I’ve had a few folks weigh in on Napoleon, Blown Apart so far, and as a result, have made some changes to the 2p game. Some of this is just in the form of tweaks to the rules, which are hopefully more clear in places and are easier to use and understand. There are some functional changes to the game that I’d like to note here and fill in some reasoning around as well.

The first is the Rout threshold has been lowered to 7. I hadn’t seen any Rout wins for a little while in my own testing, but hadn’t really noticed that problem until a tester noted that the threshold seemed too high to them. I’d like a Rout win to be a real threat, but not the most common way for games to end. If one in six games ended in a Rout win, I’d be happy with that ratio. That would be something frequent enough that you have to account for, but not necessarily dominant. I’ve adjusted this threshold repeatedly during development, so it’s not a big surprise that it’s still being tweaked. The truth is that the other changes in the game are going to change how easy or hard it is to score Rout points, so this threshold will need continual attention. I should probably just have a development item once the game settles down to double-check the Rout wins to make sure they’re in the right proportion (somewhere between 15%-20% of games or so). But for now, seven. Why not?

The second change is around the mix of battles. With two Massive battles in the battle card mix, there’s only a ~36.4% chance that you’ll see even one Massive battle in the layout. Since the Massive battles are the most different of the battle types, it’s kind of a shame that only about a third of games will see even one. What I did was take two of the 10 Standard battles and move them to 11 Massive battles. The “massive” line was always an arbitrary one, so this doesn’t even really upset the “historical” analysis that I did, it just moves down the line a little bit of what counted as one of the big ones. In the end, I’ll sacrifice historical fidelity for better gaming for this game, the theming is mostly a way for me to think about the systems, so I’m not too worried about this. Now, 60.7% of games should see at least one Massive battle. Better!

Finally, a problem that I’ve encountered several times throughout the testing was brought up by a tester, and it’s time to tackle it. You can sometimes get some real garbage in your Reserve. Mostly, I didn’t worry too much about it in the past, as you could still use those garbage cards when they’re in the trump suit and maybe dump another suit. Not totally useless, but still kind of a bummer to see 1s and 2s in your reserve. I thought about several possible options:

• I could set it up so you draw extra cards for your Reserve and then discard down to the target size. This requires a bit more faffing around during setup, which isn’t great, and the choice here feels like it’ll be pretty obvious. Like, maybe there’s a borderline call where you need to think about whether to keep an Artillery 3 or an Infantry 5 or something like that. Still, not a terribly challenging decision. And when I used to just have a single deck that established the Battle Sites, and you had to deal cards and discard ones out of range, that was kind of annoying. So I don’t really want to bring that kind of thing back.

• A variation here would be a Magic-style mulligan. This is a tried-and-true mechanism, forces players to think about the utility of the stuff they got, and has more of a decision than the previous one. But with a relatively short Reserve, I might need to increase its size before this becomes a viable option. And it doesn’t really solve the faffing about problem (although there’s more thinking involved here).

• Provide an alternative use for Reserve cards. There are a few options here, such as something like the Scout ability, or forcing a discard, or something else. A problem with this is that it kind of dilutes how special the Scouts are, so that’s not a great direction. Getting to cancel a card play by an opponent is kind of neat, but I was sort of hoping to potentially reserve that for an alternative Commander play.

• Perhaps adding another resource. You could discard Reserve cards to gain this resource. And, maybe there’s something else I could do with this new resource. Generally speaking, there’s a balance in adding new resources in a game, in that it gives you some more design levers and parameters, but there’s additional overhead and complexity for players. Add too much of this kind of thing, and players find it difficult to remember and reason about things. And this is, at heart, a card game so I don’t want to lard it up with too much extra stuff.

I’m going to go with option four for now. You can now discard cards from your reserve to get +2 tokens, and you can spend a +2 token to bump the rank of a card by two during resolution. You have to make the decision to discard Reserve cards at the start of the game, so it’s a little decision players need to make early, which adds some tension to setup. You have a little extra in the resolution of tricks, which is nice. And I can use that currency for a bonus, which is that the player that is behind gets one after each Battle, just to give them a little boost. It seems like it should be a lightweight addition, but give players a little bit more control of things and potentially disturb the card play at a crucial moment.

So those are the changes. I’ve updated the PCIO file for use with playingcards.io and the draft rules, which also include some tweaks to the wording. The four-player version is still kind of baking in my brain, but I think there will be some fun stuff coming in it.