I Rays You This
Hello! This is Dice with Diceratops Games. That’s not my Christian name, but you need something to call me by, right? As much as I want to connect with you as community members, identity protection is important on the internet.
Anyways, I’m here with our first installment of Diceratops Design Diaries (3D, for short), a design diary from the people behind Diceratops Games. (But mostly from me.) I want to highlight some of the creative process that’s gone into bringing our games to you. To convey some of the lessons we’ve learned, and to tell some good stories as well. So, please join me as I naively venture into the world of online blogging.
DISCLAIMER: You’ll need an understanding of how to play Stoicheion: Elemental Clash to fully enjoy this article.
Let’s talk about Ray. During Stoicheion’s development, we ran into an issue where Ray just seemed bad. Across every group, at every stage, from every level of familiarity, players never failed to mention that Ray was suboptimal as an element. And when one of only nine elements stinks, that’s a problem.
The first reason was its ability. Ray’s effect allowed players to make an additional swap between their hand and the Mana Pool. That’s it; Ray was an extra Mana Action. It wasn’t an exciting game of chance like Continuum, or a sneaky burn effect like Ignition, or even a unique recovery tool like Catalyst. It was an extra copy of an effect every player gets every turn. Strictly speaking, it’s usable, but not all that fun. And with the advent of the boosted Mana Action, there became even less opportunities where it was the optimal play. How often will three cards you need be in the mana pool?
The second reason is its flavor. Ray is the element of electricity (and light, at least to the extent of the original design concept, but we’ll get into that later.) When you think of electricity, you picture effects like magnetic attraction and repulsion, big lightning strikes, chaining speedy attacks. None of that truly was reflected in Ray’s mechanics.
Pictured: The Element of Disappointment
But how did that happen? Well, originally Ray was themed more around light and color, rather than strictly electricity. (The name still reflects this.) Back when there were still end-of-game effects (a topic for another day) Ray elementals would get a bonus for each color of card in their hand, forming a dazzling rainbow visual. Its Elemental Action was to swap a card in your hand for a card of a neighboring color in the discard pile. You might recognize this effect as close to what Catalyst is now.
That’s because Ray, Catalyst, and Moment all swapped effects earlier in the development of Stoicheion. Ray played with card colors and recovered from Discard, Catalyst ‘alchemically changed’ your spirit’s element by shifting along the Leyline, and Moment leveraged the force of gravity to attract an extra card from the Mana Pool. To better serve the flavor of Catalyst and Moment, as well as for general balancing reasons, the effects were shifted. Catalyst’s exchanging mechanic was better suited for transmuting cards, not people, and the pseudo-shift action gave Moment a feeling of speed and momentum. The result is that Ray kind of got the shaft. Being between Maelstrom and Ignition, two of the most impactful elements in the game, it being bad was an indirect nerf to their power levels. Ray being bad was a bug that morphed into a feature, so I let it be through further development.
But it was still an issue of flavor. I felt like Stoicheion needed to keep Ray’s effect, or something similar, SOMEWHERE in the game. There are turns where people want to grab extra cards from the mana pool, and Ray did see use on occasion. Where Moment was a necessary way to ‘exchange’ an Elemental Action for an extra Shift Action, Ray was the same for the Mana Action. (You could consider Continuum to be the equivalent way of exchanging one Elemental Action for another.) And if its effect WAS changed, Ray wasn’t allowed to be a powerhouse, lest the top portion of the Leyline became too good for the game.
While expressing my frustration with a first-time tester over this conundrum, they offered a blindingly simple solution. Catalyst had undergone a recent simplification that turned it from [Discard: Swap another card between your hand and the discard pile.] to [Discard: Take a card from the discard pile.] They offered “Why not do the same for Ray?” And while I was initially concerned about hand sizes and shrinking the mana pool, I realized that it was exactly what Ray needed.
Ray was now [Discard: Take a card from the Mana Pool.] For the player using Ray the effect was improved, but mechanically similar, though they had more lenience in hand space by no longer needing another card to exchange. This negated a sizable increase in power we might have struggled with if we completely replaced Ray’s effect. But for the other players at the table, a single ray shrinks the mana pool by 25%: a sizable limitation to their options. In this way, Ray took on an aggressive tone, just like its two neighbors. (I’ll write about the design ideas of Control vs Aggro in the future.) Flavor-wise, it was like the Mana Pool had been struck by a great bolt of lightning, while the player using Ray ‘magnetically attracted’ the debris.
I take this as a valuable demonstration of the power of play testers as problem-solvers. Coming from a place of unfamiliarity with your game, their outsider perspectives generate some out-of-your-world suggestions. When they ask, “Why can’t it be like this?” give some serious thought to your reasoning. There was little reason why Ray couldn’t be like Catalyst, and a relatively small change let so much more align. I was too tunnel-visioned to see the solution right in front of me. Ray still may not be the most defining Element on the Leyline, but I feel its flavor is much truer to our vision for the game.
P.S. - Thank you to Discord user Tbonesticks for helping to fix Ray. He’s working on his train-management game Dead Steam, so give them a helping hand testing it here. Tell’em we sent yah.
Additional thanks to Parker@ Champions of Aednir, M0xes, and Prazyon for joining us.
