Deities & Demigods - back on the table (... the operating table that is)

 I recently mentioned that one of my favorite designs, Deities & Demigods, has been signed by a publisher. I'm sure I'll talk more about details such as which publisher eventually, but for now I'll keep that under wraps.

Yesterday at my weekly scraped together playtest, Rick was the only player available, so we played a 2p game of Deities & Demigods so I could refamiliarize myself with the game, and to make sure he knew how to play -- he'd played it once back in April, and possibly one other time years ago.

Playtest Report

With 2 players, my notes said to put 2 neutral troops in each city, to make the City points a little harder to win. This is like a 3rd (and/or 4th) player fighting for control of the cities, and I think it's a good idea so players can't just drop 1 troop in each city and score 5 points just because their opponent never got to that side of the board. To be specific, my notes say to add 1 neutral troop for a 3p game, and 2 troops for a 2p game, and while I know I've played that way in several 3p games, I'm not sure if I'd ever actually played 2p with that rule. I think it worked out well though. It makes me wonder a little bit whether 3p ought to also have 2 troops, so you can't get 3 points for just 1 troop sometimes -- not sure (and TBH, I'm not sure that matters a lot).

I had a bit of an advantage just from experience, and in the early game I did a pretty good job of building up my engine -- I bought 3 monuments in a hurry, and did 1 quest in cycle 1, and another in cycle 2, so my minimum devotion was way up on several deities! Rick started in a more central location, and decided early to concentrate a bit on Ares so he could spread out from there... that was my downfall. I didn't do enough Ares, and besides starting next to 2 quests, I wasn't very close to much of anything else, and all that building of monuments removed my troops from the board, leaving very few in play. I never did spread out very much, though in the end I dominated 2 cities (for 5 points each) and tied the neutrals in 1 (for 3 points) - actually outscoring Rick on City points 13-11. He had 1 or 2 troops in each city, but also had 3 Ares Favor cards, so while he only had 11 points for city control, he had 15 points for those favor cards. I only had 2 Hephaestus Favor cards, also for 5vp apiece, so I only had 10 points there. Rick had a 4 point building, and all I had was monuments, which didn't help my endgame score (though gave me a lot of power on my actions). Finally, Rick did 4 quests to my 3, which gave him a 4vp lead there. In total, he outscored me by about 7 points or so, enough to pull off a solid victory.

Thoughts on upcoming changes

After the game, I briefly described the initial ideas I've got in mind to add the things to the game that the publisher is interested in -- more of a 4X feel, more relevance to the board spaces, an additional deity/action, etc. He liked the sound of what I have in mind, and would have liked to be able to do some of it that game, so that's promising at least. We'll have to see how it goes when I get the changes prototyped and implemented.

New Deity - God of Adventure

As I probably described before, my idea to add a God of Adventure (since we're going to make up our own pantheon, I'm not even going to try and pick a Greek god for this role) which allows you to sort of search a hex where you have a troop an add a feature to the board, seems like it would work, and I've now put a little more thought into it. Initially I imagined bags of tiles (one per terrain type) which you would draw from -- the higher your devotion, the more tiles you'd draw, and you'd choose 1 of the drawn tiles to place on the board. These tiles would also depict some resource or immediate benefit you'd receive. But when I sat down to try and list off board features, I was coming up pretty dry.

Then I had a revelation... looking at the board, which so far has been a good size, there are 4 mega-hex boards of 7 hexes each, and each one currently has 3 features: either 2 quests and 1 city, or 2 cities and 1 quest. The way it's laid out results in a range of 5-7 cities and 5-7 quests (totaling 12, so 5/7, 6/6, or 7/5). So far I've been pretty happy with that range, and I like the quests being face up from the beginning so that you can start to make a game plan from the outset. BUT... suppose instead there were just 1 city and 1 quest space per tile, leaving 5 blank tiles per hex (20 total blanks). Let's also say there are 5 types of terrain, color coded to the different deities. If that's the case, then for each terrain type, there could be just a few (4, maybe 5) different tiles, meaning just a few different features to add to the board. For example, in each terrain type, maybe you could find the following:

• Ruins (a city space)
• Portal (a quest space)
• Enemy Stronghold (a space where you can spend Ares points to sacrifice a troop and gain a specific benefit)
• Catacomb entrance (once 2 are in play, you can move from one to another as if adjacent)
• Monument space (perhaps monuments can only be built in specific spaces, and this would add a space to the board where someone could build a monument)

If I only need 4 of each type of tile, maybe each terrain type could lack one of those, or double up on another, just to give them a little different flavor.

Note: This could result in a range of 4-9 buildings and 4-9 quests, and they wouldn't be related to each other (9 buildings doesn't mean only 4 quests), but that's probably fine, and the likely range of these features in play will be pretty close to what I had before (I think), so the game should work about the same that way -- assuming players can (and do) utilize the God of Adventure. There may ought to be a rule that if you resolve the deity (i.e. don't pay), and you have a troop in a blank hex, you must choose that troop -- no intentionally choosing a troop in a non-empty hex just to keep the features off the board!

In addition, I had wanted the player to get some prize just for themselves, so it's always good to use this effect, even if the board feature doesn't matter to you. So in that respect I'm thinking of having 5 types of gems, again color coded to the terrain types/deities. Maybe you get 0 or 1 at level 1 devotion, 1 at L2 and L3, and 2 gems at L4 (that way even if the tiles have dwindled, L4 is still better than L3):

1. L1: 0 gems, draw 1 tile at random
2. L2: 1 gem, draw 1 tile at random
3. L3: 1 gem, draw 2 tiles, choose 1
4. L4: 2 gems, draw all tiles, choose 1

Or possibly:

1. L1: 1 gem, draw 1 tile at random
2. L2: 1 gem, draw 2 tiles, choose 1
3. L3: 1 gem, draw 3 tiles, choose 1
4. L4: 2 gems, draw all tiles, choose 1

Gems:

These gems could have 2 uses:

1. At game end, there could be a way to score points for the gems, maybe a Deity Favor condition is to collect a set of different gems
2. During the game, perhaps the gems could be spent when resolving a deity to resolve it at the next highest level. In that way, it'd be very similar to a cube bump.

So to test this out, I would need to put together the following:

• 1 starting God of Adventure card
• 8 additional God of Adventure cards (with scoring condition)
• edit player boards to include God of Adventure tracks
• edit the boards to add terrain types to 5 hexes (removing a city or quest space) - color coded with deities
• 25 new tiles (5 per terrain type with features as listed above)
• a handful of "gems" in each of 5 colors - color coded to the deities (and terrain types)

Fortunately, my prototype files already have each deity's name in a different color, and there's even a 5th track on each player board with Hades expansion material (that I never got around to trying). So some of that updating should come pretty easily.

Unfortunately, I still cannot find my physical prototype, which means I may decide to make an altogether new one sometime soon, as I like to have physical prototypes rather than just virtual ones on TTS.

New version of Favor cards and Monuments

The publisher also wanted to see more, and more unique, monuments and favor scoring conditions. Matthew will be working on some of this pretty soon, but I think the direction we're headed is this:

Favor Cards:

Currently the favor cards use the same components as the deity cards you add to the deck. This is an efficient/elegant use of cards that I'm a fan of, and it made sense to me when I built the game because the scoring conditions all go along with concentrating on for a certain deity. Do a lot of building, score a lot of Hephaestus' favor. However, there's not really a reason those have to be connected beyond elegant use of components. Matthew had an interesting idea to have a bunch of unique conditions, and deal them out (maybe draft them if you're experienced) to players, and whenever you get the chance to claim a favor card, you play one from your hand.

This sounds reasonable to me, though it means we need to come up with about 20 more scoring conditions, and ideally they'll max out at 8 or 9 points if you do a good job. I don't know how easy that part will be, but I guess we'll see!

Monuments:

Currently there are just 4 monument cards, and they are like big, fancy buildings. Their purpose is to allow you to increase minimum devotion to a deity (good in the early game), or claim a favor card from that deity (good in the late game). When the Monuments are gone (or if you don't care for the ones that remain), then you instead may choose a Building AND an Artifact, which could be viewed as a unique monument that has the effects of both that building and that artifact (though admittedly, it doesn't look that way). The publisher would like to see more, and more variety, of monuments, which I assumed meant making a bunch of additional cards on par with the existing monuments power-wise, which seemed like a lot of content to create, but this morning I had an idea that might be simpler. Maybe we could go another way with the monuments:

• Get rid of the cards altogether
• Have a monument mini above each of the devotion tracks on your player board
• Require that a monument be built on a monument space on the board (each City that starts on the board could have one, and as described above, maybe you could ad them via exploration)
• Require that the monument be built in a terrain type that matches the deity (?)
• Once built, an icon could be revealed on the player board - giving you an additional benefit (perhaps +1 to the resolution, like +1 Ares move per Ares phase for example)
• In addition to the above, you would also increase minimum devotion to that deity

Then, instead of "Building+Artifact" as an option for L4 Hephaestus, instead of building a monument, maybe you can claim (play) a favor card that matches a deity's monument where your troop is. In other words, you could move your troop to a monument to Zeus (belonging to any player), then use L4 Hephaestus to play a favor card with a Zeus icon on it (which presumably will care a little bit about how much you've been using Zeus)

An example of such a card might be:

Zeus/Ares:
Score 1 point for each Favor card you have played

Score 1 point for each city where you are at east tied for most troops

This might make you care about things like which monuments are in play, making sure you get a particular monument into play, and also about getting to specific hexes to do so.

 

Random idea for buildings (that I'm not necessarily fond of):

While coming up with the above idea for monuments, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps the buildings could also come off your board to reveal a benefit, rather than having benefits printed on the board. This way the buildings could be something of a tech tree... if you build a "coin" building, you get a coin. If you build a 2nd "coin" building, you get 2 coins Either way, your 1st "Troop" building gets you 1 troop movement. 

Then there could potentially be some kind of scoring for building different TYPES of buildings. I don't know if this is really necessary to be honest, I kinda like the buildings just saying what they're worth, and I also kinda like the desire to move to a particular city because you like the build reward printed there. But I wanted to note this down as an idea, because it could have merit.