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Renown: The Resurrection
By Corvus | March 27, 2008
Some time ago I designed a card game, posted alpha rules, got some feedback… and then completely let the project die. You see, small studios like PJ’s Attic can’t really hope to make any money off a card game and I was trying to be profitable once upon a time. Now, however, I’m not interested in making a profit off of my game designs so I’m free to pursue any project down the rabbit hole that I wish to. It doesn’t hurt that I found a print-on-demand solution that doesn’t require a significant amount of money up-front. That means I’ll take what little bit of profit I might make off each deck and store it away to someday make a bigger and more luxurious deck.
Today, I’m going to provide a brief overview of the gameplay of Renown. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the design of the cards and their other possible uses. At the end of today’s post, I’ll be putting out the call for beta testers, explaining the requirement and benefits of being a tester and letting you know the what today’s giveaway is!
Renown is designed to emulate a highly political body of people as they maneuver to curry favor and win the most renown. The goal is to collect either the most heroic renown, or the most villainous renown. Gameplay is marked by sudden reversals of strategy and encourages easy alliances and sudden betrayals.
The games is played using six suits from the deck. Three suits of cards–Vitae, Terrae and Hydrae–represent villainous potential. The other three–Vae, Aerae and Pyrae–represent heroic potential. The seventh suit is used to mark positions on the table–the Court, the Altar, the Hall and the Den. Black and white markers represent villainous and heroic favor, respectively.
Every player starts with nine black markers representing villainous favor and nine white markers representing heroic favor. The dealer deals every player a single card face down and two cards per player laid out, face up, in a row on the table. The dealer decides which end of the row is the top and places a marker card titled the Hall (of Heroes) there. The Den (of Villainy) goes at the bottom of the row. During their hand, players will be required to take the top card out of this hierarchy. The remaining cards are stacked, face down, on the Den.
The players look at the card they’ve been dealt, assess the hierarchy of cards on the table and bid a single favor marker to the court–heroic if they expect to gain more heroic potential during the round, villainous if they expect to gain more villainous potential during the round. After everyone has bid, the dealer decides if play will progress to their right or left.
During their hand, before they take the top card from the hierarchy, players may decide to sacrifice their potential. Each suit has a different effect when it is sacrificed and can dramatically impact gameplay. Sacrificed Terrae (brown gem cards) move cards downward in the hierarchy, up to one spot per point value of the card. Sacrificed Aerae (blue gem cards) move cards upward in the hierarchy, up to one spot per point value of the card. This allows players to sabotage the hierarchy for the next player, or even remove cards from the hierarchy by vaulting them into the Hall, or burying them in the Den in order to end the round early while they’re ahead. Players may also vault card out of the Den (or drag them down out of the Hall) to extend a round, hoping to acquire more cards in order to reach their goal.
Hydrae (turquoise gem cards) and Pyrae (orange gem cards) may be sacrificed before another player, forcing an exchange of the opposite cards. If the targeted player cannot meet the point value of the card sacrifice before them, they must make up the difference by giving the attacking player the appropriate markers from their pool of favor. This is an ideal strategy for someone finding that it would be advantageous to reverse their strategy, or perhaps more importantly to force another player to reverse theirs.
Vitae (black gem cards) can be sacrificed before another player who must then sacrifice an equal number of points of Vae (white gem cards). Unlike Hydrae and Pyrae sacrifices, both players discard their cards. If the targeted player cannot match the amount on the card sacrificed before them, they must make up the difference by adding enough favor to the court. This is a desperate move, but an effective one. Vitae and Vae cards are worth extra potential, so forcing another player to give up their advantage can be quite useful.
When the hierarchy is empty, it is refilled from the Den. Players assess their cards and the new hierarchy and bid another marker. Play continues until the Den is empty. At this point, the players total the amount of villainous and heroic potential in their hands. Most cards are each worth one point of potential, with Vitae and Vae cards worth two points. Each player determines whether they have more heroic or villainous potential. If they have equal amounts, their hands are canceled out and they are considered to have no potential. The players declare their potential and the player with the highest villainous potential collects the villainous favor from the court. The player with the highest heroic potential collects the heroic favor.
If play is to continue, the previous dealer declares the next dealer and play begins anew. There are a variety of end conditions possible for a game, depending on how long the players wish to play. You can declare the court capable of only holding so much favor, set time limits, play a set number of rounds, or play until the first person is forced to give up all their favor to sacrificed cards. Regardless, when the game is over the player with the largest amount of a single type of favor wins. Like with calculating potential, heroic and villainous favor cancel each other out. Note that there are never two winners. If the player with the most renown holds villainous favor, then villainy wins the day. Likewise if the largest favor pool is heroic. Ties, or draws, are considered loss states and no one is the winner.
Okay, on to the call for beta testers! I have yet to receive my initial decks of beta cards, so I cannot tell you exactly when the official beta is going to begin, but I hope to start the process next month. In order to qualify to be an official tester, you must meet/agree to the following criteria:
- Live in the continental US. In the interest of cost and time, I cannot accept official international beta testers, sorry.
- Be able to play at least three extended games of Renown with 3 to 6 people over a period of four weeks this summer.
- Coax, encourage, browbeat and threaten your players into filling out an online survey about their play experience.
- Be willing to ship the game box (we’ll be paying postage) to the next tester in a timely fashion.
The benefits for taking on this task are:
- Your name in the credits of the final manual
- A free copy of the final game, including card deck, manual and favor markers.
- A sense of pride at being instrumental in helping some achieve a goal that’s important to them. *kniw*
If you live overseas, or are not selected to be an official tester, there will be an opportunity for you to be selected to receive those same benefits by making your own deck and getting players to fill out the online survey. I’ll post more details about that closer to the beta launch.
If you’re interested in being an official tester, please comment here, send me an email, or let me know via the contact form. I’ll be making my selections next week and adding people to the official testing mailing list.
Now for today’s giveaway!
I know this is delayed gratification, but today I’m giving away a final copy of Renown. This will be a full color illustrated story deck (how’s that for a hint at tomorrow’s post on the card design?), a nicely printed manual and a full complement of quality favor markers. You need not be located in the US to chime in for this giveaway–everyone who comments on this post before tomorrow’s giveaway (which I’ll schedule for 12:00p PDT) will be eligible to win.
On a side note, I’ve decided to announce all winners for this week’s giveaways on Monday the 31st. It’ll allow me to administer them all in one go. There are two prizes left, I’ll have a game giveaway tomorrow and another giveaway in Monday’s podcast. You can also still enter to win the games form my library, or the U6 map or Ultima book. That giveaway will not be closed until I post my next podcast on Monday.
Tagged:beta test, card-game, giveaway, Renown. |
March 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I am interested in your game. I am also creating a card/board game. My background is cards - I teach bridge/poker.
many thanks
Simon
March 27th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
So how exactly can one participate in the “unofficial” beta?
If you could provide B&W printable decks (with each suit still clearly distinguishable), that would be more than enough to test.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Unofficial tester it will be, I guess. It’s too bad about the country restriction, but I understand shipping costs. I’d be all over this if it was open to Canada too. Looking forward to seeing the cards, and to playing the revised game. The six suits should balance a little nicer than the four from the Alpha.
March 27th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Oh, I’m kind of interested in being an unofficial beta-tester, but I know just the right person to be coaxed into applying for it.
I’ve got a friend who is an avid boardgamer; I’ll point him over here, and keep him updated later.
March 27th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I wish I could help with the beta testing, but I also live outside the U.S. (at least until August). Plus I don’t know how many people I know who could be coerced into playing and writing about it. But I’ve really enjoyed reading about your progress with the game. I hope the testing goes well.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I have numerous ideas about how to enable the unofficial testers and it looks like that’s a good thing! Sorry I can’t afford to ship each of you a beta deck and let you keep it.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
I’m quite interested in being a beta tester, but I’m sure that by “overseas” you meant “outside of the US”, since technically South America is not overseas
Oh well… I couldn’t finish reading the whole rules because after a while of reading my head started to hurt. Really bad. It wasn’t a good idea to read that after a day of working on my RPG engine and then going to the unviersity were my brain turned into liquid and started pouring out of my ears.
On the plus side, I can at least be an “unofficial” beta tester, I even have the perfect amount of friends to do this. One of them is particularly picky, in a “I make my own table RPG rules because everyone else’s suck” kind of way… maybe obsesive-compulsive-perfeccionist-jerk would be a better adjective. I don’t know if it’s a good thing that he’s in my beta testing group, but at least I’ve warned you.
I need an aspirin.
March 28th, 2008 at 11:22 am
The giveaway is officially closed now, but I’ll leave the comments open if more people want to volunteer to be testers.