Happy Holidays with House War Minis in the Wild
over 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 02, 2019 at 01:17:40 AM

Hey everyone,

We're deep into the holiday season now, but there's no rest for the wicked here at the Crafty Home Office. The Mistborn Metal Dice campaign has been front and center for the past couple weeks, but we've made sure to keep the gears crankin' on Siege of Luthadel as well. In the next update we expect to share the final rulebook for a short review period, along with all the other polished components just before we send everything to press. 

At that point we'll have some exciting news to share about one component in particular, which we think will really add to the expansion's table presence. We want to roll that out with graphics, but in the meantime we can offer a little (oblique) hint by way of our favorite pics of Mistborn: House War minis in the wild *. Click on any of the pics for full source credit, and post links to your own painted minis or faves from out there in the interwebz. We'd really love to see what else is out there!

* No, the Siege of Luthadel minis won't come pre-painted, but the upgrade is related and we think it's pretty darn awesome. :)

If you haven't already, we encourage you to Follow us here on Kickstarter so you can be notified when we launch new campaigns like the Mistborn Metal Dice. And please do spread the word! We appreciate each and every post, share, and retweet. In fact, we're running a Daily Dice Giveaway all through the middle of our new campaign to give away the factory samples we used to promote the Kickstarter. Today's giveaway is for the Nicrosil die...

Until next time, Happy Gaming, Happy Holidays, and Stay Crafty

Alex, Ed, & Pat 

Mistborn Merchants: Mistborn Metal Dice is Live!
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 09:06:57 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Siege of Luthadel Update: Playtesting Complete, Final Prep & Production Commencing
over 4 years ago – Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 12:23:13 AM

Hello backers! 

We've returned from our autumn company summit with great news! Blind playtesting for Siege of Luthadel is complete and the game's latest iteration has proven to be a hit with everyone. We've folded in all the (small) changes recommended by you and our teams, and we're now getting the production pipeline ready to bring the expansion across the finish line. 

Thank you all for your contributions, feedback, and suggestions. We appreciate every bit of support we've received, and it's all helped to make The Siege of Luthadel the product we knew it could be. The moment we heard from teams that they felt the expansion made the game even more interesting, with new ways to scheme and win, we were sure we had a winning design. 

Updates will be a little lean for the next couple / few months as we work with the factory, but we'll post as close to monthly as we can and include all the detail we have. We expect you'll see the final box art and some other finished components in the next update or two. 

In the meantime, here's a revised piece of art for you, courtesy of Oliver Specht and Herowannabe, who noticed that Marsh should have facial tattoos at this point in the story. Oliver also took the opportunity to enlarge and enhance the spikes a bit. We're really pleased with the result. 

Until next time, Happy Gaming and Stay Crafty!  

Everything on Target & Going Well!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 09:09:35 PM

Hello backers! 

Very quick update this month, as we're still in the window for backer and blind playtest feedback. That process is going very well in that so far nothing has surprised us and (almost) nothing has prompted changes to the expansion. We say "almost" nothing because one eagle-eyed backer reminded us that Marsh should have eye tattoos at this stage in the story, so we're having Oliver Specht add those to the piece. We should have an updated version of that art to post in the September update. 

One last thing before we leave you for now - the deadline for backer feedback on the print and play is Monday, September 23. After that we'll be locking things down and going into production, so further changes will not be possible. If you have anything more to add, please get it to us through the links in our previous update as soon as you can. If you haven't played yet... well, what are you waiting for? It's the start of a long holiday weekend here in the U.S... 

Until next time, Happy Gaming & Stay Crafty!

- Alex, Ed, & Pat, Crafty Games

The Genesis of the Siege of Luthadel, Part 2: The Beginning of the End
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 12:54:50 AM

Heloooooo again, backers! Alex Flagg, Mistborn line developer and Siege of Luthadel co-designer here with the second half of our retrospective on the creation and evolution of the first expansion for Mistborn: House War. If you missed our earlier update, you can reach Part One at this link.

[ED: Pat here. I prepared the backer-only print and play files, which we’ll be sending along in a second update shortly after this is posted. I’ll also interject through this post when I have something to add.] 

We left off after Version 7 of Siege, with a hopeful note that we feel Version 8 is our release candidate. Let’s walk through the concept, overall changes, and exciting new content we’ve developed for this iteration.

Crafting a Siege Mentality

The lessons learned through this expansion’s long history have been hard earned but invaluable. As I dove into Version 8, I laid out a few core tenants to guide my decisions…

• Negotiation is the focus of House War’s game play, and must remain accessible and interesting.
• The siege is the “thing” this expansion brings to the table. Tensions between the Houses in relation to the siege are vitally important to game play.
• Player choices must matter both immediately and over time — particularly the side a House chooses to support at any time. 
• Certainty is boring and undermines the game’s fun. This is true whether you're sure of the winning House, the winning side, or another element of the game. 
• Houses must be as free as possible to turn their coats and play the odds over the course of the game.

With Version 8, I focused everything on satisfying these goals. Dozens of decisions followed, and they were always made with these tenets in mind. 

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Versions 1 through 6 taught me a crucial lesson: I have a very limited budget of player attention. The more the expansion demands from players — the more rules they need to remember — the less attention they can pay to things like negotiation and winning the game. When juggling the needs of such a complex release, and working with playtest feedback that indicates the load of your design is too high, every little bit of cognitive bandwidth you can buy back through substitution, reduction, and simplification can only improve the game.

Replacing Unrest with Vin’s Journey in Version 7 was a boon. Not only did it better fit the expansion’s theme, but it also removed a third game resolution (Attackers win / Defenders win / Unrest wins so… no one wins?). With Unrest out of the way, players could focus more on the state of the siege. 

In that spirit, I replaced all effects that destroyed resources with discarding resources to the Spoils. This further streamlined the game and presented a new economy that could be leveraged with new versions of old mechanics. 

These replacements also led to one of the biggest changes in Version 8: I eliminated the Siege board altogether. It wasn’t necessary anymore because all the spaces on it could simply lie over parts of the base game board. One board overlay covered Unrest with the Vin’s Journey track. Another overlay covered the Destroyed Resources and Pass the Turn spaces, as well as the Problem discard spaces (see below for why we no longer need these). This second overlay introduces our new Support Pile spaces, plus the Spoils and an upgraded Pass the Turn area we need to support the Koloss mechanics. 

[ED: The final release will include two board overlays, but the print and play includes three overlays in four pieces to keep the pieces on easy-to-print U.S. letter sheets. The image below is actually cobbled together by splicing two of these pieces together because I don't have access to the graphic designer's full working files as I post this update.]

The overlays lower the volume of information a player needs to track during the game — by literally reducing the number of spaces in their field of view. Our playtests have shown this reduces confusion and raises the value of each space and action in the game. 

Finally, I simplified set up and game play by fully replacing the Personality deck. Originally, you shuffled the 30-odd Siege Personalities with the base game deck, which had several knock on effects. Most importantly, it produced wildly divergent play experiences and severely skewed the chances of drawing a particular card in any game. It was also extremely difficult to balance the utility of every card from the base game alongside the new ones. Ultimately, it became clear that just as we were fully replacing the Problem deck, we also had to fully replace the Personality deck to focus on characters and actions related to the siege. 

Once this decision was made, the Personality deck came together in short order. I swapped out generic archetypes for specific characters — e.g. the Mistborn cards were replaced with Vin and Zane — and I tweaked rules everywhere to tighten things up. As a happy byproduct of this work, we preserved the fundamental probabilities of the base game, giving players one less thing to relearn when using the expansion. 

V8: The Version That Lived

I arrived at the heart of Version 8 back in late March, as I was building the Problems for Version 7 (see the last update for details). I’d spent a week tinkering with various ways to make the siege outcome more uncertain. Players were still in control of where all Problems were discarded, so even with hidden Impact scores it was still a little too easy to tell which side was winning. Then an important question came to mind…

“What if every Problem ended up in a Support pile, rather than just the solved ones?”

Not only did this introduce the uncertainty I was after, it also supported the expansion’s theme. Just as the Houses were now currying the Favor of the people of Luthadel, those same people could impose their will over the course of the game. When a Problem erupts, indicating that the Houses have failed to address it, the people decide how the aftermath of that incident will affect the siege. They express their own self-interest, and the Impact of their decision is felt all the way to the end of the game. For example…

I built a second deck of prototype Problems with this new mechanic and took it to a local con for testing the next day. We played with and without the mechanic in back-to-back games, and this yielded surprising results. While the initial deck worked just fine, the “Erupt To…” deck made games faster, less predictable, and less prone to analysis paralysis. At any point, players could optionally ignore roughly half the Problems in play — any that naturally erupted to their preferred side — and this dramatically eased the cognitive load. 

Simultaneously, the increased number of cards going into the Support Piles meant no one was quite sure which side was winning the siege at any time. This encouraged players to be a bit more cautious, and to switch sides tactically through each game. Observation and cunning became more important, as bonus scoring from Allegiance often made the difference between victory and defeat. Best of all, everyone was consistently engaged as they struggled to support their preferred outcome and undercut their rivals, knowing those rivals might become their allies the moment the will of the people shifted. 

It was everything I’d wanted for the expansion since the beginning, and it hit all the right notes for the political game we already have in House War. I discarded all other versions of the game and spent a few more weeks fine-tuning the remaining rules & components. Since then we’ve been in blind playtesting, and results have been extremely positive. Once you see the result for yourselves, we hope you all agree. 

[ED: This is where I came in again. After being involved primarily as an advisor and sounding board up to this point, it was my job to take Alex’s hard work and sculpt it into our release candidate. To be honest, the process was pleasantly free of major issues. 

The biggest hurdle during this editorial run was figuring out how to express Alex’s multi-layered design goals for the Supporting Personality mechanics in ways that would be as obvious to new players as possible. We toyed with a few different wordings and presentations before landing on what you’ll see in the print and play version, and I’m pretty confident that language is where it needs to be now. 

I also gave the rulebook a thorough pass, which thankfully involved very little fundamental structural work. The rules remained largely as Alex wrote them, though I did break out a few topics as sidebars, expand a couple sections that needed more clarification, and generally streamlined the text for easy reading. I’m hopeful your comments will prove me right on these fronts, but every bit of feedback is useful in some fashion. You’ll see an editorial link in the print and play, so please bring on the feedback!]

How It All Works

So, after all this you may rightly be asking yourself: what does this expansion look like now? Here’s a quick summary for the non-backers reading this. Backers: Watch your inbox or activity feed for another update in a short bit. You can see the entire expansion for yourselves!

[ED: Anyone who wasn't an original campaign backer and later added a late pledge through BackerKit, please drop us a line at pat <at> crafty-games.com. We'll verify your pledge and hook you up!]

The Siege

The siege and its resolution inform the design and all new changes for the expansion. Throughout the game, you and your fellow players will support one or both factions — either the Attackers laying siege to the city, or the Defenders struggling to protect it. Your support will likely change freely as circumstances and agendas dictate, and this support is recorded in two ways…

• Allegiance Tokens: Each House participating in a successful deal claims an Allegiance token matching the side the deal supports. These tokens have common backs and so they operate as a second scoring vector alongside Favor. At the end of the game, bonus Favor is rewarded for Allegiance tokens matching the side that wins the siege, making Allegiance tokens a lasting record of each player’s choices through the game. 
• Support Token: Each House also has a single Support token that reflects only their most recent leanings. It’s a double-sided token with Attackers on one side and Defenders on the other. The idea here is that at any time everyone can see how you most recently sided, and various game mechanics can trigger from your current (most recent) status. Some named Personalities offer bonus or alternative effects in response, and some Problems behave differently as well.

The Problems

The expansion features an all-new Problem deck, with new themes, features, quotes, and art depicting and inspired by events from The Well of Ascension. Nearly every Problem in the deck has an Impact value ranging from 0 to 5, which represents that Problem’s importance to the siege’s outcome. 

Each time a Problem is solved or Erupts, it is placed in either the Attacker Support Pile or the Defender Support Pile, either as negotiated or as chosen by the Active Player at the start of the deal. At game’s end, the total Impact in each pile is compared, and the side with the highest total Impact in its pile wins the siege. As noted above, bonus Favor is awarded for each matching Allegiance token a House has collected. This Favor is an expression of each House’s accumulated trust with the victors, and the people who believed in them.

The Personalities

The replacement Personality deck is specially designed for use with the expansion, and loaded with favorite characters like Vin, Sazed, Elend, Zane, OreSeur, Ashweather, and Allriane Cett. Many of these Personalities have their own agendas, represented by their Supporting ability. When you currently support the same side as a Personality — as indicated by your Support token — you may play the card for a different or more powerful game effect. Political calculation and timing are vital to getting the most from these key figures!

Vin’s Journey

Vin’s quest to unravel the mystery of the Deepness and her own destiny are the focus of The Well of Ascension, and in this expansion our heroine’s journey drives and escalates the game toward its explosive conclusion. At the start of the game, six Vin’s Journey cards — each taken from a key moment in her story — are shuffled into the Problem deck. Each time one of these cards is drawn, it triggers a thematic event and advances the Vin pawn 1 space along the Vin’s Journey track. 

When Vin takes the final step along her track, the Battle of Luthadel Problem card is added to the board. This card operates a lot like the Vin Problem card from the base game — when it is solved or erupts, the game ends. The Battle of Luthadel also has the highest Impact in the game, though this Impact degrades the longer the Problem remains on the board. 

The Koloss

Of course, it wouldn’t be Mistborn without everyone’s favorite blue-skinned, hulking, rage-monsters — the Koloss! In The Siege of Luthadel, the world’s most powerful and dangerous fighting force are up for grabs by any House foolhardy enough to seize control of them. 

Each time a Problem is solved, some of the resources spent to solve it — a number indicated by Vin’s position on her track — are discarded to the Spoils. These resources are collected as the Koloss rampage across the land, pillaging what’s left of the Final Empire. You can claim these accumulated resources by “taking the Koloss” — a new action on the Pass the Turn space — but in doing so you also claim the Koloss pawn. 

When you hold the Koloss pawn and a Problem card with the Rampage trait is added to the board, you must immediately draw and resolve a number of Rampage cards  — again, as indicated by Vin’s position on her track. Each Rampage card forces a choice: do you suffer its effect, or do you pay the resources shown at the bottom? Sometimes there’s no easy answer for the foolhardy…

There are plenty more changes, tweaks, and twists in the expansion as well, but this update is already pretty long. The good news for backers is you don’t have to wait to see the expansion for yourself! Watch your inboxes and / or activity feeds for the next update, which will arrive shortly. This update will contain links to a full digital version of the expansion, ready for you to read and play today! 

Thank you all so much for bearing with us. It shan’t be long now!

Yours truly, 

Alex, Pat, and the rest of the Mistborn: House War team