Now that everyone knows the project is happening, I thought I’d take a few minutes to go into more detail on what the game is actually about. I won’t go over all the rules, since those are evolving via play test sessions, but I can at least give you a high-level understanding of how the game works.
The story and characters
The Cithria Card Game is based on the book series Rise of Cithria, written by myself, Patrick Underhill, and Alistair McIntyre. It’s a six book fantasy series (the last two are still coming soon) set in a land where three kingdoms are at war. Those three kingdoms are Caldera (with Romano-British influences), Andua (more Celtic in nature), and Bergmark (VIKINGS!!!). There’s more to it than that, of course, but the first version of the game will focus primarily on playable character classes from those kingdoms.
Each player starts with a hand of level 1 characters, 5 initially, although later versions may up that to 10 or 12. Those first five characters are then laid out on an imaginary hexagonal field, which allows you to stagger characters diagonally. This is important, because certain characters have abilities that can help other characters they are considered to be ‘touching’.
The ideal scenario, initially, is to create two lines, with tougher, armored characters up front, and ranged and healing/support types in the back. Damage types will be explained later, but for now, know that by putting your tougher characters in front, they protect the weaker characters behind them from certain types of damage (melee, essentially). This makes the character layout important, especially when additional characters get added.
Time for some action
Once the characters are in place, each player draws five ‘action’ cards. This constitutes their deck, i.e. the actions they can play each round. Action cards include attacks, which deal damage to other teams, heals, which restores HPs of their own team’s characters (side note: they can also heal other teams, which allows for co-op play), and utility cards such as stuns, dodges, critical attacks, etc. I’ll post a list of all the action cards somewhere down the road, once things start to get a bit more solidified.
Each action card must be played by a character, and each character gets one action per round. If a character takes no action in a round, the player can draw an additional card, up to 8 total cards (for now; this is still in testing). Each player plays until they have no more cards or actions they want to take.
As play progresses, characters are knocked out of the game, until there’s one victor. Although two players will work, having three is ideal because it allows the flavor of the game to change depending on alliances or truces, similar to the shenanigans that go on in Risk. As the number of kingdoms/realms increase, so will the entertainment factor as players decide to help each other, or just themselves.
Some extra flavor
One wrinkle I want to include in the first version of the game is the concept of bosses. These will be characters with massive amounts of hit points and defense, who do large amounts of damage. Ideally bosses will be played against the other three (or more) kingdoms, with everyone scheming to take it down before it slaughters the army arrayed before it. An early contender for the first boss, if you’ve already read the books, is Kallixtus, who made his appearance in Book 3 – The Breaking.
I’ve kept the game description pretty high level because there’s a chance all of it could change during play testing. As things start to get finalized, I’ll post more details on the rules, the action cards, and especially the character cards. In fact, look for an in-depth diary on the character cards sooner rather than later.
Also, we had our first (official) play test last weekend at Madness Comics and Games in Plano, and we’ll be posting video and results of that play test shortly. I don’t have a date for the next play test, but it should be happening soon. I’ll keep everyone posted, just on the off chance that people want to show up and cheer on our play testers. Or maybe they want to try it out themselves! We’d love for more people to experience the game and give us their thoughts. The more feedback we get, the better the game becomes for everyone.
Until next time…
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