Thursday 3 April 2014

Fossil Updates

I've been doing some work lately to address the faults of Fossil. The basic concept was novel and fun, but the game was swingy, not deep enough, didn't scale well, and felt too short.

Here is a list of "patch notes" on the recent changes:


  • Increased the number of tiles. This has gone from 72 to 120. I have also rebalanced the tiles to include more monsters and rooms to keep things more interesting.

  • I have reworked the digging mechanic to scale better with more players. They now roll 1D6 per opponent, and take tiles equal to the lowest number rolled.

  • I have redone the monsters. I now use a deck of small monster cards that you can put on the tiles. This allows for a greater variety of monsters, as well as more detailed and interesting ones. It also solves the long-standing problem of how to represent monsters on the board (previously with ad-hoc dice or token representations). 

  • I have also rebalanced combat. The way it worked before was very all-or-nothing, and while fun, was not that interesting. I have changed it to a system I like calling "chip damage"; monsters now have an Attack stat that determines how much damage they deal, rather than the remainder of their health. This also opened up a lot of opportunity for more interesting monsters for the cards mentioned above.

  • The items have also been reworked quite heavily. They were very swingy before, cards like Mimic and Treasure Chest (which let you draw 2 and 3 treasure cards respectively) combined with high-value powerful-effect cards (like Boots of Travel, which gave +1 movement and was worth $3) could potentially give you $10 from a single lucky drop. All the most powerful items were reworked into "Abilities", which give powerful enhancements to your miners, but cannot be sold for money. In addition, the "draw extra treasure" cards have all been nerfed to give 1 fewer than before. In addition, many others have been reworked to be more useful. I still need to add more loot, but this has been a good start to the item reworks

  • I have also reworked the Miners, by adding Classes. You now start the game with 1 Scout, 2 Miners, and 1 Heavy. Scouts can move up to 5 spaces, but only have 2 Strength (which serves as HP/Carrying capacity). Miners can move 4, with 3 Strength. Heavies can only move 3, but have 4 Strengh, and get +1 damage in combat. On average, this has increased the speed of your workers by 1 space; which was also partially done to counteract the larger maps brought about by having more tiles.

I am quite happy with the rework thus far, and I look forward to continuing it, as these changes have been a huge step forward in addressing the issues facing the game. 

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