Weavers is a 2-player board game about magical combat that focuses on the process of spellcasting itself as opposed to the effects of spells. It is a game that rewards timing and planning ahead.
Each player has a deck of 36 spell cards created by combining two fixed sets of 18 cards. There are two types of set – class sets, which have simpler spells, and spellbooks, which have more complex spells. A deck combines one class with one spellbook.
Each player plays 1 spell per turn. Spells have a small effect that occurs immediately when played and a larger effect that occurs if the spell is completed on a future turn. Each spell also produces 1-3 “spell components” when played. The challenge is that completing a spell requires producing specific spell components in the correct order, while simultaneously trying to satisfy the requirements of other spells at the same time. The focus of the game is on timing and planning.
Weavers is a game I have wanted to make for a long time. I discovered the game Spellbinder as a teenager and was fascinated by the idea of using sequences of symbols to cast spells, exploiting sequence overlaps to cast spells more efficiently. It felt more like spellcasting than in any other game. However, the game in practice was painful to play – it was difficult to keep track of all the different spells you could cast and predicting your opponent’s actions was even harder. I think it probably works better as a play-by-mail where you can spend a lot of time analyzing possibilities, but I wanted to play it in real life. At the time, I couldn’t figure out a variant that worked so I set it aside.
The key realization that led me to revisit the mechanics of sequence-based spellcasting was the importance of Foreshadowing in games. I think the primary flaw with Spellbinders as a board game is how impossible it is to predict what is going to happen in the near future. There are simply too many options to keep track of.
With this in mind, I focused on solving the problem of making events as easy to predict as possible. In Weavers, spells are telegraphed well in advance in proportion to their strength, because your opponent has to literally play the spell card. There are no surprise fireballs – unless you are ignoring your opponent completely, you can see every threat before it arrives. The game is not about surprising your opponent, it is about being as efficient as possible with your spellcasting.
One of the early revelations I had was to focus on costs rather than effects as the core of the game. Early versions of Weavers had a large assortment of card effects, and some cards had text-based effects of varying complexity. But the more different effects there are, the harder it is to parse what your opponent is doing. With the objective of making effects as easy to read as possible, I reduced it down to just Damage/Shield and Status/Heal. Status effects are the main source of complexity, but there are only 5 and they are all require the same response (heal yourself). With the iconography simplified, it became much easier for players to predict what was coming because they could just scan their opponents’ spells and count up the red damage signals to figure out how much defense they needed, and look at the cubes on the spell progress tracks to see when they needed to shield.
This is the main difference between Weavers and other magical combat games to me – it is a game about process rather than results. Spell effects are relatively boring in Weavers, but the process of casting those spells is anything but. The game is about aligning your spells just right so that the waste products of one fuel the requirements of the next, freeing you to set up another spell in the meantime. It is about learning to weave your spells together in the most efficient way possible, which I think is an untapped design space in magical combat.
One trope of magical combat games that I had to contend with was deckbuilding, which is expected by players. TCGs and CCGs like Magic the Gathering or Mage Wars have extremely fine-grained systems where you can tweak the individual cards in your deck, which is great for players that like that sort of thing but can be a major barrier to entry for players that just want to play the game without having to worry about optimal deck construction. Since Weavers is heavily focused on the interaction between cards, I was also worried that allowing players such fine control over their decks could lead to degenerate combinations.
Instead, I settled on a model similar to Smash Up. The player chooses a “Class” and a “Spellbook” and shuffles them together. This gives players some customizability while allowing players that don’t care to just grab two random decks, and also gives me more control over the compositions. Because of how spellcasting works different combinations emphasize different cards – a spellbook card that is the best in the deck with one class might be more mediocre with a different class whose cards don’t combo as well with it, making each deck more complex than the sum of its parts. A Bard of Radiant Ash is radically different than a Monk of Radiant Ash.
In the process of searching for a publisher, I learned that games about magical combat are frequently pitched, making it difficult to get the attention of a publisher. One publisher told me that Weavers was the second game about wizards fighting that they had seen that week. In other words, the theme is a barrier to publication. I have thought about retheming it, but for the moment, Weavers remains unpublished.
Weavers is available to play over Tabletop Simulator.