I've been very excited! The first four playtest games of Seeker's Quest - Title of Liberty have been quite successful and very revealing! The first tests have been using only TOL verses in randomized decks. Once I feel that the set is functional, consistent, and unbroken, then we'll do some testing with mixed decks (including verses from the Scripture Mastery set).
Since there's not as many draw or seek verses in this set, the play is very different. Also, a lot of the verse rules play well within specific stories, so I think they cater to preconstructed decks moreso than the SM set. All of that tends to lend itself to play that's more focused on icons and books than on combos so far.
We'll see how that plays out once we get into testing with precon decks. I'm particularly interested in how a battle deck will play out. I'm a bit afraid that it might be broken in a precon deck. We'll have to see! That's what platesting is for, right?
If anyone is interested in cutting out some cards and trying it at home, I'd sure appreciate it! Contact me at mrkhmusic@yahoo.com, or leave a comment below, and I'll set you up!
In the meantime, at the left, click to follow our facebook page!
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
So, this week, I was all excited to start working on the Title of Liberty cardset, printing them out and getting them cut and sleeved, ready for playtesting. By the way, if you want to help playtest, just email me!
Then my son and I were talking about decks from the Scripture Mastery set, and he started wondering out loud if he could make a One-Turn-Kill deck. In Yu-Gi-Oh, that's where you kill off your opponent in, obviously, one turn. In this case, it would be a One-Turn-Win, since nobody dies in Seeker's Quest.
I thought, No way. It can't happen. I've set all of the verses where you receive blessings to have high sacrifice costs. But he thought that he could get enough draw verses going to overcome that. I was still skeptical, but I was, honestly, scared.
Well, to shorten the long story, he did it. It was a wicked deck, filled with verses that allowed him to draw blessings, and verses that allowed him to draw verses, both from his deck and the discard. Three games in a row, he won before I even got a chance to freeplay my first verse.
In the game design world, this is known as "Breaking the Game". I would have been thrilled if we had discovered this in the early playtesting phases of making the game. Instead, it came to light after the cards were designed and already available to the public! Yikes!
Seriously, I was quite dejected.
But, soon after, I regrouped, and he and I started talking about ways to "nerf" the verses in question.
Let me explain that. In his video/online gaming circles, if a game company makes a facet of a game weaker or harder to use, it has been "nerfed". To understand this word, think of a real sword, and next to it, a Nerf sword. That should clear up any confusion.
So, we had to nerf the blessing draw verses, and we did that by setting it up so that after receiving the blessing, you end your turn. That way, the other guy gets to play. We also nerfed the verse draws, so that they're not so many, or for greater cost. And, the few verses that pull from the discard, like "Judgement Day" don't pull quite so many, so easily.
That meant that I had to rework the graphics of the verses, and re-upload them into The Game Crafter's website. It took me a while to do all that, but it's done, now. Anyone who buys any of the Seeker's Quest products (Full games, boosters, or pre-con decks) will all contain the new versions of the verses.
There are a few of you who have bought the game already, and for you, if you contact me, and tell me which game set you bought, I'll make up a special booster with the right cards and get it sent off to you.
Here are a few of the "new" verses:
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
Brendon and I had a bunch of friends come over last night for a few games. Jacob wasn't with us, he and mom were up at the hospital. He got admitted again on Friday.
The games were so energizing. Brendon and I started out by just explaining the game an demonstrating a few turns. There were about seven of us, so we split into two groups, one of three and one of four, and we all started playing. It was one older guy (dad to three of the boys) and another kid who likes to come to our house from time to time. As we started playing, each one seemed to get the game pretty quickly. My group was the three-player, and our game went longer. The other group actually played two games in the same time frame.
After all the games, it was amazing to see everybody just jump in talking about how fun it was. Brendon and I had a great talk afterward about the game and about how teaching the game works. It was all just great to have fun with friends with the scriptures.
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
Well, earlier, really. I’ve been a tabletop gamer all of my life. I loved the early role-playing games, and I played Avalon Hill’s wargames with my friends from as early as 8th grade. I’ve come up with various game ideas over the years, too. But in the early parts of the century, as I got more and more involved in collectible card games (CCG’s, like Magic: the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokemon, which I played with my sons), I found myself wanting to make an LDS game that expressed my faith. I tried making one that was based on the Book of Mormon, but I struggled with it, and in the end, it didn’t satisfy me.
But in early 2006, an idea gelled for me, and I created a set of rules, and a set of cards. I talked about it in my Mormon commentary blog here, and here.
Rather than be a strict story-line game, it would be more abstract. The players take verses of scripture, from the seminary scripture mastery list, combine them together into thematic chapters and then close them up into books. The verses would have individual effects which would change the play of the game, just like MTG and YGO cards do. It was, and still is, a new idea in the LDS game market.
Over the years, I would work on it, abandon it, then work on it, and abandon it in a sort of creative/frustration cycle. It was usually my son that would break the frustration part by asking to play it again. That would trigger a new wave of creativity, a new version of the rules, and more playtesting, until the next cycle of frustration would make me set it aside for a while.
All the time, I thought I wanted to publish it, but I’ve never known how to accomplish that. I’ve looked at lots of options, and I’ve submitted it at times to various publishers, I’ve priced out printing, etc... but I’ve never really been sure how to proceed with it.
A few months ago, after I turned in the manuscript for my the final book of my Dutch oven cookbook contract, I started thinking about it again. I brought it out, dusted it off, and started reworking some rules ideas that had been bugging me about it. I made a whole new set of cards, and Brendon and I started playtesting it. My boys started taking a deeper role in the development and promotion of the game. Then, another idea hit, and the Church changed the official list of Scripture Mastery verses, and we remade the whole cardset again. We’re now in version 11 of the rules. I’ve been contacting a number of key people and sharing the game with them, gathering input and even endorsements.
Last week, I met with a friend who owns a game store, and I demo’ed the new Chapter and Verse for him. He was very positive and his suggestions were more directed toward how to get the the game published and distributed, rather than any fixes that needed in the game.
A switch turned inside me that night. I realized for the first time inside me that this game needs to be published and that it will be published. I’m not sure when it will happen, but there are now several options on the table to get it done. For the first time in the 7 years I’ve been working on this game, it feels ready and it feels like it will actually happen.
And that is very, very exciting!
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
So, after reworking the card set, which increased the number of cards by over 50%, and redoing the layout, and printing the pages and pages of cards, then cutting them and sleeving them, Brendon and I finally got a chance to playtest this cardset. I truly hope it's the last test. I've been working and reworking these cards in this LDS game for over seven years, now! And always with the Scripture Mastery verses.
We played two quick games, and they were both thrilling. These cards are so much more balanced and flexible than ever before. With the addition of the Life icons and evening out of the other icons, the game was much more playable. There were more options, but it wasn't overwhelming!
I was concerned that there would be certain verses that would be too powerful. There were some powerful cards, it's true, but no one verse dominated the game. There was plenty of quoting and even some quote challenging, but again, it didn't rule the play. Since Brendon had studied many of the verses in seminary, for Scripture Mastery, he was able to knock off quite a few quotes.
We played with random verses in our decks, as if we had just opened the game out of the box. We used one set of verses as our base to draw from. We'll have to try and work with constructed decks sometime soon.
We also discovered that Brendon's work on this whole project has almost earned him the game design merit badge. This is a relatively new badge, only about a year or so old.
At any rate, this is a great LDS game. I'm really proud and excited to have been able to work on it all this time. I really, finally feel like this revision is the most complete of all the versions of it so far!
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
After banging my head against my computer for a frustrating morning, I finally got the latest revision of the cards prepped as a PDF and set on the site! You can download them on the left, or by clicking here!
Now there's a common thread through the phraseology of the verse rules, the Mastery challenge DISCARD effect is now in place, and it's all ready!
Soooo....
Pleeeeeze give it a try and start playtesting it! Let me know how it all goes. It is a bit intimidating to print and cut apart all of those cards. There are 143 cards, and each one is a set of six on its own page. I haven't yet figured out how to merge my database to flow them so that there are six unique cards on each sheet.
But, you can print them all out, then cut one off of each sheet, and you'll have enough to play. Then, if you cut them all out, you'll also have enough that two people could make unique decks and test your deckmaking, so the error does have its advantages. I also recommend that you put the verses into plastic sleeves (available dirt cheap at hobby stores and card shops), so that they're easier to shuffle!
Thanks so much for giving it a try!
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
In Collectible Card Games, balance is a very interesting concept. I mean, you want to have some stronger cards in your set, and a few really tough ones so that people get excited about collecting and playing those cards in their decks. So, how is it that a game can be balanced if some cards are so powerful?
Achilles heels
One way to impact the powerful cards is to instill some weakness in the card itself. Make the special rule such that it’s powerful impact only comes into play in certain circumstances. This is the limit on “The Work of God” and “The Glory of God” Their Ability only triggers when they’re together.
Other Powerful Cards
Another way to temper the power of a big bad card is to have other big bad cards that can stand up to it. In Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh, the biggest baddest monsters always have to deal with other bigger, badder monsters.
High costs
In the economy of the game, more powerful cards should be harder, or “more expensive” to play. Pearl verses, for example, all cost a sacrifice cost of at least 3 to play, one even costs 4.
Rarity
One simple way to balance out powerful cards is to make them rarer. This can be done either in the game itself, by using the “Unique” special rule, or in the meta game, by including fewer of the powerful cards in the sets or packs.
Ultimately, it takes a lot of playtesting to determine if a set of cards is balanced.
Brendon and I made decks tonight and played a game or two. I’m very pleased that both of our constructed decks played very well against the other. Neither one felt to be too overly powerful. I don’t mind if a deck is powerful, as long as it’s not an automatic win every time. As long as something can bring it down, it’s good by me.
Last week, we also playtested some games with random decks made from a set of one of each card. That played out pretty well. Then, we added an extra set of “normal” (not powered) verses (so there were two of each of those, and one each of the strong verses). Those games played out pretty nicely as well.
I’m still finding verse with ambiguous wording, or other errors, but those are becoming fewer, and I’m getting more and more confident in the balance of the verses. It’s exciting.
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
I mentioned that my son and I have been playing each Sunday. That's been a lot of fun, and it has also revealed a lot about the game.
One thing I discovered is that there is way too much drawing from and searching of the deck. One can play on and on, while the opponents are sitting scratching their noses. There are a few options to stop this, of course, like the quote it challenge, but that can be a bit tricky to time, and you have to have verses available to sacrifice.
Another issue was poorly worded verse rules and effects, as well as power adjustments that needed to be implemented in some individual verses.
Finally, I wanted to start implementing some of my previous ideas, like the pearls. I think the location verses will have to wait for another set, but I also wanted some extra-powerful cards that could make up the "rares" of the game.
So, over the last few days, I've been setting up the spreadsheets so that I can flow the verse data into card format, then I adjusted some of the existing verses. Finally, Brendon and I sat down and started discussing and working out some of the power cards. That was a lot of fun. Here we are, reading the verses, discussing the meanings, and interpreting the meanings in game terms. It was like scripture study, but it was fun, not drudgery. In the context of the game, it was a whole new experience!
Of course, now, we need to rewrite the rules to accommodate the new cards and some of the new things we've been trying out. This is version 9.0 of the beta rules! We just keep on tweakin'!
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
So, a couple of weeks ago, my son bounced up to me and said, “We need to play Chapter and Verse!” It happened to be a sunday evening, and I was done with the Dutch Oven cooking for the day. It seemed a clever Sunday night sort of activity, so I dug up the cards that I had, we shuffled them up, and started playing.
It was very exciting to me to see the excitement in him. I love to watch as he reads an important verse he’s about to play, trying to quick-memorize it, just in case I make him quote it, or how suddenly the air is filled with words like “Faith”, “Strength”, and “Prayer” and it’s all a natural part of the fun. We don’t even really notice it!
Well, I do.
But then, I’m a dad...
We decided that we were having so much fun that we were going to plan on playing each Sunday, a few games each time. So far, we’ve held to that plan. I’ve really begun to look forward to our playtesting sessions.
We’ve started noting ambiguities in the wording of the verse effects, and we’ve discovered a few combos that are a bit too powerful, and need to be tempered. For example, “The Work of God” and “The Glory of God” should both cost 3 to play, instead of the current 2. “Judgement Day”, by itself is really cool. One in your hand and one in your discard is almost an infinite loop of drawing. I’m still not sure how to fix that.
We’ve tried two different processes for closing up books. Tonight, we talked about a third. We’ll try them all and see which one works best.
It’s time to revise the cards, too. With all of our notes, clarifications, revisions, and plans, we need to make a new set. This current set has been around for two complete revisions of the rules!
I don’t know what the future holds for Chapter and Verse, but for now, it’s fun to play each week!
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
A few weeks ago, as I was in a game shop up in West Jordan, I struck up a conversation with the owner, when I noticed he was wearing a CTR ring. When I mentioned Chapter and Verse and told him it was an LDS game based on the scriptures, he said, "I'd play that!"
With that encouragement, I set up a time to demo it for him. That was tonight. We played a quick game, and he, being a long-time hard core gamer, picked it right up. Even though I nailed him twice on the "Quote it" rule (which I rarely do when I'm demoing it), he still won. I didn't even have to let him win.
His two initial comments?
One was that it was a fun game, which I sure appreciated. Frankly, I just appreciated him taking the time go give it a whirl.
The other comment was that it might market better as a "LCG" or "Living Card Game". This is a model that a lot of very successful card games are going with right now, like Munchkin, Dominion, Killer Bunnies, and many others. The idea is that you create a unique starter set, that people buy to begin playing. That contains everything they need to start with. Then, every so often, you release expansion sets, which are also complete sets, sold in a single package (rather than sold in small "booster packs").
One cool thing about doing Chapter and Verse that way is that they way the game is designed, you wouldn't need to start with the first set. A new player could jump in and begin playing with any set.
Another thought I had would be to kind of hybrid it with collectibility. For example. Currently, there are 100 unique cards in the first set. Suppose that you divided those into 60 lower-powered cards, and 40 stronger cards. Each starter set could contain two copies of each lower card (as if they were "common"), and one copy each of the stronger cards. Then, you could also create 25 really strong cards (the "rares"), and even sell them in a separate "powerup" set.
But then, what am I talking about? I can't even get going with a first printing yet! Oh, well. At least it was fun to show the game to a receptive player.
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
I had a great weekend. My family went up to Park City, UT to just relax and enjoy. We invited another family to go with us, some great, long-time friends. The dad and I ended up playing Chapter and Verse, and he really liked it. He kept jumping in with suggestions for graphics.
I made an amazing deck, and even took on Brendon's "Quote it!" deck. Brendon's deck is all based on using the Quote mechanic to play lots of verses for free. Then, he also has some fluff cards that he can discard to make me quote things. It's a tough deck to beat.
But "The Work and The Glory" did it! It's based on two cards: The Work of God, and the Glory of God. These two cards share an effect and a combo. If the two are played into the same chapter, you can close up the chapter into a book no matter how many icons there are or of what kind.
Two cards, one book. Boom.
So, every other verse in the deck is geared toward putting those two verses in your hand. It turns out that there are, like, three verses that have a keyword effect that can pull those verses forward. Then, I added a lot of verses with the prayer effect, so that I could dig through my deck quicker and get to those two verses.
Here's the deck:
"The Work and the Glory" (3 copies of each verse)
4 - God and Moses
10 - Job's Testimony
13 - Talking With God
14 - The Marvel
33 - Stephen's Sacrifice
42 - The Word of God
45 - Show Me
51 - The Work of Satan
56 - Helping Man, Helping God
57 - A Child's Humility
68 - Kindness and Love
79 - Don't Wait
96 - The Glory of God
97 - The Work of God
98 - The Heart of Zion
It's a pretty cool deck! Maybe here soon, I'll post up Brendon's "Quote it" deck. It's pretty good!
If any of you out there reading this has had any deck ideas, just post a comment, and tell us all about it.
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
So, this last weekend, we had some friends over for MTG and games, and we ended up playing a five-way game of Chapter and Verse. That's easily the biggest game we've ever played. It played pretty well, even though many of the players were complete beginners. The tabletop got a little cluttered and it was a little tricky to see the ownership of the cards. I have some ideas on how to fix that, however.
I think it only took us about 40 minutes to get a winner. The other players wanted to continue to see who came in second, third, etc... After about 50 minutes or so, we were seeing who was to come in third and we finally decided to stop. A good sign was that there were still some people wanting to continue.
That experience brought up another interesting issue. Currently, by the rules, in larger games, when one person wins, the game ends. But when the remaining players wanted to continue, the winner dropped out. It was curious because in Magic, the losers are eliminated. In C&V, the winners are. It occurred to me that the winners could actually continue playing. I mean, yes, the winner wins, and that's that, but he/she could continue playing and influence who comes in second, third, etc...
It would beat sitting out...
Thoughts?
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
I just sent this out to the email list (the yahoogroups to the left):
Hello, everyone!
I'm starting to get caught up on maintaining this mailing list, and I'm very excited to get moving forward on the game. I've decided that I'm going to enter the game in a design contest held annually at a Salt Lake City game convention every January. I'm excited to press forward with that.
To that end, I need some help:
First of all: I would very much like to hear back from anyone on this group who has played the game, especially in its most recent form (version 8.1). Unfortunately, because of spam, I had to shut down the discussion option in this group, but I would encourage you to join the chapterandversgametalk discussion
yahoogroup. You can find it at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chapterandversegametalk/
If you don't want to join that group, you can privately email me your reaction to the game at mrkhmusic@yahoo.com
Please take some time to try v 8.1 and to let me know how it goes. The more feedback I get, the better I will be able to get the game ready for the contest. Entry deadlines are the end of October, even though the presentation of the games and the selection of the winner won't happen until January.
Second of all, if there are any graphic designers in this group, I would sure love to talk to you about helping to prepare the game for the contest, and eventually for publication. I would be open to negotiating a split of any of the sales with anyone who was interested.
Thanks to all of you. It has sure been encouraging to see so many people express an interest in the game!
I've been doing some more testing lately, and the more I play 8.1, the more excited I get. It just keeps feeling more and more smooth and consistent.
I have been noticing, however, as I've been playing, that I need to tweak up the cards some. There are a few cards that need to be rewritten. Not the scriptures, of course! Mostly the effects. Some of them have had the same effects text for the last three or four versions, and it's time to update! Others just need to be more balanced. For example, there are a few cards that simply cost too little to play, and the sacrifice cost needs to be higher. Or maybe the ability needs to be tempered a little. If, while you're playtesting, you find verses in need of editing, please let me know, via comment here, or via email!
Last night my son and I tested the new version of the basic game. It was dubbed an immediate success. Not only did he really enjoy the game, but as soon as we were done, he lept into his ideas for cards for the advanced game (the collector/deck building game). The cool thing was that his suggestions showed that he understood the scripture stories because the card effects he was talking about reflected the scriptures! He was thinking, for example, of how a "Nephi" character card might interact on the table with a "Laman" character card. It was thrilling to watch! And the dude's only ten!
Anyway, I want to test it a few more times before I remake and repost the cardsets, and I haven't rewritten the new rules, yet.
Basically, it's the same game. The verses are still chosen from the Scripture Mastery lists. In fact, I didn't change any of the scripture quotes or excerpts I'd been using. I've done a few things to streamline play, and especially to streamline learning the game.
1. Now, instead of numbers representing the various Strength, Faith, etc.. points, there are simply letters: S, F, etc.. Ultimately, in the published version, these will be replaced with visual graphic icons, in a similar way to the "mana" symbols in MTG or the Pokemon/Energy types in Pokemon. Instead of trying to get 12 points in a certain theme, now you simply accumulate icons. This keeps you from having to add up what's on the table, and all you have to do is count. Most cards now have one or two icons/letters. Some have more, and some will even have a "FF" double icon, counting as two. I found this makes play much faster. In fact, I was surprised just how much faster it is. I still haven't decided how many icons you have to have in the chapters to close up a book. I'm thinking 5 or 7, but the jury's still out.
2. The card effects for the Basic game have changed, but only a little. I went through all of the verses and counted the number of repetitions of each word (except for the "and"s and "the"s). The most common words were the ones I set up for the "Keyword" effect. One of the goals is that someone can grab the whole stack of basic game cards. Split them in half, shuffle them, and play. With these keyword verses relating to more words, then there is a greater likelihood that the combinations will actually come up. I also had to re-write the wording of a few verse effects to reflect the new icon style of play.
3. To streamline learning, there are only 4 standardized effects: Quote, Prayer, Keyword, and Discard. Everything else will be in the advanced cardsets.
Other than that, it's pretty much the same game. It played much more quickly, much more smoothly. It was very easy to teach it to my son. That may well have been because he was a bit familiar with previous versions, and he's also fluent in playing more complex collectible games. I'll have to try and teach it to some folks that have no CCG background and see what they think.
I'm getting re-excited to see how it might fit into the world of LDS games, and help people learn their Scripture Mastery.
James and I just played a bit of a game using yahoo webcams. Long distance! We tried to get the audio working, but we just couldn't do it. As a PC man, I'll have to defer to the Mac's in this case. They do make it much easier!
We talked about a lot of thing that the game needs. One of the biggest is rules that are written more clearly. They have to be so clear and simple that someone who's never played a CCG before can do it. I'll have to rework it. Again...
But at least this time I'm not changing the actual play rules. I'm just making them easier to understand.
I just realized another issue with the rules that needs clarification: If you're playing along and you run out of verses in your deck, what do you do?
There're a couple of ideas I have right off, and I'd like your input.
1. If you run out of verses in your deck, you lose the game. In most other CCG's (Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokemon), that's the way it resolves. This also tends to make the decks that flow lots of verses a little less powerful.
2. If you run out of verses in your deck, you keep playing, but you can't draw. That would mean you'd have to have some way to pull from your discard, or your only source of new verses would be your blessing stack.
3. The only other option I can think of is that if you run out of verses, you could shuffle your discard and flip them face down into your deck and continue playing.
What do you think? Right off the top of my head, I'm leaning toward option 2. I don't know why, but it seems to be pretty sensible. Still, I'll defer to the opinions of the playtesters, if there's enough clear opinion either way.
Brendon and I just barely finished playing the two new decks against each other. Wow. What fun, to see two planned decks go head to head. It showed me a bunch of cool things:
1. "Quote" isn't as powerful as I thought it would be. It is cool, and it did help Brendon bring out lots of verses, but it wasn't as uber-powerful as I was afraid it would be.
2. The two decks really were pretty evenly matched. If he hadn't won when he did, I would have won the next turn. And the only reason I didn't win was that I didn't have enough verses to sacrifice to throw down the final combo and pull my last blessing.
3. After this game and some of the other games I've played, I feel like there needs to be some limits on the turns. Brendon, in his turn, kept drawing and playing. Then, in my turn, I kept drawing and playing. It makes for long, drawn out turns. I'm flirting with the idea of a rule that would say that when you close out a book, the play phase of your turn ends, and you move into the end phase. I dunno. I'll have to play with that. Another idea is to make more verse effects that can be played instantly instead of only in your own turn. That way the turns can be more interactive instead of so long. Maybe even some verses that can end an opponent's turn.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts. Tell me what you're thinking when you play your games!
There's lots of cool new stuff over in the playtester's page. You gotta check it out!
First of all, we're excited to announce the creation and release of two playtest decks! The first one is based on the "Quote" mechanic. It'll be interesting to see just how this one plays out. Almost every card has the ability, so if someone were good at memorizing, they'd be able to play verse after verse for free!
Then, there's the Strength of Faith! This deck is made of cards from the Strength and Faith themes. Those two play together quite nicely, bringing verses to the hand and drawing blessings.
It'll be fun to try these out and see how they play. Give them a game or two and tell me how they do!
Also, there's a new version of the rules and the first cardset. Nothing's really changed much. There was a need for a clarification. Now, verses that are played as a result of another verse's effect are not "played" but are "set". If a verse is set, its own effect doesn't trigger. Its numbers still count in chapters, but no effects. This keeps the long chains of effects down.
And, based on some feedback I got from James, I created a one-page quick start guide to get you playing right away. The details of the game are still in the rules, but to just start throwing verses down, you can start with the quick start. It's not so intimidating as 8+ pages of rules!
A couple of days ago, I got in some more playing with Brendon and Jared. This time, we had a friend of ours from Mexico playing as well, Limhi (you'll recognize that name if you read your scriptures...) In spite of the fact that he sometimes struggles with English, he did quite well, and in fact, almost won. It was interesting to see him try and quote verses in English. A couple of times, I knew the Spanish versions, so I let him quote them in Spanish.
I just got finished posting up a new set of rules, v5.4. Not a lot of changes, but a clarification that will keep the game from spiraling out of control. That's the concept of the "Set" card verses the "Played" card. Any card that I play from my hand in the freeplay or after sacrificing in the regular play phase is considered to be "played", and it's effect is triggered.
On the other hand, if a card comes into play on the table top as a result of a verse effect, it's called being "Set", and its effect does NOT trigger. However, once it's on the table, if it has an ongoing effect "while in play", that effect is valid.
I made changes to the cards themselves to reflect this difference as well. Rather that having an effect read "...play a card from your hand." it now reads "...set a card from your hand."
That way, you won't have long strings of effects, like having a card throw down another card, whose effect throws down another card, which triggers another card being played, which causes, etc. etc. You get the picture.
Also, there's now a hand size limitation rule. Now, if you start your turn with more than 8 verses, you have to take the extra verses (your choice) and put them on the bottom of your blessing stack.
Don't worry. The game's still fun. :-) Moreso, in fact!
