Playtesting the rules.

First of all, let me wish you all a happy new year and a great gaming 2009. I know this year will be a great gaming year for me!

The New Year could not have started better. The brother of my wife, who is also a great card game fan, came over to my house and we play tested Wuxia Pian almost all day long.
The good news: The rules I wrote for the game were solid.
The bad news, the game is boring to death..

Let me explain: In the rules I had, both players were only able to play one combat card when attacking/defending. This led to a very simplistic and boring game play, even though it looked good on paper. I hoped the Combo-zone I invented would bring some “spice” to the game, but it still did not feel like 2 warriors in an intense combat, it was more like a slapstick movie, where 2 dumb heads are slapping each other in the face, taking turns doing so. There was no feeling, no real strategy in the short run..

So, Vicente (thanks man!) came up with an idea. There is a great board/card game online (and real life) called Dominion, where you have cards you play that gives you the option to draw extra cards, but they also provide extra actions to take, so you might be able, for example to draw a card, play a card, play a card, draw a card, all in the same turn.

This mechanism sounded perfect for Wuxia pian. Vicente and I quickly drew some rough numbers on cards, shuffled up and tested. It worked like a charm. The battle is no longer boring and even quite dynamic now. I even think the time it takes to play the game got drastically cut, and best of all, its more fun!

One other thing we did was to change the following:

1. Winning warrior stays in play
2. Combat cards have both an attack and defense value on them
3. Create Action(s) for warriors to use, and an easy way to increase that.
4. Create different “types” of warriors, to differentiate between fighting styles (reflected back in combat cards)
5. Start of each combat, both players may convert a card - Rule.

1.
In the original rules, each time a warrior won a combat, he got a victory point, and all cards still in play must be discarded to make room for new ones, including the winning warrior. We changed this to : winning warrior stays in play.
This way, the winning warrior gets to fight on, but with much less life (he hopefully took some beating during the first combat) and with less chi (more on this later) to use. This way, the losing warrior will have an easier fight to get back into the game.

I am still unsure about this change, since even thought the losing player might get back to (1 victory point all) evening things up, their warrior will receive some wounds, and thus the first “kill” still is very important. We need to do some more play testing on this when the rules for the new enhanced combat are done. Including the numbers for the combat cards.

I changed the name Endurance to Chi. Sounds much more oriental and cool.

2. + 3.
To sum it up, the rules for combat have changed into this:

Player with the highest speed on their warrior starts with the initiative. He or she gets to play their cards first.
Each player gets 1 action to do per turn, but additional cards and effects can increase this. A normal action usually means to play a combat card.
For example, player A has initiative and plays the following cards:
Card 1: +2 attack, +1 defense, +1 action (giving player A another Action to use)
Card 2: +1 Damage.

Player A has no more actions to use, so the turn goes to player B.

Player B is now looking at an attack from player A, that has an attack of 2, a defense of 1 and does 2 damage (1 standard, plus 1 extra).
Player B plays the following card(s):
Card 3: +1 defense, +1 Action (giving player B another Action to use)
Card 4: +1 Attack.

Player B has no more actions to use, so the turn goes to resolution:

Player A´s warrior has the highest speed (is the fastest), so his attack gets resolved first.
His attack is 2, with a damage of 2.
Player B´s defense is only 1, not enough to block the attack, so player B´s warrior receives 2 wounds. Since player A “used up” his +1 damage card, that card gets placed face down, signifying the effect is used up and can no longer be used (unless a card or effect places the card face-up again).

If player B´s warrior still lives, his attack resolves.
His attack is 1, with a damage of 1 (just the basic 1 damage each warrior has)
Player A´s defense is 1, not enough to block the damage (defense must be higher than the attack) and Player A´s warrior receives 1 wound.

The combat round ends and if both warriors still live, player B gets the initiative to play cards first. The cards already played last round stay in play.

Player A has in play:
Card 1: +2 attack, +1 defense
Card 2: Face down.
Player B:
Card 3: +1 defense.
Card 4: +1 Attack.

Since player B has initiative, he better get his Defense up, or player A will hit him again this turn. Or maybe he will get his attack up, in anticipation of some defense cards from player A.
Remember that the resolution still gets done first with player A, since his warrior has the highest speed. Especially if both warriors are low on life this could mean a won or lost combat. Speed therefore has a much bigger impact in the updated rules.

It will be a challenge to get the balance right, but if I just start with some basic numbers, and work our way around the power curve from there, it will be alright.

Since both Attack and defense values are on the same card now, there is no longer a need to create a strange way to prevent a hand screw of 5 defense cards, for example.

4.
Next thing to do is to categorize and create different fighting styles. Some warriors (like a Monk) might have very fast fighting styles. This could mean, playing a lot of cards very fast for a low cost, but have a lower damage output than other warriors. A Samurai, for example, may be slow, but he hits harder (higher damage output) and so on and so forth.. Hopefully this will create some different deck types.

5.
During play testing, we found out, that even with the Convert game text, both players quickly run out of card in hand to play. We found a few problems we needed to “fix”:
A: Both players without endurance (chi). What happens then? Both warriors just sit there and make a staring contest?
B: Both players without cards in hand to play.

We fixed (hopefully) both things by:
A: Giving the standard action (in the rules, not on cards) for a warrior to use: Rei to rest, meaning : use an action to increase your endurance by 1.
B: Giving the standard rule that a player may convert (1) at the start of each round. Meaning he or she can convert 1 endurance (chi) into a card in hand.

This way, the game gets going no matter what. You ran out of cards to play? No problem, just convert 1 card at the start of each round. Ran out of endurance? No problem, just use your action to rest and to increase your endurance by 1.
Ran out of cards and endurance? no problem. Use Rei to increase your endurance, use convert to draw that card and make a note to re-do your deck, since you are using too hight costed cards :P

As you can see, both methods come with a cost, to prevent abuse.
Converting 1 card sounds like a great idea, but you will use up your warriors endurance pretty quickly this way. You will have to find a balance, without overdoing one (playing too many cards) or the other (using up too much endurance too fast)
Resting to increase your warriors endurance is a great way to pay for those heavy hitter cards, but it does use up your standard action you are allowed each turn, meaning you won’t be able to defend your warrior from attacks (play cards).

I hope players in the end will not need to use these rules a lot, but they need to be there to prevent stalemates from happening.

Next thing to do: come up with a cost-matrix for basic cards, and slowly increasing that to a finished set of cards.

And also re-write a good portion of the rulebook..

Playtesting the rules is very important for a card game. I did not even had a single card designed, thankfully.

Back to the drawing board.. but with a bigger bucket of ideas and a bigger board to draw on. You rock Vicente, thanks superfriki!