Deities & Demigods playtest - new deity!

 I apologize for again being a little cagey or cryptic about some of the details of Deities & Demigods getting signed. I'll just continue to use terminology and context from the Greek mythology theme, familiar to myself and anyone who happens to be following the progress of that game. At some point I'm sure I'll post about a retheme, a new title, and other publishing details.

Adding new content to an old game

Interestingly, I'm adding new content to this old design at the same time that I'm consulting on the development of an expansion to a classic game. Seems like a parallel there. I've created expansions to Terra Prime (Eminent Domain Origins), Eminent Domain (Escalation, Exotica, and Oblivion) and Crusaders (Divine Influence, Crimson/Amber Knight) as well. So I'm not a complete stranger to fitting new content into an existing game.

In Deities & Demigods, the publisher asked for a few specific things to be added to the game. Among those:

• More of a 4X feel
• More relevance to all spaces on the board (not just City and Quest spaces)
• Slightly heftier game weight (a little longer/more complicated)
• More variety in game action (an additional action you can do)
• More variety in the Favor card (game end scoring conditions) 

I believe that we can address all of that in 1 fell swoop by adding a new deity to the game. A new card in the starting deck necessarily means a longer game and another action. More different actions means a heavier and more complicated game. And since we get to choose what the deity does, we can use it to add relevance to the board spaces and give the game more of a 4X feel.

New Deity: God of Adventure

Since we'll be changing pantheons, I didn't bother actually getting a new Greek god for this role, and since my prototype components already say Hades on them, I decided to just use Hades for a stand-in here (I never did try that Hades expansion material we'd come up with, though I think Matthew may have). So... Meet "Hades," God of Adventure and Exploration!

With this new action, you can explore blank hexes, collect gems, and add features to the board. As nobody probably recalls, the game board was made up of 4 boards, each with 7 hexes, and each board had 3 features: either 2 cities and a quest space, or 2 quest spaces and a city space. This way, a random arrangement of the boards would yield 5-7 quests per game, and 5-7 cities per game (and as it happens, 5 quests meant 7 cities and vice versa). Now I have removed 1 feature from each board, leaving 1 city and 1 quest space, and I colored in the other blank hexes to represent different terrain. Each of the colors also corresponds to one of the deities, this way the stuff you find in an area could be weighted toward the type of thing one of the deities is known for.

When using this action, you choose one of your troops and they explore their hex. You get 1 gem of the color matching the hex, and then you draw some Exploration tiles to choose from; the more devotion you have to Hades, the more tiles you draw. You'll choose one of the drawn tiles to add to the board in that hex. So far the features on those tiles are new cities, new quest spaces, tunnels that connect distant hexes, monument sites where more monuments can be built (the monuments are getting a pretty big tweak as well, so they're not just fancy buildings anymore), and a "stronghold" - a space which is meant to have some kind of common enemy that you can "fight" by sacrificing troops to gain the printed effect.

The gems I keep mentioning are also color coded to match the different deities, and the plan is that when resolving a deity, you can spend up to 1 gem of that deity's favorite type (matching color) in order to resolve it as if your devotion were 1 level higher.

First playtest of this new deity

I played a 2-player game the other day with Aaron, who's played Deities & Demigods before, but not that recently. He picked up the nuances of the new content right away, but based on how the game went, we didn't see too much of it in play. For one thing, neither of us added an Ares to the deck, so movement was a little hard to come by, and that was exacerbated by more things requiring you to move around the board. Other than that, the game went fine, and I noted a number of things to change for next time.

Tweaks and changes for the next test

The biggest hurdle was a dearth of movement. Aaron suggested it might be good to add a 2nd Ares to the starting deck, since questing, city control, building, and exploration all require adding troops to the board and moving them around. This might not be bad, but I think I had a better idea -- add movement points to the Hades action, so no matter what you'll be able to move a troop before exploring. Also, even if you didn't care too much about exploring, you could utilize the extra movement to accomplish other goals. So I'm updating the Hades track to give movement points as well as gems and tile draws.

I figured that the result of this action would be an immediate benefit for the player (the gem), as well as a lasting effect on the board (the tile) - if you draw multiple tiles, you have a better chance of getting a feature that better benefits you. Some of the tiles weren't that exciting - for example a tunnel does nothing unless there are more than one in play. This felt a little disappointing when choosing between tiles, getting a poor one feels bad compared to getting a good one, feels like you didn't get a benefit. But you did... you got the gem! I guess you were getting that gem anyway, so it doesn't feel connected to the choice of tile. So I might simplify the action by removing the gem, and instead print a gem on many of the exploration tiles, so whichever one you pick, you can feel like you got something. That also means I can change the value of some of the tiles by adding or not adding a gem if I want to, for balance reasons.

For the monument sites, I might let the player actually build that monument for free, which makes it a lot more attractive to explore! And for the quests, I was just thinking of drawing a new quest tile, but instead maybe specific quests would be better.

I'll be updating these items in my prototype, and I look forward to trying the game again as soon as I get a chance!