❖ Version History ❖

1st of March, 2022
Today, is the two year birthday of Calendra!

In a bit of irony, I am sitting here looking over the numbers of Calendra to balance them just as similarly as I had done on its first day two years prior. It is legitimately wild to me that it has somehow been two entire years since that morning when we concocted this game on index cards…

Over the last few months, there have been many play tests with a variety of different players. I love this phase of the game design because of its interesting landscape of witnessing people learn the rules and interact with each other based on how they interpret the cards. As games go on, whether I am playing or simply observing, I always take note of unexpected outcomes in the gameplay. When a rule is questioned, or a power seems out of balance, I love sifting through the details that I have to now somehow amend to make the game better. There is almost always a path that keeps the flavor and the lore of the game in tact, but finding that perfect solution is the puzzle that draws my intrigue the most!

The recent tests have proven that there are a few numbers that need adjusting to make the experience more interesting and aggressive. The tests have also proven to reveal that there are a few cards that could use some other subtle changes, like wording and or titles. For an example of the card titles, the featured image up above is of an old rendition of a card that now goes by another name: Mist.

This card was changed to the different name because it felt more on the Celtic theme and mystical (hah!). It is a bit sad that the name is different, because the artwork contains a secretive spelling of the work ‘fog’ in morse code… but in a sense now both names exist on the card, so I am not terribly upset (just another secret hidden here in plain sight, which is my favorite thing. Despite the fact that probably about 100 people have held this card in their hands while playing, only one person has ever asked my if it was something written in morse code).

When it comes to the numbers involved in the game, there are a lot of subtle changes that seemed like they needed to be made. The number system in the game is interesting, because it is not always about numbers when achieving victory, it is frequently about getting special combinations of cards. However, the balance of the number system is very important and very fragile. One number being a point too high can cause major changes in how the game is played and what is considered a “good or bad / fair or unfair” card.

A big importance to the numbers is the Ferric suit. This suit of cards is meant to play differently than the rest of the playing cards, because the Ferric suit is very strong but can never be used to win the game itself, the cards can only be played for winning advantage in rounds. As such, the Ferric cards should feel intimidating when they enter into play. To create this effect more directly, many numbers in the suit were bumped up by one point, as show in these examples from the 1st and 3rd iteration of the game:

Even though there are many tiny changes to these names & numbers that happen, the process itself is not terribly expensive on time consumption when making the alterations. I find it interesting to share this aspect of the game’s design though, because these are the final changes that will be happening to this system of numbers unless something else dramatic takes place in the gameplay in the next month or two.

Though we will be doing play tests for another couple of months before mobilizing toward manufacturing phase, I am not terribly concerned that the numbers will have fallen out of balance from what has been changed. For the time being while we await our final deck prototype in the mail, I will begin looking over the box designs. So be sure to check back in on the Design Journal to see where that takes us!