the ware
First I’d like to introduce a nice new tool I discovered that’s called Dia. It allows us to create nice flow charts easily and a sample of the original rules concept turn/phase sequence can be seen here to the right. Dia is open source of course and available for lovely Linux among other OS:s. I’ve added the link to it in our FAQ and recommend everyone with the need to try it out.

the vamp
As anyone that has actually playtested the orginal rules concept (orc) has surely noticed it’s not working out and has some serious and fatal issues.

1. victory points á la shapes
The main problems it has is that the victory point system – which enables a player to get points for creating an empty shape in his opponents army – does not play together very well with the fact that a player can recruit freely every turn (even if he/she pays for the recruit). Most of the different empty shapes never occur because the opponent will mend the holes in his/her army by recruiting a new unit.

Using shapes for any kind of victory condition has proven to be very tricky to accomplish. I’m probably abandoning that idea for now, but would gladly revisit it should anyone have some good input on it.

The concept of shapes can, in any case, be used as a requirement for some types of ability payments: The more we want to limit the use of an ability without having to make much more expensive in marked cards, the more incentive we get to ask for a payment in a shape, i.e. [c] instead of [2].

2. overpriced
Most cards are overpriced. All creatures should probably have their cost lowered with 1, and many of the abilities are also too expensive. This will be fixed in the next revision of the elfs.

3. AP:s goodbye?
There may be good reasons to ditch the AP:s, allow unlimited number of attacks (but still just 1 per creature due to the fact that attacking marks a card) but limit the number of movements to just 2 per turn.

4. attack system
I’m not impressed at all by how I devised the attack system and will look at alternatives. The thing which bothers me the most and which is related is the admin it takes to keep track of HP of each character. If possible I’d fool around with letting everyone have just 1 HP and use some kind of MTG approach instead to lessen admin work and add elegance to the system, if I can also still keep the effect of Rows and Spatial placement in the game.