Rules for Siege of Verdan

Exploring new territory

The first draft of the map is complete.  Against the better judgment of all the forums, facebook pages and websites I have decided that I need a good looking set of cards for my first play-test. I stand firm on this decision, I needed to cultivate a group of non gamers into play-testers, I think I would not have been able to take that group as far as I have with out real cards, and a nice mounted board. So, off to the internet I went to find a pod publisher.  Not the cheapest in the world, but I did go to The Game Crafter, the set up is so easy and the end product is great (it’s the shipping that will kill ya). Now, that I had the template I needed card format and art.
    (Side note)The cards from the first play-test..are so far from where we are now in-development, the first card set might as well be lining the bottom of a bird cage.
    I was familiar with photoshop before but I would not become intimate with PhotoShop.  It was hours and hours of work learning, formatting and re-formatting, I am not graphic artist I will be the first to admit.  My first set of cards was basic, very basic, even boring. title, pic, black font on a white background. I am still convinced that the $30 I spent on quality cards made a difference in the interest in play testers.
I had my hand made boards, and my shiny new Game Crafter Cards, my game is done.  I may have to do a little playtesting and change a few little things but it will work great! (I have never been so wrong). I had decided to video record the first game, and have my wife (god rest her soul) take notes.
The first game was a grueling 6 hours; I realized that this was not going to really work. My play-testers seemed interested, but I would limit my play ability, and target audience dramatically if I didn'tthe facebook pagefacebook page cut this down.  Even if I could make the most interesting game ever, the average person would only be able to play once or twice a year. This is not what I wanted al all. Now I needed to figure out what was taking so long! Not to mention a movement rule need to be addressed, combat was too complicated, and when a ruler got killed well nothing happened. This just scratches the surface of the challenges to come.

A world filling up with people: We welcome commerce and negotiation!

Now I have these lofty goals and ideas.  I have made several RPG systems, and a few card games but I have not tried to make a board card game, especially one that we intended to publish.  The map started as a bi-fold 24 by 36 inch monster.  It was looked a lot like a Pangaea map of earth (very unintentional), it had 62 states divided among 6 countries. The continent was surrounded by over 100 hexes of water, with three islands. Verdan was going to me monolithic.
I next set out to generate the population for Verdan.  I knew I wanted assassins, and rulers, but I would need military forces of varying combat abilities and costs. My question was how to moderate the speed at which these fella’s came out.  I wanted things to ramp up fairly quickly, and with all of the available resources I knew that I needed to watch out for the exponential increase in resources as the game progressed.  The idea was simple.  Each card would have a fairly low initial (or inception) cost (IC), and a maintenance cost (MC) to keep the piece in play and under your control. Thematic The Facebook pageally, it seemed logical that you would have to be able to feed or pay these soldiers under your command as well. With all these resources going around I wanted to be able to share them between players.  I wanted a system of commerce and reasons for one nation to share its affluence with another, but how, and why would they?
I came up with the idea that a player would have a resource pool that would expire in the very first phase of his turn.  Then during the second phase you would collect resources from your states, and keep them until the very first phase of your next turn.  That would be the first encouragement to negotiate. If you did not use these points you would lose them, but I didn’t want points flying around between the players all haphazardly.
I needed non- military units that would serve as negotiators between two players.  You would have a negotiator move into an area controlled by another player, and that would allow the exchange of resource points. The Merchant and Diplomat would born as a direct result of this.  I still lacked a real reason for players to want to exchange resource points.  I knew that some players would support others out of friendship and more strategic minded players would wait for a player to get weak and then pump resources into him so that he would be more resistance for a different opponent attempting to take him out, but that was not enough for me.  I wanted something more, I wanted prisoners.
Actually, I wanted prisoner exchange.  I came up with the idea that if a unit was defeated in combat an opponent could choose to take them prisoner and keep them for ransom or vanquish them from the game. This would come in helpful if a player lost his ruler or other valuable card that might be hard to get back into play. Now there are reasons to negotiate, later I would come up with one more reason. The last could prove to be the most valuable reason to have a Merchant or Diplomat in your arsenal.
I knew I wanted the diplomat to be able to negotiate, but I wanted Merchants too.  Thematically I wanted the diplomat to be harder to kill off but weak in a battle, so I limited the types to characters that could harm him or her.  The Merchant was a different story, it needed to have the negotiation of a diplomat, but also needed something more to do with economics it self.  The merchant became an asset to both players giving them a slight resource advantage, but was able to be attacked by anything on the board. Merchants and Diplomats had another nice side effect.  Another target for assassins! If two player’s negotiations hurt a third player, that third player could always send an assassin in to do the dirty work. If you kill the negotiator the negotiations stop. What if I don’t have an assassin and I have a need to get an opponents card off the board? Can I pay another player to take care of that for me? The seeds of strategy have begun to spread.

Time to Face-off, or face on: We are live on Facebook!

I have mentioned my brother before, an absolutely amazing software developer, and coder that helped me to catalyze my gaming lust. He suggested that I do a website immediately to help get the ball rolling. David suggested that I start reading up on html programming and made some suggestions. I may do this one day but the level of commitment to the development of the game will not allow for this extra responsibility…yet. So until I can convince my brother into developing the website for me I will just do some stuff on “The Facebook”. I have included some pictures and a link to a few videos we have prepared. Please take a look at what we have put together, look around a bit, ask some questions and be a part of the Siege of Verdan Community. I wold love to hear from you. 
https://www.facebook.com/SiegeOfVerdan?ref=hlfacebook page

Let them Eat Cake: The Death of the Feudal System in Siege of Verdan

The Feudal system is a BUST!! I wanted Siege to work without player elimination. If a player attacked a capital and defeated an opponent that opponent would then get to play as normal but his or her resources would be allocated by the player that defeated him. I theory I felt this would be similar to a Feudal Lord system, and the player would be ok, playing for the wining team. This was not the case. No one really wanted to help the player that took them out. Not to mention that it effects the speed of the game a lot. 
This now has created a few other small issues (butterfly effect). The cost of throwing everything at another player with the possibility of losing a lot of units is a little frightening. Players hesitated to attack, fearing that they would be spread to thin. This issue kind of watered it self down when you would have all of that defeated opponents assets to help you (not to mention draw phase extra attack per round etc.) This led me think of the Cataclysm clock (no called Kings spoils). After each round of turns the players advance a token that would give them an advantage such as extra card draws more resources etc. These advantages would peak a few rounds in and then begin to dwindle, this should create a sense of urgency, and also allow for a fixed amount of turns that the game can last. When the token enters the last space, the winner will be declared. The winner will be the one whom defeated the most capital cities with a resource total as a tie breaker. After a few play-tests, I pushed it a little further, the clock now became the kings spoils, if you did not have a ruler in play in the king position you would not be able to collect these boons. Ahh, that would add to the value of the King that much more.Facebook page

A new world to discover! THE MAP!!

I worked on a project about 15 years a go with a good friend of mine. We talked about the idea of a resource management game that had Senator characters whom affected the resource availability. We ultimately decided against the rulers, and focused on the different types of resources but I never forgot about my concept of rulers in a game. And what better targets for my assassins!
I didn't want to over complicate Siege of Verdan with different types of resources, but still wanted to mitigate growth with some kind of economic management system. I thought long and hard about what I had learned from my past in gaming. Risk (old version) derived its resources (troops) form area control and so did MTG. That was fine, I would have a board and divide each possible country up by states(I used “states” because by definition, that can stand to for both a nation and a territory, and when the player starts the game he has only one “place” on the board. It’s his starting nation). I thought about this for a moment, in the two games I mentioned above, each territory or piece of land only accounted for 1 resource. I really wanted more strategy involved in the area control aspect. I made the decision to have different states to have slightly different resource revenue. I figured thematically it would make sense that some areas of a country would be able to yield more resources then another. The Fertile Crescent offered better agriculture, China’s rich iron ore mines, Africa’s diamond mines each corner of the world has its own hot commodity. I Also figured if I made the differences subtle enough I would be able to add a nice extra layer of strategy for the serious gamer, while still making the barrier of entry not to bad for the novice and casual gamer. Some state have lots of resources, some only have a few. Now, I have the general idea for the board layout I would need to start sketching out the physical map. I wanted it big and vast with lots of states and…and Ports, I want islands, and…oh crap.Facebook page

TMI: The emotional unexpected journey!!

Game designers diary Day 1

I want to start this diary with a little insight about me. Like many of you, I have always loved games and gaming. I lived in a small beach town in Florida, well I lived outside of town with very few neighbors. My brother, whom was much older, spent a lot of time and energy to educate me and entertain me. Eventually when I was old enough, he introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons with his college aged friends.
A new world opened up for me, I was never much of a reader, and my math skills were subpar at best, but this game changed everything for me. I do not think I will ever be able to thank him enough for that. It exposed me to some very intelligent, very different, people I would never had the opportunity to meet. I eventually started high school and my own RPG group.
I mentioned that it was a small town (and this was in the late 80’s) so we didn’t have as much access to RPG material as I would have liked, so the best solution was to make my own material. And so it began, I made several of my own Dungeons and Dragons adventures, and eventually expanded to make my own game systems for several different games. 
Then college, full time jobs, girlfriends and drinking slowly sucked away my time until there was no more time for games, or gamming in my life. Although, I had a brief re-kindling of my love for games with Magic the Gathering. I convinced some friends to play and I entered some local competitive events but It lasted only a few years until I got a call some years later from my high school best friend and college roommate. 
I was marred now, still juggling my job, and at this time I was doing psych research at the University of Central Florida. My roommate called me and told me that he was diagnosed with cancer. He would have to undergo treatment that started with him losing a lung. He called me, and said he was playing Magic the gathering online because he had so much down time and asked if I would play with him at night when I got home from work, and we did. We played a lot. He liked the idea of playing on days that he was too sick for company but didn’t feel like being alone.
Shawn Jeffery Mattingly and I played magic until he passed away. The last time we played was Sunday night November 2nd 2008 he beat me 5 of 6 games. The next day he went into the hospital and on Wednesday November 5th at the age of 37 Shawn Mattingly passed on. He was a lifelong friend and his passing was very difficult for me. I was grateful for the time we had together playing games, but I did not take this well and at the risk of public vulnerability I lost more than a best friend, I lost a bit of myself. I have never played MTG again, and I would not play games for quite some time.
About 6 months later, I received a phone call from my mother, she was in the hospital, and she had been diagnosed with cancer. She had a Colon cancer and a good bit of it was to be removed. She started Chemo and slowly began to get better, the colostomy bag, and Chemo where challenging at first, they definitely took some getting used to.
I was working a 70 hour a week job. It took up all of my time, I would drive down to see my family as often as I could but my days off were canceled a lot. In fact, my boss even called me at 11pm one night when I was driving home, it was my turn to buy groceries for them, and he told me that I had to get back to the shop right away and my day off would have to be put off for another time. I got in to my home town around 1 am, bought groceries and got back to work by the next morning by 8a.m. I was very proud of myself. 
I came home for Christmas in December of 2010, and she made a Christmas dinner like when I was a kid. I had to make the mash potatoes like when I was a kid, and we sat on the kitchen floor and talked for a few minutes, like when I was a kid. 
One week later on January 2nd I received a call at 10am. My mother was back in the hospital and she asked me to come back to town. I spent the next 5 days at her side in hospice, I only left one time to go home, take a shower and shave. She never really regained consciousness but if she did I wanted someone to be there and let her know what was going on. 
On January 7th 2011 at the age of 70 Joni Talbert passed on. She was more than a mother she was a lifelong friend and her passing was very difficult for me. I was grateful for the time we had together but I did not take it very well. I lost more than a mother, I lost a bit of myself. On that kitchen floor on Christmas day she gave me a little insight to her life. I asked her why she devoted so much of her life to others and she told me that she did it because she enjoyed doing it, that it made her happy. 
One of my friends posted on my social media page something I will never forget. He said “To honor my mother’s memory I needed to do what would make me happy. She devoted most of her life to make her children happy and I owed it to her.” 
I wanted to make games. I wanted to make games that told a story, no that is not true. I wanted to make games that let others be a part of their own story. Nothing was more engaging to me then to be part of a story and the decisions that influenced the outcome. A few Ideas had been floating around in my head and I started to work on them. I made two adult party games that I will bring to market soon, but I wanted to undertake something that allowed players to use strategy, negotiation, deception and use some moral decision making for better or worse, and one more thing I wanted it to have assassins in it!
I loved risk as a kid, but It really lacked storytelling and I felt that the total random dice influencing the outcome of battle, sucked. I also loved Stratego and its discovery, but I also felt its story telling was limited. Of course I loved magic the gathering because of its story telling ability, but it lacked the visual special relationships that a board game can give. I wanted to make Siege of Verdan.Facebook