Think Like A Game Designer - Think Like a Game Designer: Ascension Tactics Special

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

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Today's episode is going to be a little different. So usually I'll bring on a guest, somebody who's an incredible designer or a person in the gaming industry, to be able to pull the lessons out, learn from their background, and provide insights that you can use when you're creating your own games, building a career in the gaming industry, or whatever else you are interested in. But today, you're just going to have to listen to Me Talk, and hopefully you're going to find it at least as valuable, because I want to talk about my newest project that I'm incredibly excited about, Ascension Tactics. You see, Ascension was released 10 years ago, almost exactly. The day this podcast launching is July 7th.

This is the day that our Kickstarter is launching. And as of the beginning of August, that will be the actual first copy sold was 10 years ago at GenCon. So we want to do something really special to celebrate it. And so Ascension Tactics is a deck-building miniatures game. We take the fundamentals of Ascension and all the strategy that comes from that, and we combine it with the strategy of a miniatures game and all the tactics and fun and excitement of having cool characters come to exist. Now, why did I do this?

Why didn't I just make another Ascentron set? We've got over 16 standalone expansions for Ascension. Why did I want to go so far and have to deal with making miniatures and building all that stuff? The first answer is because it's cool. Okay, I just love Ministers game. Some of you may know, I designed the World of Warcraft Ministers game many years ago before I started my company. I really loved that process.

I used to play things like Warhammer 40K and HeroChyllics and tons of other miniatures games. And so I just thought it would be a really fun project to work on and an interesting challenge. But also because I really have been trying to stress the importance of always innovating, of always being able to push the boundaries and do things that scare you a little bit and that keep you going. And that's something that this really did. You know, for 10th anniversary, we wanted to do a lot of really big things, and this was one of the biggest things that we could think of. And now I like to think about deck building the mechanic as more of a building block for other games.

Back when Ascension first released, it was, you know, one of the, the only deck building games out there and the fact that we introduced the six-card ever-changing center row was a real innovation and enough to get us a lot of attention. Nowadays, you really need to do something very significant and very different to get attention. And combining a tactical ministers game with a deck-building game was really the way we wanted to go about doing that. Before I get too deep into the specifics of ascension tactics, I want to highlight an important design principle of what I call the same but different paradox. The same but different paradox is something that every designer faces when they're working on sequels to popular games.

Players want more of what you gave them before, or they wouldn't be buying a sequel. But they don't want exactly the same thing since they already have your original game. If you make the game too different, players will reject it because it isn't what they're looking for. If you make it too similar, players will feel cheated because they aren't getting a new enough experience. This is something I've had to wrestle with for every single expansion of Ascension over the years. And the question of how do you solve this problem? How do you give people something that feels like the original game, but then still, offer something different enough that it's going to be exciting and worth buying is that

you need to be able to understand the core tension of your game. The core tension is the emotional core that lies at the heart of your work. If you know what it is, you can create mechanics that play with that tension in new ways without diverting from what your game is fundamentally about. You see, as game designers, we are constantly trying to frustrate our players. I know that sounds weird every time I say it, but in reality you're trying to create these desires in your players and prevent them from getting exactly what they want by having to interact with the game mechanics and struggle against in single-player games, the game itself, or in multiplayer games, the wishes of the other players.

In Ascension, the core tension is the ever-changing center row. Players are fighting to acquire the cards they want and reacting to which card each opponent might take. Finding new and exciting ways to play with that tension has been the heart of every single Ascension expansion I've done over the years. Every time we add a new mechanic, it's designed to create a countertension or to highlight those tensions in a new way. For example, in their last release Skulls and Sales, we introduced pirate ships that would travel around the center row. Pirate ships are able to spend crew to buy any card they want that's in their space, and that relieves the tension of having to get the right amount of ruins or power and balancing those two different resources in your deck. But in exchange, we offered a countertension of having to have the pirates be in specific locations. And where you moved around the board, you could only use the pirate's crew rating on spaces where your pirate was.

And so then we just layered tons of things in to make spatial relations matter. And balancing where your ship is, trying to run away from the crack in or raid stuff from other players, all became the heart of what was going on. So shifting back to ascension tactics. The reason ascension tactics is a different game than ascension is because we've shifted that fundamental tension. The fundamental tension uses the center row, just like Ascension does, right? There's still a same six-card center row. You still have starting decks.

But the fundamental tension is about the interaction between building your deck and commanding your champions. So to get really into detail about that, we're going to have to start talking about how you play Ascension tactics. So let's go with a brief overview. The fundamentals of play begin in the same place Ascension does. Each player has the same starting deck of eight apprentices to militia. There's a six-card center row. you'll be using runes to acquire new cards for your deck. And that's kind of where things change.

Because instead of using power to defeat monsters and earn honor like you do in Ascension, you'll be using power to command your champions. Champions are the name we have for your miniatures, which you get to pick four of to start the game in most scenarios. This can change in some different scenarios, but most of the time you're going to have four miniatures in front of you. Each miniature has an attack rating, a defense rating, and a command rating, which is how much power you've got to use to move them.

And so when you're building your deck, you're going to want more ruins to be able to get more cards to make your deck better, and you're going to want more power to be able to move your champions out into the center row. Whenever you command a champion, it can move up to three spaces in attack in any order. If it's off the board when you command it, you spawn it on your spawn point and start marching it into battle. When battling, your champions will compare their attack rating to whoever the defender's defense rating is. If the attack rating is higher, the defender gets removed off the board. If not, nothing happens. Damage stays through till the end of the turn, but it's cleared off.

So if you can't finish a miniature off in one turn, then it's going to stay on the board. Once a miniature gets knocked off the board, you have to spend one turn for it to recover, and then it can be resummed back to play. You earn points by controlling key zones around the board. If you have the majority of miniatures on or adjacent to one of the key zones, that's scenario dependent, you'll score a point. In the first scenario, it's first one to 15, but different scenarios give different victory conditions. Okay, now you've got a basic overview of how the game works.

Of course, the specifics of the cards and a few other abilities. that are tied into characters matter, but you kind of now can get a sense of how the game is played. And I want to step back now and put on the deep dive designer hat on so that we can talk about why we made these choices, because a lot of the choices for how this works are pretty unorthodox. Most miniatures games let you move all your miniatures every turn, and most of them make you roll dice and have to track damage on your miniature over time. So why do we avoid all these things? Why do we do it this way?

Why is it all commanded by cards? Why don't you get to play with all your miniatures and command all your minatures every turn? Well, we spent over a year of testing to get us to this point, and there's a lot of advantages to the reasons why we made the choices that we did, and I want to talk about some of those right now. So first, let's talk about balancing armies in a miniatures game. See, because each miniature has its own command cost, you don't need any complicated point systems to build your army.

If you're like me and you played any of these old Warhammer games, you know you had to build like hundreds points worth of army, and you had to add them all up and figure out which modifications you were getting, and it could take forever to build your team, and it was an incredible barrier to entry. In Ascension Tactics, if you want to build a team of all giant monsters, you go right ahead, but you better make sure that you get enough power in your deck to keep those monsters moving. Or you could build a deck of lots of small quick figures that will allow you to run around the board

and maybe take an early lead and focus your time on building up your deck and getting some more powerful cards to boost your figures. A huge variety of strategy and possibility are available with just a few miniatures in this game. Even with only four miniatures per side, which is the typical amount you have, Of course, more can be acquired during play, and there's more cool stuff that can happen there. But it makes the game very fast to set up. It reduces the barrier to entry for people to play and gives you a lot of variety and unique starting positions right out of the gate. The second major design thing we were focused on was uncertainty and the kill zone problem.

You see, in classic minatures games, when I move all my miniatures and then you move all your miniatures, it creates a play pattern without a lot of uncertainty. I know where you're going to be able to move your miniatures to. You know where I'm going to be able to move my miniatures to. and very often the goal is to sort of advance without putting yourself in a position where the other side can move and attack and get the first attack in.

And that creates this like dance around what I call the kill zone, right? If you ever move into the kill zone, your guys are going to get knocked out. And in Ascension tactics, because you're never 100% sure which miniatures your opponent will be able to move, you're never sure if you can safely take territory

or if you can rush into position and get away with something. And that uncertainty, the strategic uncertainty of not knowing what my opponent's going to do is a huge part of what makes this game function. One of the big inspirations for me on this was a game called Memoir 44, which is a board game miniatures game that has some really cool card play tactics.

It has a pre-built deck and doesn't have a lot of the things that we do, but you can see influences there about why you want to create that uncertainty of movement and card-based play, which lets you strategically make decisions with the resources you have, but not be able to do everything all at once. Now, let's talk for a minute about dice rolling, because this is a, let's say, dicey subject for a lot of people. Sorry. Sorry. Bad jokes. Just come with the territory here. This is what happens, so I don't have somebody else to keep me in check on the podcast.

You know, I love rolling dice as much as the next gamer, right? It's a lot of fun to, like, roll a bunch of dice and see what happens. But on the flip side, nothing's more frustrating than planning out the perfect turn, tactically setting everything up, and then watching a few bad die rolls destroy all your plans. Ascension is a game where strategy is rewarded, and Ascension tactics is no different. Because Ascension's variance is front-loaded, and what I mean by front-loaded variance you draw your cards before the start of your turn. So the randomness of not knowing which cards you're going to get,

you can plan around from the beginning of your turn. You can then execute the strategy that you deem best, given the resources that you have. And so the only uncertainties you have to deal with are what your opponent might have and what they might do, which, again, creates that strategic uncertainty. But I know if I'm going to move forward and make an attack and try to kill your guy, I can kill your guy.

And so that amount of upfront variance creates a different feeling of play and creates that more strategy-forward-type experience. Similarly, this impacts why we don't do damage tracking and why miniature death is treated the way it is in the game. Trying to keep track of all the things that a miniature can do is hard enough. But using tokens or a modifier base or something to keep track of damage is a huge pain in the butt. I'll tell a story. When I was working on the World of Warcraft Miniatures game, we did have dice rolling and we did have damage tracking.

And we had these little detachable bases on each figure that could track how much damage they have. The Heroclix games are similar. But it ended up being just such a pain to have to constantly look around the board. constantly track for different damage amounts. And because in ascension tactics, we don't have that ability of like rolling a bad role and only doing like three damage when you need to do 10. We don't need to have that tracking of health because combat can be all or nothing because I know if I'm investing in an attack, it's going to get, it's going to work.

And similarly, because we make death not that painful, this allows us to avoid the problems that a lot of minter's games have of creating a snowball effect. What I mean by snowball effect is like a snowball rolling down a hill. if you have a small snowball at the beginning and it starts accumulating and accumulating, by the time it gets to the bottom, it becomes a giant avalanche and nobody can stop it. In most mini-dures games where your miniature dying means you now have less figures to command, which means it's harder for you to kill mini-which-means, which means you're very likely to lose the game, so an early advantage can take over.

In Ascension tactics, that just doesn't happen. Because it's only a small setback when your mini-dies, you can come back and make huge dramatic comebacks that keep things interesting until the very last point is scored. And that was a really important goal for us. A typical game can last. about an hour, some of the longer scenarios, or if you're playing with a four-player game, it could be up to, you know, an hour and a half, two hours. And you don't want something that happens in the first 10 minutes to dictate everything that's going to happen for the rest of the

game. So balancing all of that out was really important. Another advantage of the systems that we designed is you feel like you're in control of the game, not the miniature. Again, games that I love, you know, when you're talking about Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, you have, the miniature has so many different powers. Honestly, you have to like spend a lot of time just like reading multiple rule books to really figure out what's going on and it became a rules lawyer game. But that aside, you know, the miniature very often just dictated what you could do. It had a certain set of powers and it was going to do the same thing every damn time. But in Ascension Tactics, you actually can modify your miniatures.

If you buy constructs, you can boost your miniatures attack and defense over the course of the game. You can give it new special powers. Cards from your hand can give you movement boosts or attack boosts or a whole variety of things that change the way your miniatures play. So it really feels like you're the one that's in control. And that feeling of not just building your deck, but building your miniatures and tactically pushing them out along the board is a huge part of what we wanted to get for the feeling of the game. And it really is different than what else is out there. That's the big thing about this project.

And one of the reasons why I was so excited about it is that I really wanted to bring something new to the table. And that's what, you know, take the stuff that I love and the stuff that I've had tons of experience with, all the deck building strategy of ascension, all the tactics of a miniatures game, and really bring something that feels different, but feels like. an organic mesh of the two things. If you're familiar with Ascension, you will be able to pick this up in a heartbeat. If you're familiar with tactical miniatures games, you'll be able to pick this up in a heartbeat. And ideally, for those of you that have neither familiar, neither of those things, you're still going to be able to pick this up and enjoy it. And that's one of the key features of this game design. All right. Well, hopefully what we've talked about so far gives you a sense of what is coming in Ascension Tactics. And if you're listening to this right

around when it's post, that means that our Kickstarter is live. And it would mean the world to me if you could go check it out, back us, or even if you don't have enough money to back us, I understand it's a challenging time. If you could just share the link, right? If I've been, you know, you've enjoyed this podcast and the stuff that I've put out there, this is the project that I've really poured my whole heart and soul into to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Ascension. We have over 20 beautiful miniatures, hundreds of cards, all kinds of cool graphics. You'll see some 10th anniversary celebration products and little bonus stuff in the campaign. And if you can just, you know, support it, check it out. Tell me what you think. And if you don't

like it. Tell me what you don't like. It's awesome. I want to get that feedback. I want to see what's out there. I hope you guys have enjoyed, but not only this podcast and the years of Ascension and all the cool stuff that we've been making, but I really hope you guys love Ascension tactics as much as I do. And if you want to learn more about the game, we are making a version of the game available on tabletop simulators. So you actually play, even if you're stuck at home and you have nobody around, you can play a version of the game right now for free to check it out and see if you like it for yourself. We have other versions and a lot more details on the page about. the game itself, talking about how we have a solo mode and a cooperative mode where there's

an AI deck that controls a boss and miniatures that you have to battle against. We have a ton of different scenarios with all kinds of cool new rules and capture the flag and different behemoths that you have to battle against. And we have a campaign setting. We have all kinds of cool stuff that's coming and we're going to be having a lot of fun surprises throughout the course of the campaign. So once again, please go check it out. You can go to our page at stoneblade.com slash tactics or just search on Kickstarter for Ascension Tactics. And hopefully I'll see you there. and I'll be answering in the comments. And either way, thank you guys so much for your time.

And I hope you enjoyed and got some useful design insights about Ascension Tactics.