LDS Game Card of the Week - Gather the Sheep

John 10:16 “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold... and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” Sacrifice Cost: 2; Markers: Wisdom, History; Themes: WHH; EFFECT: Choose two Histories verses from your deck, add them to your hand, and reshuffle your deck. I remember this one from way back in the day in my own seminary class. It was always used, both then, and later, in my mission, to show evidence of the need for God to be God of the whole world, not just of Palestine or the Middle East. When Jesus visits America, after His resurrection, He says, “And verily I say unto you, that ye are they of whom I said: Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.” The point was, to prove that the Bible references the Book of Mormon. Of course, if you didn’t already believe the Book of Mormon, it was really a meaningless argument. Still, in the game, I wanted to capture the sense of gathering and binding together, so I used the fetch mechanic to represent the “one fold” feeling. If I were playing this one in a constructed deck, I’d probably fetch “The First Vision”, which lets you fetch two more Histories verse and set them right away.


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.

This LDS Game Feels Complete!

 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.

Version 11.0 of the Rules and Cards

I've just posted version 11.0 of the cards and rules.  Really, there were almost no changes to the rules.  I had considered some, but Brendon and I decided to pass on each of the changes.  So, why a new version number?

Well, the cards were so deeply changed that I decided it warranted a new version.  Here are the changes:

1 - The addition of all of the new seminary Scripture Mastery verses, as outlined by materials I found at the lds.org website.  At first I struggled to decide what to do, because I really liked a lot of the passages that were removed from the list, and I really liked a lot of the cards and verse rules I had created for them.  I the end I decided to include the old ones and add in the new ones.  So, all of the verses are marked as either SM 2013 (meaning they're included in the new list), or SM Legacy (meaning they were only in the old list).  Verses that were on the old list and are still on the new list are marked SM 2013, too.

2 - The addition of a new theme icon: Life.  These are passages that relate to being alive, and living in the temporal day-to-day world.

3 - The icons and markers are more evenly balanced now.  I did some counting, and discovered that Faith and especially Wisdom were heavily over-represented, and Histories were sadly neglected. Much of this was due to the fact that the Scripture Mastery verses are more conceptual and doctrinal.  Still, I did some re-reading of the verses, and adjusted the icons and the markers so that there is a much more equitable count.  They are not equal, but it is much more balanced than it was before.

4 - Some of the basic verses were upgraded to power verses.  I know this really doesn't change much, but if the game is ever published, and we use my current packaging strategies, it will make the game more balanced.

5 - Brendon and I went through the verse rules, verse-by-verse and corrected a lot of verbiage and phrasing to make things more consistent, and fix ambiguities.

6 - I had to rework the layout of the prototype print-n-play pdf cards, because there were new things to include, like the Scripture Mastery SM 2013/Legacy label.

So, with all of those changes, I decided it deserved a new number.  I'm really hoping that, at this point, we've got the rules and the cards to the point where we could publish.  As I play the game, it really feels more complete now.

The new rules and cards are available for printing in the left sidebar.





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.

New Verses for the Scripture Mastery Set!

In my recent efforts to prepare and promote Chapter and Verse, I had a visit with a seminary teacher.  He was very helpful in a lot of ways, and one was to let me know that the Church was making some changes to the Seminary Scripture Mastery verse lists.

If it’s been a while since you’ve been in Seminary, or if you joined the church after your teens and never attended, here’s an explanation.  Those in the Church leadership that oversee the Seminary Program and its curriculum choose 100 passages, 25 from each of the standard works (The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Book of Mormon, and The Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, combined).  The Seminary students spend each year learning about and even memorizing the 25 scriptures that are part of that year’s curriculum.  After the four years of High School, each student should, in theory, have a good command of all 100 passages.

Now, since the entire first set of Chapter and Verse cards is all based on the 100 scriptures of the Scripture Mastery set.  And suddenly, that was changing!  I got a copy of the new lists from the Church’s website at LDS.org, and I set myself to revising.

Several things happened:

One, most of the verses remained unchanged.  A few were lengthened, others were added, and some were removed, so that the final tally would still be 25 per course.

Two, I really liked a lot of the cards that were now no longer a part of the Scripture Mastery List.  Faced with the idea of removing them, I decided to keep them in the set as sort of “Legacy” cards.  So, I added in new cards, and new verse rules for all of the additions.

Three, since I was taking so much time to revise add in so many cards, I was going to use this as an opportunity to revise the entire set in a few ways.  One was that I wanted to add a sixth theme icon:  Life (Things dealing with the earth, nature, and the practicalities of temporal existence).  As I read through the new verses, there were lots of opportunities for that.

Also, the themes were way out of balance in the original set.  There were almost twice as many “Wisdom” verses, for example, as “Histories”.  I went through and counted each icon and each marker, and did some thematic revisions to even the numbers out some.  They are still not exactly equal, but they are much more so than before.

So, the current themes are:

1 - Strength:  Represented currently by a Red Shield.  This is the theme of action, of doing, of taking a stand, of holding fast to your beliefs.

2 - Wisdom: A glowing Yellow Candle.  The theme of knowledge, of doctrine, of understanding, and of living in accord with that knowledge.

3 - Faith: Represented by the Blue Eye of Faith, spoken of by Alma.  When we look to the Heavens and believe, our lives are full and complete.

4 - Histories: A White Page, with writing.  The scriptures are full of stories and characters, teaching us by example how to choose the right.

5 - Trials: Represented by a Struggling Fist, surrounded by Dark Purple.  All may seem to be black as we face our difficulties, but as we overcome them, and the dawn comes, the darkness starts to fade.

6 - Life: a Green Leaf.  This is the theme of our home, our earth.  We are born to it, live in it daily, and will eventually return our bodies to it.

All of the verse cards relate in some way to one or more of these themes, and that’s how the verses are added into chapters and eventually into books!  That’s how you become a Master of Chapter and Verse!

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.

Version 10.0 of this LDS Game is ready for general playtesting!

Whew!

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.

Beta Version 10.0 of LDS Game Chapter and Verse

Every once in a while, things will bubble and boil up inside me, and all of the ideas that I've had over the course of six months or a year will all burst forth into...  What?   Stew?

I don't know where I was going with that metaphor.

But anyway, I just finished reworking the rules.  There are two big differences:

1. I did away with the learning game and the standard game.  I found that when I taught people the game, I taught the standard game, anyway.  I also combined the meta game into the shame rules doc as the standard game.  The mastery game is so far from development that I shelved it, too.  I also created a "Quick Start Guide" so that players can get the overall idea of the game, and give it a try, then reference the more detailed rules to answer questions, or as they get more into the game.
2. I did away with the "Quote Challenge" rule, and made it a DISCARD verse rule.  I found that many people testing the game were turned off by the rule, and by playing the game with the possibility of a challenge hanging over their heads.  Making it a verse rule follows the model of the Magic: The Gathering "Cancel", "Counter", and "Fizzle" spells.

Here in a few days, I'll put out the new cardset, too.  It has more verses, about 145, and my playtests so far have been lots of fun.

So, here is the new v10.0 complete rules document.  And here is the new v10.0 quickstart guide document. The links are also available in the sidebar, on the left!

Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). In addition to playing LDS games, Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.

LDS Game Design and Dr Grimdeath: Part 1

Recently, I got a facebook message from one of my old buddies from my high/school college days. He was one of our gamer crowd, and played a lot of D&D as well as other miniatures and role-playing games.


He’d developed a game, with a prototype, that he wanted me to playtest.  It was based on the old, corny B-grade horror flicks of the past.  The premise is a bunch of students spending the night in a mansion with a monster.  They have until midnight to 1) identify and kill the monster using weapons and items they find, 2) escape the island the mansion is on, or 3) die trying.

Our family tried it, and it was a hilarious and silly romp.  It’s a cooperative game, so we were all trying to win together.

Afterward,. by a few days, I got on the phone with him and we talked a lot of cool things about game design and our game efforts.  It was interesting to talk to him about Chapter and Verse, and about Dr Grimdeath, because he’s not LDS, and so that made it interesting to explain the concepts of the game.

I thought I’d share some highlights of our discussion, because it plays not only into LDS gaming, but also into game design in general.  I’ll touch on each one here, in the successive parts of this posting!

Feedback Loops

There are two kinds of feedback loops in game design.  A “Positive Feedback Loop” is a rule or a circumstance that encourages a situation to recur more and more frequently.  One broad example, it’s the way a Monopoly game is really won or lost in the first few turns.  The player that gets the best properties in the first few rounds ends up collecting more rent, and that grows into more re-investment, until he or she is unstoppable.  You have to watch for these in your games, or they can make the game balance run away from you.

A “Negative Feedback Loop” is a rule or situation that makes a situation LESS likely to recur.  In American Football, when you score a touchdown, you have to kick off to the opposing team, and it’s their turn to be on the offensive.

It’s important to note that the terms “Positive” and “Negative” don’t refer to any thougths about the outcome.  As a player a PFL can have a very bad impact on my strategies and my play of the game, and a NFL can keep my opponents in check.  Positive loops are things MORE likely to happen again, and negative loops are things LESS likely.

Early in the game, when a player closed up a book, he/she would draw blessing verses, and then continue on with their turn.  I soon discovered that players could use various drawing verses (like Prayer and Keyword) effects to just keep on playing and playing, closing book after book, and win in one turn without the other player being able to do anything.  A PFL was messing up the game balance.  I chose to fix it like the football game.  Once you close a book, your turn ends.

It’s interesting because in an LDS game, as in any game, you have to watch out for PFL’s because they can really mess up the balance of a game.  On the other hand, in LDS LIFE, it’s full of PFLs.  Like prayer, for example.  You say a prayer and you feel great.  You feel connected to God.  That makes you want to pray more.  Which makes you more connected...

Of course, temptation is also a PFL.  If you give in once, you’re more likely to do it again.

Next: Getting to Your Core Essence






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.