Darkstone juegos de mesa y crowdfundings

Bueno, yo voy subiendo información que voy encontrando para que la analicen los expertos.  ::)

Esto es lo que han respondido a la pregunta de: "doesn't the full availability and display of the cards lead to analysis paralysis?"

"Great question! Stemming analysis paralysis was one of our major focuses during development. The answer is, not at all fortunately. Or at least, no more than any other loved card game. There are a bunch of reasons for this that work in concert, but a large one is that at any given time there are only 12 face up cards, each with an average word count much lower than many card games. 12 is far less than you are typically looking at in many TCGs if you include your hand with the field. In MTG for instance, you can rapidly end up with 20+ cards on the table in addition to what's in your hand. In Singularity, what's underneath your opponent's exposed cards is hidden to you initially, so you don't have to consider that information until it becomes available as the game progresses.

Late game your turns can get a bit thinky because you have so many resources, and how you sequence your moves really matters when a single damage difference can mean a win or loss, but those turns are some of the most fun and can produce the most engaging surprises. Even players who have never touched a card game before can usually dive in and have a blast getting through turns pretty quickly.

All of that said, I do advise being comfortable with the game before going much past 3 players in a competitive match, as the complexity does compound (much the way it does for any card game). 4 player matches do very much benefit from card familiarity to move at a solid clip."

Y también subo la imagen del TTS para que nos hagamos una idea de cómo se vería el juego en mesa:

"I think first thing worth knowing is that casual deck building is much faster in Singularity than most card games you are probably used to. When just playing for fun, a lot of our current players will just deck build on the spot prior to a game and it takes like 5-10 minutes. That's largely because Singularity kind of holds your hand and narrows your scope while you build, as opposed to just dumping you into a massive pool of cards. You choose a faction you like, pick out 5 characters that match that faction, and then each of them have a constrained pool of programs they can choose from. There's lots of nuance and options, but it's a very different experience from "pick 60 cards from thousands". This trait will continue even as our card pool gets larger. It many ways, it feels almost like making a party in a CRPG.

If you want to get extremely competitive, deck building does take some real theory crafting, careful consideration, testing, and time. But, that's there for people who want to engage it. Many players we have now just enjoy it casually, and many love to really dig in and try to break it, but depending on who you are playing with, both approaches are a blast. I tend to enjoy the game most when I just throw together a team before a match and see how it goes, but that's just me. :)

Also important is that I don't think you'll find that decks get boring after a few games (unless they are truly terrible). I've played the pre-constructed starters in the box dozens upon dozens of times, and I still find them to be really engaging every time. Different choices in a match spiral into so many different outcomes, and even the same two decks played against one another over and over will adapt as they try to find weaknesses in one another. Maybe the first game I try and burn down one character and it results in a loss, so the next game I'll target a separate character, and that in turn will cause my opponent to react in a different way, and that will evolve a chain of events that's radically different from the first game. It has that butterfly-effect quality, where minor changes can create big differences in outcome, and the possibility space between even the same decks over and over can be huge.

All of that is a long-winded way to say that casual deck building is pretty breezy and could even be considered part of setup when you have a bit of familiarity with the game. When you have a deck that you enjoy, you'll probably find joy in it for a good while, maybe trading out a program or two as you get a better feel for it. If you just took the 4 pre-constructed decks and made 4 more, you could probably have hundreds of hours of enjoyment without changing another thing."

"Q: Will the game contain all the cards needed to play competitively in the kitchen league?

A: This is actually really interesting! So, the short answer is that the core set does not come with duplicates, but will support lots of players comfortably. Every deck in Singularity can only contain one copy of each individual card, and every card in the core box is completely unique. If we were to have two copies of each card, we'd basically just be doubling the components and selling two cores together at twice the price, and it could be a lot of waste for a lot of players.

That said, there is so, so much deck building possibility in the core set even without overlap. I would say that you can probably get far more built decks out of this core than you can with almost any other core that has 3-4 copies per card. You could easily do a six person kitchen league out of one box as long as everyone is up for not running the same deck.

Basically, accommodating a lot of players out of one box is no issue at all. If the players really want to build competitively though and want guaranteed access to specific cards to do so, they'll probably want their own set (or you'll want a extra set or two). It's a bit of a sacrifice, but the alternative would be making the core much more expensive (effectively selling two cores as one anyway), and a lot of players will never want or need more than one copy of each."

"Q: Well, this is an interesting project! Normally, "Zero randomness", and "Customizable decks" is a combination that would lead to a game falling over flat on its face. But as a result, I'm interested to see if you can pull it off, especially as your game expands. I'll be coming back to try your Tabletop Simulator build...

Is there hidden information, at least? It's hard to tell from the infographics if your entire deck is revealed to your opponent at the start of the game. Maybe it's just the "first" program of each character?

R: Ha, Relenzo, you understand. I've been in professional design for 20 years, and teaching graduate level game design at a top program for 10, and getting "zero randomness" and "customizable decks" to work together is the hardest thing I've ever done, no contest. It took years of dedicated effort from a very experienced team. I'm happy to report though, I think you'll find this is the real deal. Stoked for you to try it.

You are right that there is a good amount of hidden information, and it works exactly as you described. Initially two characters, their stacks, and everything under the top programs of revealed stacks are hidden. This is important for a tournament setting, where anticipating the meta will be as valuable as your deck building and play skills. That said, we didn't want hidden information to be a requisite for the game to be fun. Good decks do beat poorly constructed ones, but two well-matched decks will have to play against each other many times, even with perfect knowledge, to really understand which is stronger, and then changing even one card can vastly alter that outcome. Our sideboard rules add a lot of opportunity for decks to pivot in competitive settings."

"The base set has 40 characters and 130 programs split across 13 brands, for a total of 170 unique cards (in addition to other cards like Singularity Fragments)."

"Q: Interesting! Too soon to ask how those sideboards operate?

R: Not at all, with the caveat that it may change slightly. It's pretty simple though -- you just bring two additional built characters for a total of seven, and you pick five each match. Two additional characters is enough for a savvy builder to completely transform how a deck functions between matches, or have them ready for specialized purposes. Both players sideboard in secret, so there is also consideration in being able to anticipate what your opponent may or may not change."

Bueno, pues ya hay más información de cómo funciona:

"So, there's no hand, and all of your cards sit on the table in front of you. Your deck has five characters, and each of those characters has three programs in a stack (basically a three card mini deck). You decide which characters are in your deck, what programs they have equipped given building restrictions, and the order of those programs.

Two of your characters will always be inactive, so you have access to three characters at any given time. The cards you have access to play are the top programs of those active character stacks. Whenever you play one of those three programs, it will either move to the bottom of its program stack (working like a sorcery in MTG), or attach to a character (working like an enchantment in MTG). Either way, it will expose a new program underneath, which you will now have access to play because it's on top. If you can play that new card this turn, or any of the other cards on top of your stacks, you can keep activating programs until you run out of resources. So I might play the top program on Shred, then the program underneath it, then a program from the top of Kodama's stack, and then the program underneath that one. Or I might change that order if it's advantageous. The only critical rule is that each program can only be played once per turn, so you can't play a whole stack of three 1 cost cards twice if you have 6 RAM to spend.

Even though you can order your cards any way you like, your opponent has tools to mess with the order of your program stacks, deny you access to cards, stun characters, crash characters which also crashes all their programs, and on and on. Ultimately, the order you put things in matters enormously, but will be messed with quite a bit as your opponent tries to take thwart your strategy. You'll find that even though you constructed the deck in a deliberate way, you often won't have access to the cards you want, or you'll have to radically change your strategy in response to what your opponent is doing."

"Q: One question though: given how heavily analytical the gameplay is going to be, are you concerned about there being potential for quarterbacking?

R: Given that Singularity doesn't have a hand and that there's no player-side randomness, it could be extremely susceptible to that, and making sure it's not is a major focus for us, as on its face, Singularity is a lot of public information that one player could theoretically drive. The game has a few inherent traits that help in a general sense, but then there are more content-specific solutions that are contextual to the challenge you will face.

Two general qualities that immediately help are decision complexity and hidden information. In co-op, players can't share information about the hidden programs in their program stacks (explained in the gameplay section), and they also can't share information about their facedown, inactive characters or their stacks. Given that the stacks are constantly being reordered, even if co-op teammates generally know what's in each other's decks, it takes a huge amount of tracking to remember orders of stacks mid-game.

That's helped by the fact that decks in Singularity do generally hit a sweet spot for complexity. Your own turn will require enough mental horsepower that you likely won't have the capability to focus on what another player is doing. After you complete your action, you'll probably want to and need to begin planning out your next turn and possible courses of action.

Beyond that though, we are exploring content in co-op that provides limited, private challenges and mechanics to individuals. For instance, an enemy program with consequential effects that you can see but the other players can't, forcing you to play intelligently in a way that may seem counter-intuitive to others.

Preventing quarterbacking is all about controlling how and where information flows, and how much space your teammates are given to understand your specific game state and vice-versa. It's something we give a lot of thought to for co-op, and even though Singularity does have more public information than most card games, I think you'll find there are good countermeasures in place."