Dice have been a looming problem in Dungeon Rancher for a while. Every monster uses dice to track its level by the number of dice on the card. On top of that, players must roll enough dice to feel secure in feeding their monsters. Given four colors of dice, even the most conservative estimate puts the total dice required at 120. This is prohibitive on cost alone, but dice are also inconvenient for tracking states because it is easy to knock them over, losing information.
For these reasons, we’ve decided to try switching to using cards to track monster levels instead of dice. Each monster has a stack of cards, and to tend to it you must play a card equal to or greater than the top card. Instead of four bags of dice, there are now four decks of cards. This has major implications for the game.
When we used dice to represent levels, the highest die determined the difficulty of tending to the monster. It is inconvenient for players to search a pile of cards, so now only the top card matters. Since it would be too powerful to train a monster by changing just one card, we decided to remove the training mechanic altogether. Rerolls became the ability to discard a card and redraw from that deck.
Fortunately, we have space for the card piles above or below each monster because we limit rooms to two monsters. This is good because the new resource cards need to be the same size as the draftable cards since some are in the draft. The change also makes it much easier to theme the resources because we can use thematic icons rather than pictures of colored dice.
Players naturally hold all the cards they gain from different sources in their hands – both the drafted cards and the produced ones. Therefore we had to modify the rules about discarding your hand at the end of your turn. Now players must only discard down to their hand size, whether they keep drafted or non-drafted cards. Their hand size is equal to the number of rooms they control, making room building a little more interesting.
Finally, we decided that all monsters should start at level 1. To level them up faster, players may spend a new type of token to tend to them again.
Using a different type of component to represent information always has consequences. I find it is best to go with whatever changes are suggested by the new medium rather than forcing it to work the same way as the old one. The same is true when working under component restrictions. For example, if you are involved in an 18-card contest, don’t try to cram a bunch of state information into the cards. Just use them the way cards are typically used and make a good game within those bounds.