❖ Version History ❖

9th of March, 2020
The day after Ben and I had our 13 hour excursion into designing this new rune-themed game I decided to buy a big batch of 1’x1’ wood chips and some cloth pouches off of the Internet with expedited shipping. I was eager to design a more exciting prototype, and I thought it would be interesting to try making this game with a more authentic ‘rune’ feel by making the tiles out of wood & shuffling them within a bag, like Scrabble.

When the wood chips arrived, I spent about two days coloring them according to the suits, and then I meticulously added all of the Names (which by now I had simplified for ease of understanding). Most of the names remained as they had been, but there were a couple of key changes:

-Beast had three names (weakest: Fledgeling, medium: Yearling, and strongest: Elder), now all tokens with this rune are called Beast, even though the numbers on each beast rune are slightly different.

-Same occurrence with Magician, Combatant, & Archer (each level of number had a name associated with it, weakest being: Squire, medium: Knight, strongest: Elder), now all simplified to one name.

-The Changeling had also once been referred to as a Decoy, but we liked the lore association of Changeling best.

There were also edits done to the Numerical Values of each rune (which I spent the greater portion of this week attempting to balance better), and new symbols for each rune token had to be designed (since this was the purpose of these tiles from the beginning, and was a big part of the discussion between Ben & I).

Finally, a few micro changes were also made to the fifth suit as suggested by Ben, specifically to give it unique powers over the other suits and lend a player advantage in the case that they were losing the battle of collecting their own suit pieces. The key examples of this being a single unique rune (the Fog) for the ferric suit, and the idea that every piece in the ferric suit would be a few points stronger than the rest. By the time one week had passed, a much more beautiful prototype was born and ready for play testing again so that the new numbers & effects could be tested.

Here is a breakdown of what each rune looks like in a suit. Note that these are the ten base symbols, and many of these symbols have repetition throughout the suit, which gets us to our 25 unique tiles in a full set. The original ten runes are:

Though it is an ordeal of a task to get all 124 of these tokens drawn, colored, numbered, and labeled, I am super excited by what the complete set looks like on the table. I can hardly wait to jumble it all up into the separate bags and get a round of this game going for more tests!

The only thing on my mind at this point that is missing from these cute little tiles is that there is no identifying name or symbol for seeing which tile is in which suit. It is only able to be determined by the color of the tile, but there is no where to really put the title as it is… so I stew this thought around in the back of my mind for the time being and start looking to see what else I can make.