Stars Below card deep-dive: The Fall

This is part three of a five-part series of articles on the design of the cards for The Shipwreck Arcana: Stars Below expansion.

The Thief was attempt at creating the simplest mandatory effect we could think of. Once we understood its potential, the floodgates opened. Well, not really. It’s still pretty difficult to come up with effects that meet all of our card requirements, as spelled out in the first post of this series. #4 (Reliability) becomes a particular problem; wind up with too many mandatory effects in play at the same time, and the game may suddenly grind to a halt.

So, filling the board with cards that can’t be played on directly is a bad idea. Okay, we’ve tried mandatory effects that siphon fates onto the card, which will ultimately cause it to fade. What if we bypass the fates altogether, and let the mandatory effect dictate when the card fades? Suddenly, we can care about something other than the “pips” on each fate in front of the card.

This unlocked a whole new set of ideas, culminating with The Fall:

This is what we normally call a “trash can” card. You can dump any fate here, but you don’t convey much information by doing so… which usually conveys some information, indicating that this was your “best” worst option and implying a lot about the other cards in play. Compound that with the fact that this card has no moons. Instead, it introduces the “comet” indicator, which means that you have to read the card to determine when it fades. The actual fade criteria becomes dependent on your hidden fate, allowing you to convey information simply through acknowledging whether or not it will fade this turn.

There’s a lot going on with this effect. The “at least twice” bit is to let it pile up more fates than normal, something that often makes other cards (like The Prophet) more interesting. Also, keep in mind that even if you don’t play on this card, it could still fade, so the more times you throw trash in it, the more you risk someone being stuck with a 1 or 2 and watching it fade helplessly.

Finally, this combined with The Thief shone a light on something I’ve dubbed the “fade cascade,” where the mandatory effects mean that you have an increased likelihood of seeing multiple cards fade in the same turn (previously encountered when playing with The Feast). Sometimes a cascade is bad, creating tons of doom at once. Often, though, it’s a blessing in disguise: a single correct guess can avoid multiple fade penalties, and one way or another you wind up with a lot of powers at your disposal.

This increased prevalence of fading ultimately lead us to tweak our approach to the new cards’ faded powers, which we’ll spotlight later.

Art from the archive: Part 2

These blog posts will feature art from various projects Matthew has done over the years.

The story: This was a gift for my wife, drawn to accompany a similar sculpture I made her years ago.

Drawn: 2017

Stars Below card deep-dive: The Thief

This is part two of a five-part series of articles on the design of the cards for The Shipwreck Arcana: Stars Below expansion.

Last time, we talked about The North Wind and how to make a card unique by caring about a new piece of game state. Today, we’ll talk about the second and far more interesting bit of uniqueness that underpinned the Stars Below card designs: mandatory effects, otherwise known as gold text.

This began with the following idea: could a card have a static, “always on” effect, warping the game state and the way you play while it’s out? Rather than providing information directly, when you play on it, it would provide information passively, at all times. This additional information would be mitigated by the fact that it eats up one of the four arcana card slots, giving you fewer places to play.

Some initial brainstorming lead us to what would ultimately become The Thief:

This card is surprisingly close to our initial ideas, but we learned a lot from it. For starts, “passive” cards need a way to fade, so that the game state continues to progress. That means they ideally want to siphon fates onto themselves somehow. In turn, this meant that we began exploring thresholds for “move a fate onto this card” that would convey information when you executed it.

We’re excited for everyone to try out these new “mandatory effect” cards, as they create some of the most unusual turns compared to how the base game plays. Intriguingly, we eventually found that they also give rise to the “fade cascade” which we’ll talk about in the next post.

Art from the archive: Part 1

These blog posts will feature art from various projects Matthew has done over the years.

The story: I'm a big fan of the card game Red7 by Carl Chudyk and Chris Cieslik. This art is from a custom print-and-play version I made to go along with my official copy, as an excuse to add a little theme and art to the numerical gameplay (hmm, that sounds familiar).

Drawn: 2014