Designer Diary and new Stretch Goals revealed
9 months ago
– Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 10:54:38 AM
Dear Noburians,
We hope you had a great weekend!
Twenty stretch goals have been unlocked and we are excited to reveal the next three! We are getting close to the final 48 hours and hope this campaign was fun for you all.
This update is very special to us as Virginio and Simone are taking over to discuss the design process of Etherstone, its origin, and its development. We hope you’ll enjoy the read!
Etherstone Designer Diary
SIMONE
Some games are born from a brilliant idea for the game mechanic; others are born from a setting, an atmosphere. Etherstone was born from a feeling after a match. Race for the Galaxy is one of my favorite games and when Res Arcana was out, I was feeling frenzy. Lehman is an author that I admire and follow and the idea of handling a few cards to optimize them got me galvanized. I bought the game, played it a couple of times, and liked it! But the game that I had imagined in the awaiting time was completely different. I thought it was interesting. I talked about it to Virginio.
VIRGINIO
For Magic players my age, it was a revolution. Not so much (at least for me) for the collectible aspect: the mechanic was innovative, it offered a world to explore and it allowed to create infinite decks of cards and experiment uncountable strategic possibilities. I played and studied it. Then I played and studied many other card games that came after that one, sometimes they did not include original elements. When Simone asked me to work on a game of cards I accepted the proposal with enthusiasm. In the years some ideas came to my mind that I could not wait to try and create.
WORKING TOGETHER: FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS![]()
What could be our starting point? We had some solid points.
Cards activate with dice
The original nucleus was a game where cards that a player had in front of them would activate with a dice drafting mechanism. There were multiple references: our Lorenzo il Magnifico was offering the central idea: dice would activate cards but in a peculiar way. We thought that this activation element thanks to colors and numbers of dice could offer a new level of depth both in the choice of the cards to play and in handling the singular actions.
Only 7 cards for a match
Another crucial idea was creating a game that could offer players an experience of deep strategy and variety, exclusively handling a small hand of cards for each match. Res Arcana and Seasons helped us imagine a game where the initial player's hand would guide the player throughout the whole game, but we took to the extreme the concept of an immediately and fully available hand of cards, that would not allow integrating more cards during the match. We wanted to generate diverse and in-depth matches with few cards in hand: a lot of work had to be done for the characterization of cards and their interactions. Magic stimulated us to find depth, variety of effects, and net distinctions among different colors of cards (That in Etherstone became factions), in a way that each had well-recognizable and distinctive peculiarities and characteristics. This also led us to search for the maximum variability of strategies allowing us to play different matches every time.
Fast but deep
Another characteristic was to create a game that was both deep and agile, fast, where players had time (and will!) to play one match after the other. It was important for our idea that the game would maintain fluid tension in each moment. This was still not a formed idea, but a very clear intention (below we narrate how we pursued it).
Common enemies
Given, that we liked to have the sensation of attacking and defeating an enemy, but we wanted a game without direct adversary attacks, we thought of a common threat to defeat. That’s how the monsters were born, which with a specific action could be faced and defeated.
Starting from these central ideas, we started laying out the basics. We can narrate how these ideas took shape, consolidated, and transformed.
DEVELOPMENT
Often the development process is very circuitous and many of the central ideas of the game change multiple times. In Etherstone instead, we were lucky that all the central mechanics fit well from the first tests.
The cards had a cost in ‘mana’, which color was also the same as the card, and had instant abilities: some permanent, some activated with dice (that being colored allowed to use both the value and the color).
We thought right away that it was exciting to pick the ‘correct’ dice that would activate two or more cards! We naturally added the catch of the main resource, the mana, to the dice.
The building of a hand was one of the cardinal points to face. We started from a mechanic that was faced a few times: choosing your hand starting from a bigger pool (15 cards) identical for each player and casually extracted for each game; we liked this choice. The cards were created to generate very strong interactions, so you could keep a card to block a strategic combination that you foresaw as a possible adversary move, or simply anticipate others in interactions that they might have overlooked.
3 categories of cards were immediately solid, the Followers that were the majority, also helped to attack monsters, then Rituals and Technologies. Having chosen a small hand, of only 7 cards, we were not considering discarding playable cards, everything stayed in the field, therefore Rituals and Technologies had a similar structure, but we needed to differentiate them both on a thematic level to handle the interactions between cards.
To add variability we created unique powers with Hero cards, so we could create strong asymmetries to start with, that concerned both Mana and initial life points. We thought that this choice was very important also to guide players in the construction of the hand since the heroes to choose were assigned before drafting.
We liked the idea that players could “die” to give extra tension.
So each player had life points, that could be lost when attacked by monsters but also after the activation of some cards. We were not keen on eliminating a player, therefore the player with zero life points could ‘resurrect’ after losing a turn and some victory points.
Since we wanted a game where in every match different facts could shake up the rules making the match unique, we very early added victory points tokens obtainable with effects and interactions to add quantity and variety of interactions between cards and strategic lines of the game.
We started trying the game divided into small rounds in which we would collect a few dice (gaining Mana and activation) and we would either play the cards or attack the monsters. This division did not seem to be the best choice for a fluid game during gameplay, therefore we abandoned rounds and added the mechanic of re-rolling dice paying life points; at the same time, we made the player turn as fast as we could, making all actions alternative between them (catching of the dice and activation, playing cards, attack, etc…) so that every player could run their turn fast.
We did many tests, pushed by the fast pace and our amusement playing the game (it is not always the case when playing dozens of matches of your own game). We added cards and refined everything, but it was surprising how a lot of the initial game is still present in the final version.
Some ideas that we tried we also abandoned or pushed for future expansions; some territories to conquer appeared (common cards that were obtainable only by reaching the objectives that were proposed) and tokens that gave extra actions, to activate those that would progressively lose victory points. Some sacrifices needed to be made though, therefore, at least for the time being, these elements, together with many cards that did not convince us, are not in the game.
Since we are here, we can confess that during the development, we kept naming this game Little Magic (Magichino)…
WITH THE PUBLISHER
A crucial moment was the presentation of the game to Thundergyph, and we need to thank them all, starting with Gonzalo and Pier, for the enthusiasm that they showed right away for the game and further down the line during all the phases of the final evolution of the game.
In the meantime our generic and not too-original fantasy setting changed into a new thriving world, that the editor wanted to go in-depth in an incredible way, to the point of writing a book of the Story of Nobura, a planet where colors became factions, monsters became menaces, and Mana was substituted by Etherstones. Everything started taking shape with the incredible art by Paolo Voto, greatly supported by Giada Princi.
The fundamental change in the game, after the encounter with the editor, was abandoning - with a hint of sadness- the idea of creating your hand from a common pool to get to a more classic draft of cards. The tests with new players gave us the impression that choosing the hand from a bigger pool could become complex and disorientating, furthermore, the editor had clear in mind right from the start that 4 copies for each card, considering promo and expansions would have increased the price range of the game and a bigger box, without adding enough gameplay to justify the choice and compromising the accessibility and slowing down the preparation.
Finally, another extremely innovative idea was the concept of an evolving game, the future evolution of the game is guided by proposals, observations, and ideas of the community of players, which make the game stimulating and also challenging for us designers; we are very curious to discover what we could add to the future of this story…
Thank you so much for your support and talk to you in our next update!
Sincerely yours,
Everyone here at Thundergryph Games
