 point for each opposing card you kill, and 1 point for each lane you control when you Check & Draw, and it's a race to 12 points.

And that's it. The rules are simple, but the game play is varied and interesting, especially due to the way you draft your guilds for the game. There are 10 total guilds in the base game, and each player plays with 4 of them per game. During setup, each player is dealt 1 guild at random, then drafts 3 more from a supply of 7 (the last one isn't used). Since each guild has an ability or effect, they can combo together in interesting ways. Removing 1 guild and being dealt one at random go a long way toward keeping you from always leaning on the same guilds.

To be honest though, since you use 4 guilds per game, and some of the guild effects are kinda similar, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're playing a wholly different game each time. but there's an expansion coming soon (is it out yet?) that adds 8 more guilds, which I'm sure will help, I look forward to those being added to BGA.

Base Game Guilds

Here are the 10 guilds in the base game:

• Crystal: Deal 4 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. When killed, opponent gets 2 points instead of 1
• Fire: Deal 3 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. Deal 1 damage to the ally directly behind this card
  
• Water: Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. Then move to an adjacent lane and deal 1 damage to the 1st opposing card at that rift
• Air: Move to any other rift, then deal 1 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift and each adjacent rift
• Earth: Deal 1 damage to the each opposing card at this rift when this comes into play. Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift
• Plant: Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at an adjacent rift, then move it to this rift
• Thunderbolt: Deal 2 damage to any opposing card at this rift. If it dies, deal 2 more damage to any opposing card at this rift.
• Light: Deal 2 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. Heal 1 damage from any ally
• Ice: If the last opposing card at this rift is damaged, deal 4 damage to it. Otherwise deal 1 damage to it
• Shadow: Move to any other rift, then deal 1 damage to the 1st opposing card at this rift. If it dies, score an additional point

Expansion Guilds

Here's what's to come in the expansion:

• Beast: Move this beast to an adjacent location. If there is damage on that beast, put 3 damage on the first enemy in that location. Otherwise, deal 2 damage on him.
• Lava: Deal 2 damage each to the first enemy in the adjacent locations. Put 1 damage each on this lava and all allies in front of this lava.
• Love: When playing this love remove all damage from an ally in that location. Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location.
• Magnet: Deal 2 damage to the last enemy in this location. Move this enemy and magnet to an adjacent location.
• Acid: Deal 3 damage to the first enemy in this location. Deal 1 damage to the second enemy in this location. If the acid destroys an enemy, you will not receive a Riftforce.
• Sand: Move this sand to any other location. Deal 1 damage to each enemy in this location. Remove 1 damage from this sand.
• Music: Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If that enemy is destroyed by the music, play it on your side of the Rift at an adjacent location.
• Magic: Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If you have less than 7 elementals in hand, draw 1 elemental.

Custom Guilds

I see that someone has posted a fan expansion on BGG with 15 custom guilds in it. Here are some of my own ideas for guilds (some might be similar to the ones on the fan expansion, I wrote them down before seeing that):

• When activating and there's no card opposing, +1 Riftforce
• When activating and there's no card opposing, opponent loses 1 Riftforce
• Choose an enemy (any card?) at this location with damage on it and return that card to its owner's hand 
• Do 2 damage to the first enemy in this location, then shift 1 damage from one opposing card to another
• When activated, get 1 Riftforce and discard this card. Opponent does not gain Riftforce for this
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. After you Check & Draw, deal 1 damage to the first enemy in this location.
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. Before you Check & Draw, each of ~this move 1 opposing card from their lane to an adjacent lane
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If they die, draw a card
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. If they die, activate any one other card in play
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. You may put a card into play at this location
• Move all damage on opposing cards in this lane onto one card
• Move up to 2 damage from allies in any lane to any enemies in that same lane
• Heal up to 2 damage from any card(s) in play. For each, deal 1 damage to any card opposing the healed card
• cards that don't have to come into play adjacent to each other or something... "After coming into play, move this to any lane"
• would it be useful enough to have a Trap sort of effect: "Opponent's cards at this Rift cannot move" (trap water, air, shadow, and I think one or 2 of the expansion ones)
• Destroy the first enemy at this location. You may not activate any other cards this turn. [meaning they must activate alone]   
• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. When ~this comes into play, heal 1 damage on any ally

And a few ideas from my friend David: 

• Deal 1 damage on the first enemy at this location. Add 1 card from your hand to any location. This new card comes with 1 damage on it
• When you play this card, it comes with 2 damage on it. [When activated] Discard this card with no effect, add two cards to two different rifts
• If this is the first ally at this location, deal 3 damage to the first enemy at this location. Otherwise, deal 1 damage to any enemy at this location

It might be nice to see some guilds with non-standard card distributions - an all-5s guild that's weak, but easy to activate. A guild with some 9s (instead of 7s?), which can only activate each other, but are very hard to kill. I saw that the fan expansion linked above had some of that in it.

Edited to add:

• Deal 2 damage to the first enemy in this location. Move an ally from this location to any other location. deal 2 damage to any ally in that location and 1 damage to that ally
• Deal 1 damage to each enemy at this location
• Deal 1 damage to the first enemy in this location. Activate another [~this] that has not been activated this turn
• Tank: deal 1 damage to first enemy here and move to the front of the rift. For each damage dealt to this Tank, heal 1 damage from a non-Tank ally
• Deal 1 damage to the first enemy in this location for each [~this] here. Only the frontmost [~this] in the location may activate 

This game lends itself well to making custom guilds, and it would be easy to play them... if I had the game and played in real life! Playing only on BGA, I will have to be content thinking up fun guild powers and never playing with them. Hopefully the expansion will be implemented soon (though the base game is only in Beta, so it might be a while)

Have you thought of your own guilds? Post them in a comment below! 

ONE 18-card game design jam, THREE microgames!

18-card game jam

In the KBGames Community discord they just did an 18 card game design jam -- which is an exercise to think about designing a game under certain constraints - much like we used to do with the Game Design Showdown at BGDF.com back in the day. The only restraint on this jam was to use 18 cards and nothing else, but it was made clear that this restriction was more like a guideline, and not a hard and fast rule...

Worker Placement Microgame

I've posted recently about the progress I've made on a Micro Worker Placement game, inspired by an offhand comment I read on Twitter. I haven't really played that game again since that last update (I'm still keen to see how it plays after whittling it down to 16 cards in the deck), but I know that the game works, and isn't terrible, but I'm not sure whether I can claim it's really very fun, though I enjoy it.

I figured I might submit that Micro Worker Placement game to the jam... is that cheating? I came up with it before the jam started, but I didn't spend any more time on it than would have been allotted. The current version only uses 17 "real" cards, but it does use 8 more to track things, so it really comes in at 25 cards, which is over the limit by almost 40%. Maybe that's fine, but the point of the jam is to come up with a new idea. I wasn't particularly interested in making another 18 card game, but lo and behold, an idea came to me...

PYL Microgame

Inspired perhaps by all the Living Forest I'd been playing on BGA (that's a good game, by the way, and recently won the Kennespiel des Jahres!), I thought maybe I could make an 18 card Push Your Luck game with that blackjack mechanism like in Living Forest or Flip City.

So I did that. Of the 18 cards, 2 are for tracking your gems and points (you need 8 tokens, 4 per player, to track those things on these cards), 1 is a double sided "objective" card, and the remaining 15 make up the deck. There are 5 cards each of red, blue, and gold colored cards, and each card has a gem, and some number of letters on it. Originally each card's gem matched the card color, but then I decided to mix it up a bit, so for example, 3 of the 5 red cards have red gems, but 1 has a blue gem and one has a gold gem.

On your turn, you start flipping cards off the deck until you chose to stop, or until you "bust" by getting 6 or more of the same letter (A, B, or C). You are allowed to pay a gold gem to veto a card as its drawn (set it aside by the deck), then either stop drawing or draw again (up to you). This could be used to keep from busting, or to keep a particular color from scoring (see below).

After you stop, you collect gems: all gems of 1 color if you busted, two colors if you didn't. Then you get the opportunity to use the objective card to pay some gems for a star (stars are victory points in the game, it's a race to get 9 of them): 2 red + 1 gold on one side, 2 blue + 1 gold on the other, after using the card, you flip it over. Finally, you discard the cards and check to see if any colors score. 

The discard pile is kept organized - sorted by card color, and splayed so you can see the information on each card. This information allows you to make informed push-your-luck decisions. After each turn, if there are 4 (or all 5) cards of a color in the discard pile, then that color will score. It's possible more than one color will score at a time!

When you score a color, the player with the most gems of that color gets a star, and loses some gems of that color. The colors have a rock-paper-scissors relationship for breaking ties - for example, if tied for red gems, then the player with the most blue gems wins the point for red. Originally the rule was that you lose one gem when scoring a color, but once you started to get a big lead in a color, it felt pretty easy to keep it, and losing just 1 gem didn't close the gap very much. I'm torn between upping that to 2 gems lost, and something even more impactful, like 1/2 your gems (round up), or even all your gems. For my next test I'll try losing 2 gems and see if that feels like enough. Maybe losing 1 gem is fine after all.

I have to say, this game has just worked ever since the first playtest. The only tweak I made was to up the bust threshold to 6. I started with 5, but that led to a lot of turns where you only draw 2-3 cards and they weren't very interesting. 6 is much more dynamic!

Not only does this game work - that is to say it's a fully functional game - but I think it might actually be pretty good. As I've played more and more games I've found there's definitely some subtlety to it - when to stop not just to avoid busting, but to control which colors score, when to hit into a probable bust, when to spend gems to veto a card, and even when and whether to use the objective card.

I figured this might be a better candidate to submit to the 18 card jam, partly because I came up with it in the week between when the jam was announced and when it actually began (so that's closer, right?), and partly because it's 18 cards instead of 25... however it does require 8 tokens to track gems and stars. Still, that's less cheat-y, isn't it?

Lane Combat Microgame - Rift Paper Scissors

Another game I've been playing a lot of (and enjoying!) on BoardGameArena lately is Riftforce. To be honest, I've never been a big fan of lane combat games, I haven't even played very many of them. I liked SolForge I guess, but I don't recall playing any others I really enjoyed much.

But Riftforce is very cool. You start by drafting a team of 4 guilds, and they encourage different teams by (a) removing 1 team from the draft each game, and (b) dealing you a random guild to start off with - so you can't be sure to get your favorite team. Though truth be told, a lot of the combinations don't feel terribly different from each other, and in any given game I feel like I effectively ignore one of the guilds in my deck, so I'm not sure the games feel all that different to me. I look forward to playing with the expansion some day, which adds a bunch more guilds... and I even had a little fun thinking up custom guilds, something this game lends itself to easily for anyone so inclined. Maybe I'll make a new blog post to share those. But I digress...

Since I was thinking of 18 card games for this game jam, my mind ran through a few main mechanisms to see if anything jumped out at me as a way to do them in a small deck game. So of course, my mind quickly jumped to the idea of a small deck lane combat game, like a mini-version of Riftforce. Since I didn't have the componentry to track damage on all the cards like in Riftforce, I thought maybe I could use a Rock Paper Scissors relationship to resolve little combats.

A long time ago, after Brainfreeze became an iPad app, I had some thoughts about a follow up game - specifically for digital implementation - in which you would have cavalry, archers, and footmen cards in a deck, and you would place them in different lanes (probably 3), or else send them to train, which would occupy the card for a few seconds, then level it up. Every so often (maybe every second for example), the computer would "resolve" each lane, comparing the bottommost cards and removing the loser - where a level 2 card would beat a level 1 card, but if both cards are the same level, then there'd be a rock-paper-scissors relationship to determine who wins (in the case of a tie, like two level 1 archers against each other, maybe they're both removed). If you had cards on a lane when it resolved and the opponent did not, then you would get a point. Come to think of it, that decade old idea had some similarities with Riftforce!

So in my lane combat microgame (affectionately known as Rift Paper Scissors, due to the RPS combat resolution and the Riftforce inspiration), I figured there could be 3 battlefields, and you would have a small hand of cards that are either Rock, Paper, or Scissors. On your turn you would play 2 cards of the same type (rock, rock), play any 1 card and activate it, or discard a card to activate 2 cards of that type on the board. Activating a card meant attacking an opponent's card in the same lane. A 4th option you had on your turn was to resolve 1 lane and refill your hand. When resolving a lane, which was represented by a face don card from the deck, the player with the most cards in it would score it, which would give you some kind of effect, as well as some stars (vp). When there were no longer enough cards to refill the lanes, the game would be over, and the player with the most stars would win.

This first draft of the game did not work at all - it was far to common that you simply had the right card to dominate any card your opponent played ("you played Scissors there? I'll play Rock there and activate it"). And the effects I chose for winning a lane didn't even make sense - I had put "draw a card," but by definition you'd be filling your hand when you score it, so that wasn't great.

I made a 2nd attempt, expanding the cards to a sort of 6-way RPS... I gave each card a letter (A-F), and each letter had 1 letter it was really good against (deal 2 damage), one letter it was terrible against (deal 0 damage), and 4 letters it was evenly matched with (deal 1 damage). The 1st damage on a card would turn it sideways, the 2nd damage would remove it from the game. 

When I made the prototype for this, I started from the file that had red borders for rock, blue for paper, and yellow for scissors, so I ended up with 3 copies of each card, one with each colored border. I figured maybe the way to go was again, like Riftforce, to say you could play or activate 2 cards of the same letter, or the same color, or play 1 card and activate it. In general, this felt a little better with respect to game flow - the cards started to build up in play, but there was still something very wrong with the format..

In discussing this with a friend, Mohan suggested drawing 3 cards and simultaneously playing all 3 of them, 1 to each lane. That sounds potentially promising, so I might try something like that next. Perhaps after 3 rounds of placing the cards in their respective lanes, each lane could resolve by comparing the front-most cards head-to-head over and over (like my old iPad game idea), until only 1 side has cards remaining, and that side wins the lane.

With only 18 cards, at that point I think you'd have to shuffle everything up and begin again, maybe keep doing that until someone has won X lanes? Most of these ideas would work better with a larger deck, but with a larger deck, I might as well just play Riftforce!

ANYWAY... back to the game jam

The lane combat idea seemed like the best candidate to submit to the game jam, since I thought of it during the actual timeframe of the jam, and because it conforms to the actual rules of the jam (18 cards, nothing else), BUT I haven't been able to get it working, so I went ahead and submitted the Push-Your-Luck game instead.

So that's what I've been thinking about the last few weeks!

Micro Worker Placement game progress, and the "Strategy Triangle"

I recently posted about a micro worker placement game that had come together pretty quickly from idea to 1st prototype. I mentioned a lot of brainstorms in that post to improve the game. Since then, I have played 8 more times, iterating and making tweaks after each game.

Since joining the Keith Burgun Games Community Discord, I have not only played a lot of Dragon Bridge, but also participated in a lot of great game design-y chats, some of which centered around a concept known as the Strategy Triangle. That link is to a long post from Keith's describing the Strategy Triangle as he sees it. Here's a video of him talking about it which might be a little more succinct (the video is really long, but it should be queued up to his description).

I like the idea of this triangle, but it seems clear that no 2 people really agree on some of the details. A course grained reading of it, or my interpretation at least, is this:

•  An extreme "red" strategy spends all of its resources on direct progress
• An extreme "blue" strategy spends some of its resources more efficiently countering or slowing the opponent's direct progress, leaving some resources to invest, allowing for more progress later
• An extreme "green" strategy invests ALL of its resources, allowing for even more future progress

Given that, generally speaking... 

• Blue has an advantage over red, as they hold off the red strategy with efficient defense long enough for their investment to come online 
• Green has an advantage over blue, as any "efficient defense" is wasted, and green has invested more resources than blue, giving green a resource advantage for buying progress later
• Red has an advantage over green, as unhindered, they could bring the game to an end before green sees a return on its investment

In discussing this, I drew a crude graph to show advantage over time:

In any given matchup, you could look at this graph and see which strategy has an advantage at any given time (which line is higher). But more importantly, the area under the curve would be cumulative advantage, so depending on when the game ends, you could look at the area under the curve for each strategy and see which had more cumulative advantage, that would be the winner. 

Said another way, if you're playing an aggressive "red" strategy, you'd better end the game quickly, before your opponent's cumulative advantage overtakes yours! By the nature of the colors as descried above, in red vs blue that is probably going to be rare, while in red vs green that is probably going to be common.

I decided to try and use this micro worker placement game to sort of express that triangle fairly directly. I called one resource Red gems, one Blue gems, and one Gold gems (instead of green). As I alluded to in the previous post, I added an effect on each resource tracker that you would resolve whenever you collect more of that resource (when you collect some red gems, first resolve your current red ability, then collect the gems). 

• I tried to make the red effects kind of "rushy:" collect extra red, buy a star, take an additional turn after this one, get an additional star for free, and when you overshoot the top of the track, get 1 star and then reset to 2 red
• I tried to make the blue effects directly hinder red: opponent discards red gems, steal a red gem from the opponent, and when you overshoot the top of the track, get 2 stars and then reset to 0 blue
• Gold, being the "econ" strategy, does not give discrete effects when you collect gold. Instead, having gold means you have some number of Green gems - effectively Gold/2, only instead of doing math, you could just look at your tracker card and see how many green gems it currently shows. Several of the buildings give additional red or blue gems for each green gem you possess. When you overshoot the top of the gold track, you don't get any stars, but you get 3 each of red and blue gems, triggering your current red and blue effects

Also as alluded to in the previous post, I did add a countdown tracker (a "dragon"), which gives you an additional star if you score a star using the resource (red or blue) matching the color currently face up on the countdown tracker. The countdown ticks down any time:

1. You place a worker of matching color
2. You place in a building of matching color
3. It pays out a bonus star
4. The deck gets shuffled (every 7 turns)

The game started with a deck of 18 cards, but in one update I added two, going to 20. Either way, there were 7 turns before a reshuffle, with each player adding 1 card from the supply to the board, and then using another card from the display as a worker to place into one of the available buildings. In my latest update, I cut some cards and combined some others to bring the deck down to 16 cards, which will mean 5 turns before a reshuffle. I haven't tested that yet, but I suspect it'll be OK.

So far it seems like this game is shaping up for something that's just 16 cards (plus 9 more for trackers)!

Here are the current cards as of 7/7/22:

(fronts - ignore the crossed out ones)

(backs)

These files are set up for Tabletop Simulator more than for print and play, but you're welcome to print them out and give it a try (I'm sorry it's not easier to do so!)

At this point, I think the game works pretty much as intended. If you start gaining one color of gem, you have incentive to get that color some more (your action of that color will be improved, and you'd be closer to scoring a star by overshooting, or by the building that rewards you for having 4 or 7 like gems). If I see you gaining gems of a certain color, I can play against that by getting gems of the color that has an advantage against that - if you take red gems early, I can take blue gems. If I take blue gems, you can start taking gold gem, etc.

I think I've tuned the effects such that, for the most part, if someone were to bull-headedly go for red gems all game, and their opponent were to go for blue, the blue player would likely win, and similarly, bull-headed, extreme green would beat extreme blue, and extreme red would beat extreme gold. The game could probably use some more tweaking in that respect, but I thin it's on the right track.

One thing about this game though is that you can't necessarily go bull-headedly into any color, because while you do have 7 (out of 16 existing) options available to you on your turn, you don't have every option. Some cards aren't out yet, others are occupied, and others still have been turned face down as workers. So you have to have some flexibility as well, and you might have reasons (in the early game, or in general) to go for one strategy over another when you don't have gems yet.

I'm pretty happy with this game in general. It's not the deepest game ever, and attempting to keep it under about 18 cards is probably holding it back from being significantly better than it is. That may make it difficult to get published, but I think it does a fair amount with very little components, and as microgames go, I don't think it's half bad!