#project-irrgarten

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Finished a run of TGL successfully to a crowd of about 60 yesterday, so I was bound to draw something related to that. I’m also gonna try and make a real push to finish up Irrgarten at last.

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From the past few days.

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Played with my cards a little more today after ignoring it for a bit too long, this time I went with the regular ‘build a maze’ mechanic instead of the ‘draw three, pick a direction’ thing I was trying and I think it suits things a bit better. I played without a healer this time, and it felt about right in terms of difficulty, so maybe the last time when I cleared like 20 rooms without breaking a sweat was more the fault of the healer being broken than the dungeon being too easy. My party led by a “tank” character backed up by a fighter, sorceress and rogue made it through 8 rooms before losing to a golem and goblin in a catacomb. 

I also tried out a new idea for equipment since everyone who tests it wanted to equip armor and stuff long term instead of just play them as special attacks. So the idea *now* is that you can equip characters with gear to ‘ready’ a special move, but the equipment gets used up when you use its move or is unequipped. I’ll have to experiment a bit more to see if needing to ‘prepare’ things like potions and torches is too harsh. 

I’ll try and put more time into it over the rest of my break. I admit I’ve been in kind of a slump again recently. Sorry about.

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I’ve been working with these dorks again.

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Game Musings, Feel Free to Chime In

A.K.A. What’s Going Into Irrgarten V3, Please Tell Me If It Sounds Awful

I know it’s been a while, so there may be some old ground covered again, here. First and foremost, the second revision did not meet my original intent at all, so if anyone happened to download that with intent to play it later, just forget it, and maybe double back to the original draft or wait for V3 to drop for testing. I admit, I didn’t really test the second iteration much before running off a set for PAX- and when all the coin tokens and various markers tumbled out all over the table/cot/wherever I was, I immediately realized, “Oh shit, this is totally not what I’m going for.” 

Project Irrgarten is meant to be a quick and easy game to set up and play, solo or with friends. It’s also been kind of open ended in design for the sake of making it easy to make up your own mini-campaigns or win conditions (first to kill 3 of the same monster, claim a specific treasure and leave the dungeon.) So, needing a ton of chits and markers to play is out, and I’d rather not involve dice into the mix. My friend Mike did suggest the element of randomness might make things more exciting, but I’ve yet to come up with a re-balancing that keeps things moving along. Since I’ve kind of been stalled out for a while, here’s the gist of what I’m considering. 

Since the other two editions both had issues with no-win and/or no-lose situations, either turning the Defense stat into a die roll modifier or else just make the defense INTO hit points and raise the total, making all obstacles ‘eat away’ at your card steadily as you roam. This would add a pressure element to exploration, since there wasn’t much reason a player (especially in solo) couldn’t backtrack to a healing point or take X number of turns to have a cleric heal the team 1 HP at a time. The way wounding was handled also kind of created stalemates in that most healing characters and items would restore 1 wound while enemies could only inflict 1 wound per turn. The attrition angle would call for a lot more healing items, and possibly for fairness’ sake, let players see more ‘rooms’ around them to plan the least costly route around. 

So on the topic of making numbers bigger, let’s look at party structure! I have been considering playing up the “we fight as one” theme a bit by having the team’s HP go into one big pool rather than separate targets, which would be easier to track, but could gimp the strategic element a little bit if support party members were untargetable and treated like just accessories. Then again, “back row” targeting skills tend to be special skills anyway, so it could be such a deal as ‘if this attack lands, choose an opponent’s card to defeat.’ An advantage to keeping HP in one big pool would be being able to use a die or notepad as an HP tracker instead of tiny cardboard chits. Bully, right? 

One thing for sure though, is I’m ditching having a secondary set of attack and defense stats per card- it confuses basically everyone and even I keep looking at the wrong set when counting up support bonuses. Instead, the plan will be to just have the passive/support skill detailed at the bottom of the card, and if some just so happen to buff the Leader’s attack, at least changing positions around doesn’t mean tallying up your totals over again.

Another pretty well decided change is that Items will have a Coin value included *on* the card, to add a little more (in game) value to the idea of “selling” an item for another or for healing. This will eliminate the need for coin markers.

So, let’s say we wanna  ditch markers altogether- that still leaves the ‘dungeon map,’ which grows and fills the table up over time, and even a ‘default’ 5x5 layout can get kind of awkward. It could be substituted by having ‘exploration’ occur by having the players take turns drawing from the room deck, and ‘claiming’ conquered obstacles on their side of the table. Then maybe a win condition could be who has cleared the most rooms once the deck is empty. Since space would be less of a concern, more people could join in at once, assuming that isn’t too chaotic in itself. 

 It seems a little less ‘satisfying,’ though, and I don’t think keeping a coin handy to mark your spot on the map is too much of a hassle compared to a pile of tiny cards and band-aid markers. 

Another suggestion I’ve been given is to have more rooms that offer penalties or bonuses for being in them, and maybe having combat happen from adjacent rooms rather than both players needing to be in the same room, creating kind of a system of terrain advantage/disadvantage in PVP. I’ll have to see what I can do with that idea, since it’s definitely interesting! 

If anyone reading cares to toss in their thoughts on any of this, please feel free to make a reply or write a message. It all stews in my own head so long any outside perspective is welcome.

[project-irrgarten]

Character Notes

Just some trivia while cooking up the next updates:

“Irrgarten” came up when searching for translations of maze or labyrinth in other languages- it specifically refers to hedge mazes and can be broken down to literally mean “lunatic garden.” Fits the theme of a randomly expanding dungeon, don’t you think?

The world the game takes place is actually predominantly non-human, but focused on human settlers scrounging for resources. Not all ‘monster’ races are hostile, either of course.

The blonde cleric, Silvy Whitewing is based on an old Dungeons and Dragons character of mine, and the rogue, Rami Hayami is based off an old Shadowrun character. 

Silvy was originally conceived with Mint Adnade of Tales of Phantasia in mind, but as the campaign wore on and she wound up more battle-worthy than expected, she became more of a paladin instead. If this game progresses, I hope to have several first-wave characters come back in ‘advanced’ classes like this. 

Drake, the “Hero,” was inspired by the lineage of fighters named “Ryu” in the lead role of the Breath of Fire series, with Drake being a more Western dragon-inspired name. His childhood friend/rival Tori comes from ‘tora’ or ‘tiger,’ and is a sort of reference to the tiger vs dragon, yin vs yang balance of power. In the original draft, if they were in the same party, they basically trade a +1 attack bonus between each other every turn as they try to outdo one another.

The male wizard (who has no official art yet) is named Arad after another kind of dragon, and will likely turn out to be Drake’s grandfather or uncle.

Lydia the Sorceress was designed with a middle-aged version of Lina Inverse from Slayers in mind, including the innate skill Sorcery Genius. 

A single character lead to redesigning the item cards completely- Alchemists, to make synthesis attacks easier to read and use.

[project-irrgarten]

Third Revision in the Works

After a bit of time on the back burner and reviewing the older systems, I’m going to be starting work on what should be a step back towards making the dungeon crawling faster paced again.

Leader and Support roles will be returning, and I have an idea as to how to make items and skills easier to manage. To avoid running into stalemates in combat, Defense will act as HP rather than as a number to beat to deal any damage at all. 

I also think I have an interesting idea into how to incorporate floors and level bosses into the flow of things, which was something I always wanted to do, but couldn’t think of a good way to do it. 

I’ll also be adding a couple bonus characters for people who want to test the game out with the next revision. So look forward to that, too, if you plan to print and play when the time comes. 

[project-irrgarten]

Post PAX Thoughts

So, did some testing this weekend. The 'all actions happen at once and nobody is 'dead' until the resolution phase' rule seems to make things a little more harder to track than I like when all party members are active, rather than one 'active' character with the rest buffing them method of v1. I also realized the second I dumped out my coin and wound markers that I did *not* want so many bits and pieces rolling around. So with those two main observations, I'm thinking maybe having dice involved in the game wouldn't be too bad- d6's aren't exactly hard to come by, and a bit of chance does kind of make most games more exciting. I could add initiative rolls for players and assume that monsters attack before or after all the player controlled characters do. I could eliminate the need for coin counters if I make the item cards pull double duty as well- you basically get coins by ditching an item you don't want in the first place, so mechanically it's just an extra step in the way of whatever you'd be spending coins on anyway (basically reviving/replacing heroes at exit points, trading for items at merchants' rooms.) I could probably simplify/balance items a bit more if I attach the Special Attacks to characters and require them to be powered up with an item card rather than the attack being tied to the card. Table space can also get to be an issue, as I saw playing with a friend in the hotel Starbucks. I could keep the room-by-room exploration theme in place if players just keep their explored rooms in a pile and remove them if they need to backtrack. Maybe it could be a deal where you need to clear X number of monsters/hazards to 'claim' a floor of the dungeon then move on, though it would be a better idea for solo than vs play in that case. Any ideas? I'm kind of up in the air here. I went to a couple panels on card game design and board game publishing and I definitely want something more polished before I try showing the game off again.

My main things I want to keep are an emphasis on quick and easy play while keeping room for strategy. I was a big fan of Heroscape a few years back and how easy it was to keep track of even with the variety of characters. The units also played off of each other in interesting ways (like orcs being designed to work en masse with other orc units, or characters supporting each other based on alignment and so on.)