Tag: dungeon rancher

The difference between cards and dice

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.

Evolution of Dungeon Rancher Monsters

Early on, we knew that the monsters in Dungeon Rancher would have abilities if only to differentiate them from each other. There are four resources players use to feed monsters. Since each monster uses two resources, this implies a total of 4 choose 2 = 6 monsters. We gave the Dragon and the Golem simple resource production abilities to start with while testing other aspects of the game.

It wasn’t too long before we added abilities for the rest of the monsters as well. One useful principle we discovered is that abilities that don’t require keeping the monster around are unthematic because they make the monster feel more like a resource card than like something to raise. For instance, one version of the Golem’s ability allowed players to discard it to build a room for free, so players treated it like a “free room” card and always used it immediately.

We settled eventually on the concept that each monster would have a different scoring ability. After some experimentation, we further determined that such scoring abilities should always force the player to take on risk for more points. For example, the Dragon scoring ability increases its value for every ‘6’ on it, making it much more difficult to tend. Under this system, creatures represent different ways for the players to challenge themselves to increase their score.

The newest addition to the monster mechanics rewards players for placing monsters with matching “personalities” in adjacent rooms. For example, placing a creature with a food symbol on its right in a room to the left of one with a matching food symbol on its left produces a single food resource, which is automatically useful since you have two monsters that require it. The objective was to make monster placement more interesting. Adding this mechanic costs very little because it echoes the existing mechanic that adjacent matching rooms produce magic resources.

When game procedures inspire new mechanics

Game procedures are what I call the various maintenance tasks required in any board game to keep the game going, such as reshuffling decks, sorting the supply, or counting up victory points. They are the sorts of things that would be automated in the computer version of a game. An important part of board game design is streamlining procedures so they are not noticed by the players, since they do not contribute anything positive to the experience of the game.

Sometimes, in the course of improving game procedures, you find a new twist on your mechanics. This happened to me recently in Dungeon Rancher. I had been using six-sided dice to indicate monster levels, and one of my playtesters remarked that in the real world it is inconvenient to have to find a value on a die – in TTS, of course, you can just press the corresponding number.

I had not been intending to use dice in the actual game (the level die was a placeholder), but this got me thinking – how could dice be used to represent levels in a way that didn’t require the onerous procedure of locating a face? As it happens, when players are tending to monsters in Dungeon Rancher (a task that requires assigning a die that equals or exceeds the monster’s level), they tend to place the die on the monster to remind themselves that they have tended that monster. This inspired me to use the number of dice as the level, rather than the maximum die.

Each time your monster levels up you have to assign it a die matching or exceeding its highest die. The die you assign remains on the monster, increasing its level and potentially increasing the required value for the next time you need to tend to it. The required procedures are very smooth because they already match what the players needed to do; no additional steps are required.

This in turn led to some new mechanics revolving around rerolling dice – both dice used to tend monsters and dice already on the monsters from previous rounds. Thematically, this works very well – if you give the monster high-quality food, it becomes spoiled and will want high-quality food in the future, but you can attempt to tame it and reduce its pickiness. The mechanical process ends up feeling very rewarding, as players must balance caring for their monsters now with keeping their monsters as docile as possible for future rounds.

The lesson I take away from this is that sometimes the best source of mechanical inspiration can be coming up with ways to remove mundane chores from the game.

Cutting mining mechanics from Dungeon Rancher

Recently I oversaw a playtest of Dungeon Rancher in which rounds took 20 minutes (the target is 6). This was an increase of 4 minutes per round from the previous week, so I focused on determining why it was taking so long. It turned out the main culprits were the new dice-selling mechanic (which has since been removed) and the Mining Phase.

The Mining Phase was the mechanic I was most excited about going into the project initially. In games like Dungeon Keeper 2, there is a mechanic in which digging into a gold vein is likely to reveal further gold veins because they tend to be grouped. I wanted to replicate this feeling without any spatial elements by having decks of cards where certain cards allowed players to change the deck from which they drew.

We removed the mechanic of needing specific cards to switch decks after a previous playtest but left the four decks with different resources, each coded to one of the four needs of the game. The red deck had the least challenging monsters, allowing players to save minions for use generating red dice. The green and yellow decks provided green and yellow dice directly. And the blue deck provided tunnels and blueprints for building the rooms that passively generate magic each round.

Unfortunately, the mining phase takes too long. Players have also said that it feels very swingy; this is probably due to the threat system where resource cards have threat symbols that increase the strength of the next monster encountered if its color matches. Running into a lot of monsters means you won’t have time to gather resources, and finding many resources means the first monster you encounter will probably wipe you out.

The other cost of the mining phase is in explanation time. Between the threat system, the differences between the different decks, and capturing monsters, it adds a lot to the explanation time and some aspects are difficult for players to remember, such as the nuances of each mining deck.

As much as I wanted the mining mechanics to work, playtesting indicates that the cost is too high for what they add to the game. Therefore we are removing mining from the game. The core fantasy of the game is raising monsters, which does not require the mining minigame. To replace it, we are adding a Drafting phase in which players draft monsters, resources, and rooms into their dungeon. Drafting solves the problems that led to the removal of Mining because it takes very little time to explain and can be done quickly and simultaneously.

Drafting will hopefully also address feedback that the game lacks player interaction. The difficulty with player interaction is that it can lead to longer playtimes and is often not compatible with simultaneous gameplay. Drafting interactions are one of those rare exceptions.