Wiccage news

I've been working behind the scenes on Wiccage, and have made some simplifications based on some playtesting feedback. One thing that's gone is a bit of a fussy rule about scoring a point when a trick had two Witches on it. I liked the rule in the abstract, but it had some issues. First, it was very rare that it happened. And worse, when it did happen, it was largely just luck, and not from any particular good planning. Second, the rule had presentation issues. Either it cluttered up the text on the Witch cards with a rarely used rule, or it would be in the rules where nobody would remember it (because it's rare). Basically, the rule wasn't pulling its weight, and it had to go.

I also simplified the deck by renaming the Witch cards to just being 10s. They'll still be illustrated with witches, they'll still be clearly the face cards of each suit, but this simplifies rules expressions across a lot of places. In particular, I had to keep mentioning in places that the Witch was the highest ranked card of each suit. And that's just a waste of time. So, 10s they are.

But the biggest change was an update to the goal subsystem. Previously, each hand had a goal card dealt out from a separate deck. It felt a little bolted on. I liked the concept, and the balancing of trying to get a scoring combination in your hand while also preserving the viability of your hand as a play hand was great. But, there wasn't really enough variety in the goals, and I didn't want to increase the size of card count just to add some more goal cards. I also was missing a previous iteration's ability to change the goal, and wanted to find a way to get that back in.

After thinking about it, I realized I could put the goals on the cards themselves. After all, we're dealing a trump card, it could easily pull double duty and could express a goal. Now, we've got a nice property: there are basically 28 combinations of goal/trump suit that can happen (the 9s are all identical), meaning each trump card you pull is kind of a different game. It's a fun property. It also enabled me to increase the goal count to 10 without adding to the component count. Finally, it also added goal switching back, since there is a spell to switch the trump card. That spell was a bit too specialized, so this gives it more opportunities to be useful.

I do think I'm going to change the name. The game has drifted from Cribbage a fair bit, people don't seem to get the name, and I think the art is going to go in a more fairy tale direction. I'd love suggestions.

All in all, I'm happy with the changes. I'd like to find more testers for the game. If you'd like to help the rules are here and the cards are here. It's now even easier to build: 30 cards and a couple reference cards. I'd love to hear any feedback!