Backgrounds and Icon Dice – 13th Age Alternative Rules

Writing the Extended Challenge creation rules continues to prove itself both extensive and challenging, so I’ve decided to take a brief break and talk about an alternative rule set that has been on my mind while I’ve been working:

Iconic Backgrounds

An alternative to the standard method of apportioning Backgrounds and Icon Dice1)In 13th Age your skills come from your Backgrounds, generally 2 or 3 of them – each with descriptors like “Crowd favourite in the Axis gladiator pits” or “Scout for the Elven Army” detailing what the hero got up to before the story began that allows them to achieve great things – Each hero also gets 3 (or more at higher levels) “Icon Dice” – links they have with the iconic powers of the Dragon Empire. These also generally come down to what’s happened in the character’s past., this system combines the two.

At character creation you have 8 Background points, and can spread them between their Backgrounds; with a maximum of 5 points in any background and a minimum of 2

Every one of your backgrounds must in some way connect to the domain of one of the icons2)it’s pretty hard for it not to; the icons are involved in everything – label which Icon the Background is connected to.

For each separate background you have you get an Icon Die, to be rolled whenever you would normally roll such dice, and used just as freely – that background is how you came by the connection, but once you have a connection with an icon it can be used in a myriad of ways.

As you advance from one tier to the next instead of simply getting an icon die you get 2 new background points – you can put them into a new background (potentially one that describes things your character has been doing regularly during the previous tier) and thereby get a new Icon Die, or you can enhance one of your existing backgrounds, focusing on honing a smaller set of skills.

Feats and talents that grant Icon Dice now also give a relevant Background with a score of +3, while feats and talents that grant Backgrounds similarly come with an Icon Die for whatever icon is most relevant.

To take an example character from my home game, Topaz Sundancer the High Elf whose OUT is “My soul is missing and goes on adventurers without me” would go from:

Icons
[5] Elf Queen 1 (Positive)
[  ] Crusader 1 (Complicated)
[6] Lich King 1 (Negative)
[  ] Prince Of Shadows 1 (Positive)

Backgrounds
Scout for the Elven army (From Tracker) +5
Graduate of the Arcane Institute Of Ullerbower +3
Elven Nobility +3
Stint in the Stables +2

To:

Iconic Backgrounds
Scouted for the Crusader’s Army (From Tracker) +5  – Crusader (Complicated) [  ]
Elven Nobility +3 –  Elf Queen (Positive) [5]
Graduate of the Arcane Institute of Ullerbower +3 – Archmage (Positive) [ ]

Waded through a sea of zombies +2 – Lich King (Negative) [6]
My wandering soul sees many secrets +2 –  Prince Of Shadows (Positive) [  ]

Nothing about the character’s story has changed, just how it’s mechanically represented, focusing more on those parts of the character’s background that give him his links with the icons.

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References   [ + ]

1. In 13th Age your skills come from your Backgrounds, generally 2 or 3 of them – each with descriptors like “Crowd favourite in the Axis gladiator pits” or “Scout for the Elven Army” detailing what the hero got up to before the story began that allows them to achieve great things – Each hero also gets 3 (or more at higher levels) “Icon Dice” – links they have with the iconic powers of the Dragon Empire. These also generally come down to what’s happened in the character’s past.
2. it’s pretty hard for it not to; the icons are involved in everything

Designing Extended Challenges: The Core Rules

Click here for the full series

Below the “read more” tag, are the rules for running 13th Age Extended Challenges

Which means I’m finally done!

Or, perhaps not.

These rules only really cover running the challenges – great if you have an adventure module in hand that uses them, but given as we haven’t released any of those yet not all that useful.

So the new goal is that next week I’ll provide a set of guidelines for building Extended Challenges suitable to your party’s level – along with some examples.

After you read the rules below let me know what you’d like to see in the encounter building guidelines: and what you think the rules have missed!

Continue reading →

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Designing Extended Challenges: Fitting 13th Age

A lot of this series has addressed implementing Extended Challenges in a general sense, but I am specifically developing them for 13th Age, so what are the key elements of 13th Age that can be tied into:

Backgrounds

In 13th Age non-combat challenges are made using skill checks, but they’re based on d20+(ability modifier+level)+a relevant background. These backgrounds are descriptive phrases such as “Trained as a Warlord by the Elf Queen”, “Undead Hunter” or “Crowd Favourite in the Gladiator Pits” – and are free-text, meaning that as a scenario writer it’s impossible to make a list of possible skill checks.

Additionally PCs are encouraged to only have 2 or 3 backgrounds, rather than using a larger skill-list as seen in D&D editions 2-5 – and any attempt to prevent repeated checks needs to take that into account.

So rather than considering re-use of the same background to be repetition, I’m going to define repetition as “Using the same combination of ability score and background as used on a previous successful check”. As for the prevention? I think it’s fair to kick the difficulty up by a notch; you’ve plucked the low-hanging-fruit for that combination, so using it again means you’re trying something harder.

Standardised Difficulties 

The DCs for skill checks in 13th Age are highly standardised; being set based on the environment the encounter is taking place in, and always being multiples of 5. In 4e skill challenges had DCs that were, by default, set by the level of the party, but 13th Age is explicit about them being based on the environment/opposition.

So we’ll use the 13th Age chart when setting skill check DCs.

\/Task/Environment> Adventurer Tier

DC

Champion Tier

DC

Epic Tier

DC

Normal task 15 20 25
Hard task 20 25 30
Ridiculously hard task 25 30 35

 

As you can probably tell this isn’t actually very limiting – when designing an Extended Challenge the environment is likely already set, but that still gives the flexibility of picking whether the challenge is made up of Normal, Hard or Ridiculously Hard tasks.

As a rule I expect to use only “Normal” and “Hard” as the baseline for any extended challenge – most often Normal – but it seems like a good idea to give guidance on when to kick a check up a tier; should harder checks be a punishment for making silly choices, or an opportunity to achieve greater success at greater risk?

Personally I lean to the latter – the former could be a useful tool for GMs who find that their players suggest truly absurd uses of their backgrounds, but 13th Age is generally built on a strong foundation of “Assumption of Good Faith”, so it feels like such a use would go counter to the system philosophy.

Player Narrative Influence: 

For an F20 game, 13th Age is particularly keen on player’s influencing the narrative, so to feed into that I’m going to add flexibility rules:

    1. Encourage players to create obstacles to be overcome, and opportunities that they’ll take advantage of, rather than putting the onus on the GM.
    2. Allow Temporal Flexibility – flashbacks to things that were prepared earlier.

Icon Dice

A significant portion of players’ narrative power in 13th Age comes through the Icon Dice, a set of 3+ d6, each connected to one of the 13 Icons, that each player rolls at the start of every session – and that may occasionally be rolled for special events – but the rules surrounding their exact uses are deliberately rather vague; they are primarily narrative tools and therefore they tend to be used differently depending on the style of each group.

But the kind of narrative influence they offer – ranging from the aid of another ally of your favoured icon to knowledge of your most hated icon’s secret signals – seems like it should fit in with the sort of situation that Extended Challenges are used to resolve. So I’ll be providing an advised usage for them – They allow a roll to achieve a double-success, but 5s also trigger the downside listed for failed risky attempts, even if you’re not using the risky attempt rules otherwise.

The Escalation Die

One of 13th Age’s tricks for exciting combat is The Escalation Die – a d6 that is added at the end of the first round, set to one, and increases by one each round. 

It’s added to all player attack rolls, and serves to make combat more climactic; the obvious strategy of using your biggest spells to eliminate enemies right at the start – “going nova” – is made less optimal by the fact that holding those powers back lets you use them later when they have a better chance to hit.

But it’s explicitly not added to skill checks made during combat – so importing it into Extended Challenges and making it work for skills would be a somewhat strange change – which means no escalation die. But perhaps there’s another way to implement a similar feeling?

Actions that aid the whole party on all future checks can build up like the escalation die can, and encourage players to take more risks as the challenge goes on. This does suggest that perhaps any resource expenditure should still come with an element of risk – rather than expending dailies being a guaranteed bonus success, as I’ve been running them in my home game.

This isn’t even my final post

Last week I announced the post as probably penultimate… turns out that there’s significantly more to do before I can put together a final rule set. Over the next week I’ll be compiling the realisations I made while writing this in order to create a ruleset for Extended Challenges

P.S. thanks to everyone that’s been reading these, and especially those who’ve commented, writing them has really helped me think and having an audience makes writing much easier for me.

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Designing 13th Age Extended Challenges 4 – Non-binary Stakes

First in sequence – SecondThird

First, a note: In discussion after last week’s post the feeling was mixed, but overall it seemed that the advice was to provide both versions – complexity with Aid Another actions and risky checks; alongside a slimmed-down version – which honestly isn’t actually more work in this case, because it saves me the difficult job of deciding which is superior!

So, item 4 on my original list of targets: non-binary stakes. I’m leaning a bit into step 5, fitting the game, too because ultimately I don’t think that the issue of non-binary stakes can be properly addressed outside of the mechanics of the game in which this Extended Challenge system is to be implemented.

Most, though not all, systems have resources that can be lost (such as hitpoints and spells) or penalties that can be gained (such as wounds and fatigue). These are fertile ground for costly successes.

With 13th Age there are three main internal resources that we can look at when it comes to the PCs: hitpoints and recoveries; daily abilities; and icon dice. I’m going to start at the end:

 

  • Icon Dice: These elements allow players to influence the narrative of the game. They generally aren’t given specific mechanical weight, but there’s a strong argument for the sort of narrative change they offer granting a success – our group often uses them in both combat and extended challenges for rerolls.
  • Limited-use Abilities: Spells, prayers, songs, whatever form they may take plenty of classes have abilities that can only be used once per full rest. Taking as a given that even a multi-day extended challenge won’t allow for full rests 1)The abilities may be called “dailies” but extended challenges, and wilderness adventures in general, work a lot better if full rests are required to be more restful than what you’ll get while camping, and taking guard shifts, for 6-8 hours during a full march. expending these abilities also seems like the sort of thing that could bring about an automatic success – or potentially allow the opportunity for a double-success.
    Of course most such limited-use abilities are very combat-oriented – but encouraging players to use them creatively can be great fun. Rather than summoning his ancestors to help him battle a great foe, the Barbarian summons them to help dig a deep pit – and has to use a charisma roll to persuade them that this is a suitable task for them to give their all.
  • Hitpoints/Recoveries: A lot of extended challenges include a natural element of danger, risk to life and limb. Which means that a common consequence for failing at something risky, or for taking too long, should be the loss of health – represented in 13th Age by both Hitpoints and Recoveries.
    Which to use depends on the timescale of the challenge, and its nature. If short rests are going to be easy to obtain due to the timescale of the challenge, allowing the heroes to spend their recoveries to regain lost hitpoints, it’s generally best to just skip the middle step. But if they’re not, if the extended challenge is taking place on a timescale of minutes, or even seconds, rather than hours or days, attacking hitpoints can increase the urgency of the situation 2)Parties with a healer – which is to say, most parties – will be able to dodge this question most of the time by expending healing powers. That’s great, because it lets the healer do their thing. – and present a challenging choice of whether to spend an action on recovering hitpoints rather than progressing towards the goal, a choice that’s built into combat.

 

That’s a good number of factors that can make one victory feel pyrrhic while another feels glorious, but that’s only the start – only the internal factors.

External aspects that can vary between outcomes are also quite numerous, and vary in the level of mechanical weight they carry

 

  • Making Future Encounters Harder: Extended challenges are often found at the beginning or middle of an adventure, rather than at the end, and one easy way to provide consequences is to have combat encounters that follow be more difficult the longer they take to complete (and/or the more risky tasks they fail) – for instance an extended challenge to sneak into a castle vault might be followed by fighting your way out with your treasure.
    If you’ve taken too long and made too much noise you’ll be faced with extra guards on the way out, as the alert level has been raised.
  • Different Levels of Reward: Our Half-orc Artificier and his allies have finished at the ball, and they’ve garnered some support. But how much? It could be a few healing potions for the brave adventurers, a magical heirloom, or a whole detachment of elven scouts to aid the party (perhaps represented as a set of icon die to be spent at appropriate junctures)
    In that case I feel like it would be a round-limited extended challenge, with the reward value depending on the number of successes achieved within the duration of the ball – but in other cases you might need X successes, with each round taken reducing the reward.
  • Impacts on the Fiction: This one is a bit of a catch-all, and yet it’s easily forgotten. Yes I’m building a mechanical system here, but that doesn’t mean there has to be a mechanical outcome – the glory of RPGs comes from blending game elements with roleplaying and storytelling – instead the outcome could be something that only impacts the characters emotionally 3)Admittedly, some systems do give such impacts mechanical weight – but 13th age and the F20 family in general don’t.and/or affects the world as a whole; such as the loss of a village to the invading army before the Elven Courts can be persuaded to rally their defences; or the death of one of the hostages that the heroes were seeking to save.

 

So with all those options in hand, what stakes would you set for your challenges?

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References   [ + ]

1. The abilities may be called “dailies” but extended challenges, and wilderness adventures in general, work a lot better if full rests are required to be more restful than what you’ll get while camping, and taking guard shifts, for 6-8 hours during a full march.
2. Parties with a healer – which is to say, most parties – will be able to dodge this question most of the time by expending healing powers. That’s great, because it lets the healer do their thing.
3. Admittedly, some systems do give such impacts mechanical weight – but 13th age and the F20 family in general don’t.

Tinfoil Tuesday: The War on Christmas

The War On Christmas: it’s a potent part of the US conspiracy tableau – and one supported by the largest of its mainstream media outlets, Fox News – that anti-christian bigots are secretly preventing people from saying “Merry Christmas”.

Of course this year there seems to be a new twist: Donald Trump has successfully allowed people to say “Merry Christmas” again. Not that he does himself, his businesses all celebrate “the holiday season” and say “happy holidays” – the anti-Christmas conspiracy is clearly too powerful for even the POTUS to fight it.

But did you know that there was a War on Christmas way back in the 16th and 17th centuries? And that it was perpetrated by loyal ChristiansIn 1644 the puritan movement banned all Christmas celebrations in Britain and Ireland, even purely religious traditions such as the Christmas Sermons, although their primary target was the non-Christian aspects: Mince Pies, Christmas Trees, the giving of presents, the eating of a feast, and just generally the concept of being Jolly.

The battle against Christian fundamentalism in order to restore Christmas to its roots as a joyful celebration of midwinter was a harsh one, but ultimately the outcome was inevitable, the need to celebrate in the depths of winter has created festivals throughout the world – from Saturnalia to Koliada, from Yule to Soyal – and so when priests and politicians started telling people they couldn’t celebrate the birth of Christ they were met with rioting.

Perhaps that’s why the modern War on Christmas is so subtle and invisible? Those Puritans have learnt their lesson, and this time they’re going to destroy Christmas without a fight! Only once people have separated the birth of Christ and the Winter Solstice will they be able to choose another date of birth for Christ, one that won’t be celebrated in such a commercial and sinful manner – maybe one in late summer or early autumn, more fitting with the evidence found in the Bible.

Or perhaps most people just want everyone to enjoy the holidays, and in a multicultural society like the United States of America the majority of folks are kind and decent enough to respect their neighbours religions.

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A Letter Lich response

Our resident agony aunt has been busily answering questions – but because our third issue of Shards: Worldbuilding Zine has only 44 pages, one of them’s had to be dropped.

So instead of completely removing it, I’ve decided to post it here for all to enjoy:

Dear Letter Lich,

I’m compelled by my god to kill a demon, but he’s in my friend’s body – HELP!

— Liam W.

You should arrange for your friend to become undead. Once they’re dead the demon will likely be forced out (most demons can only possess either the living or the dead, not both) and you can safely slay it, while you await your friend’s resurrection.

If you have the skills, lichdom is an excellent choice, but the varieties are endless. Vampires are said to retain their minds, but I find they tend to be impulsive; then again, so are mortals much of the time.

——–

The death and resurrection approach is actually viable even if you’re not willing to bring your friend into undeath – you are doing your god’s work, asking them to safeguard your friends soul and return it when the demon is slain is a plausible option.

More likely you’ll want to seek out a rite of exorcism, or similar – something that can drive the demon from the body. If that is impossible, or unavailable, the backup plan is generally torture – capture the demon, and inflict agonies upon it (and unfortunately your friend) until it voluntarily leaves their body to face you. -Ed

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Play-test report: Tinfoil Hat

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time we’ve mentioned this project, but in case you haven’t come across it before, Tinfoil Hat is a game of conspiracy rants.

The game consists of a deck of cards containing elements for conspiracy theories – ranging from “Lizard Folk” through “The Moon Landing” all the way to “King Henry VIII”.

In the game one player is The Ranter, who must build a conspiracy theory out of the elements they’ve been given, while another was the Judge, who determines whether or not they’d been inconsistent, or missed one of the pieces.

That role has now been dropped – thanks to playtesting last Wednesday we have seen that it’s unnecessary.

The playtest was overall a great success – we expect that tinfoil hat will be ready by the time we’re ready for our next project launch, likely in Autumn this year.

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Play Report: The Reckoners

So this is something I’ve been considering doing for a while now – reviews of my experience playing board games.

Note: This is not a review of the board game’s overall quality, simply of my own experience thereof. Take from it what you will, but above all remember that what I enjoy and what you will enjoy are unlikely to be identical.

So, The Reckoners – as it’s based on a Brandon Sanderson novel series that I really enjoyed, I’ll start by talking about the theme: It works.

The theme is not amazingly strong, but it is definitely pervasive; every element of the game feels like it fits, nothing feels like it’s being papered over. Steelheart is ruling a city, and he has lieutenants who empower him to act more directly; while they are in turn empowered by the unpowered enforcement teams. The Reckoners need money to buy tech, and to afford their movement from one hidden base to another whenever one of the Epics tracks them down. They also need to do research to find out the hidden weakness, the Achilles’ Heel, of each Epic; weakening them and making them easier – or in some cases simply possible to kill.

The Epics felt a little overly abstracted at first, with them all having two simple stats “research” – required to weaken them – and health – which you burn through to kill them; but as the gameplay went on and you see how the variation in their activation effects each round changes the game they start to show more personality. At least, until you kill them.

So for a licensed game it’s well themed; it doesn’t try and do everything perfectly, and therefore it doesn’t overstuff the game with edge cases designed to mimic some minor story aspect.

The Setup was a little fiddly the first time, but only for about 5-10 minutes, and when replaying the game that time will be cut down to about 2 minutes. For an hour-ish game that’s a pretty good rate.

The Quality: We were playing the kickstarter version – metal pieces, sleeves for all the cards, it was great quality and all well put together.

The Gameplay was great fun – the core mechanic is dice rolling+rerolling, akin to Yahtzee, or King of Tokyo, but with none of the requirement for point-scoring combos – instead every result has a different, generally useful, effect, with the option to use any result to move to a new location (so that you can have your other effects there). It felt like we were constantly trying to optimise our limited resources, and acting simultaneously added to the co-operative feel (although it would open the game up even more to the “Alpha Gamer” problem where one player plays for everyone)

The Missing Piece: In this case it’s literal. There was a model missing from the game box when we opened it, one of the 6 player character models. Given as only 3 of us were playing it wasn’t an immediate problem, but with the overall production quality it felt out-of-place.

Conclusions

Would we play it again? Hell yes, it’s great fun

Would we buy it? It costs about £80. If we had £1000 to spend on games, we’d definitely get it. At £500, maybe, at £100 (our current level) definitely not – there are too many other games competing for that cash, and we could likely buy 3 other games instead of just this one.

Would we sell it at cons? (Assuming it was small print enough and we had the opportunity to get it at wholesale) – No. It’s too much of a big-ticket item, and the one experience we had had a piece missing – we’d be hard pressed to recommend it over the other games we stock to anyone who wasn’t clearly flush with cash. It’s definitely fun enough for us to be willing to recommend it, but the price point is just too high for our stand.

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Convention Report: Student Nationals 2019

April 12-15 this year we were in Glasgow for the Student Nationals or NSGRC1)National Student Gaming and Roleplaying Championships 2019 where we had a great time despite some unfortunate setbacks.

Student Nationals always has problems – it’s a convention that moves every year and is always organised by students who’ve never organised a convention before. If it went perfectly I’d get a little bit scared.

So the problems we saw at this particular nationals:

  • The roads around the buildings being used were under massive amounts of roadworks. This wasn’t the organiser’s fault – they had no forewarning of the works – but it did cause some transport issues.
  • The board-game groups didn’t have the staff, or indeed the games, that were expected. The organisers had given the wrong date to the Board-game Cafe that had agreed to help, and the Cafe had ended up double booked.
  • The tea-selling stall wasn’t allowed to sell hot water, despite having been told in advance that they would be; which caused them quite some consternation.
  • There was a significant shortage of dice available, as all the traders had expected there to be a specialist in dice present, and there wasn’t. In future this could be avoided by contacting the local store-based traders and informing them that such stock will be in demand – if no specialist is interested.

 

And what they did particularly well:

  • The traders closed at an appropriate time – if we’re next to the bar, we can close late, but we weren’t so a closing time of 6:30 was just about perfect.
  • The trade hall was in an active building with multiple things going on – including the closing ceremony at the end of the event.
  • The lunch breaks of the games were allowed to be whenever appropriate, rather than enforcing a specific time, meaning that people trickled to the trade hall over the course of several hours, rather than it being jam-packed for half an hour and dead for the rest of the day.
  • The Artist’s Alley had a good set of artists who could do character portraits for players; providing an extra draw to the trade hall, and an extra service for the gamers.
  • The shortage of dice sellers likely made our time a bit more profitable, by freeing up the con-goers funds.
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References   [ + ]

1. National Student Gaming and Roleplaying Championships 2019

Play-test Report: Rise of Legions

Due to a rather annoying illness I was unable to make it to my regular board-game playtesting this month, but I have been doing some playtesting – admittedly, of a rather different sort.

The Free-to-Play game Rise of Legions is currently in “Early Access” – or, in other words, open playtest.

It’s a member of a category of games that I personally enjoy, but have very rarely seen – pretty much only in old UMS (Use Map Settings) maps for Starcraft, SC2 and Warcraft 3 – the tug-of-war battle game.

A close relative of the MOBA (or DotA-like) genre of games – which perhaps unsurprisingly began in the same UMS environment of Starcraft – a tug-of-war battle game is akin to a real time strategy game in which you build factories to produce units, but can’t actually control those units.

That might sound limited, but the strategy in terms of which units to build when and where can prove surprisingly deep (with factors such as unit synergies and counters resulting in interesting interplay, and strategic decisions on whether or not you want to give ground in order to allow faster responses from your newly built units) especially when a little extra spice is layered on top. Rise of Legions definitely manages to spice it up a little, incorporating three additional game layers.

The first is the addition of direct summoning and casting – during the game, in addition to your spawners, you can directly summon units onto the field of battle, and support them with spells. This doesn’t overshadow the tug-of-war aspect as the units you can summon are for the most part identical to those you can spawn (with the exception of powerful heroes in the top tiers of the game), and the spells all require the involvement of your units to make a meaningful impact – the spells can never damage the end-game goal and thus can never be the final decider.

The second layer is tied to the first – while you may play any spawner you have from the very beginning of the game (or at least, as early as you can afford it) your summons and spells are gated behind time barriers. Some spells turn on after the first 4 minutes, while others become available after 8. Those end-game spells can alter the battlefield entirely, and enable huge pushes that ensure the game ends on time.

The final additional game layer is the “deck” building system – before you start playing Rise of Legions you need to pick which summons, spells and spawners you will have access to, with a total of 12 available to you. As each one has a cooldown, you may wish to have multiple identical spells or spawners, to ensure you can always use them. As is common in games without a resource system within the deck, you’re limited to two of the four available archetypes; darkness, light, nature and technology.

Rise is, to me at least, a very fun game even in its incomplete state. The devs have taken an interesting approach to the free-to-play monetization by twisting a very common – and very maligned – form of monetization and combining it with their matchmaking system.

Cards have different levels within the game; stone, copper, silver, gold and (for the computer opponents only) gem. To level the cards up takes either “grinding” – that is to say, playing the game a lot – or the expenditure of purchasable currency. Cards of higher levels can be used more often, and only a small proportion of the cards are even available at the stone or copper levels.

Normally this would be a deal-breaker for me on a free-to-play game – after all, I don’t find it fun to exist purely as the punching bag for wealthier players – but in Rise of Legions they’ve made it work because of a clever mixture of factors:

The most key factor is that you can only match with people playing decks of the same level – if you have a gold card in your deck, you will only match with other gold players, leaving the stone rank players alone.

But that alone would be a bandage, rather than something that made the game shine. The shiny aspect of it is the way that the two factors of leveling combine – at each level you have more options to put in your deck, and more ability to reuse the same option as the game goes on. Thus at higher levels the game is more complex, while at lower levels you’re still making meaningful choices when building your deck; at higher levels you are deciding which 12 abilities you’ll have, at lower levels you’re deciding which of the 7 abilities available to you you’ll have more than one of – or, if you go two-colour, which of the 14 you’ll have and whether you’ll go for one copy or two.

Overall I give rise of legions a massive recommendation if you’re looking for a free-to-play, lightweight strategy game that’s over in less than half an hour a go.

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