❖ Version History ❖

January 26th, 2023
If you have been following along the Librarium Games Design Journal for our last few entries, you would know that we have been up to some very large scale mechanical rearranging for Phoenix Farm. We have done everything from card changes to rule changes.

One big chunk of that discussion from our last entry was the inclusion of an idea that we were calling the “Firefly Jar”. This new Tool in the shop would help diversify what a player could do on their turn & help make the flow of the game better.

For today’s Design Journal entry, I wanted to go into depth behind what this mechanic does for the game, how it works, why it is so important, and how the first iterations of the card designs turned out! So, make sure to take a moment to appreciate the featured art up above (this is the “back of the card” design), and then let’s start digging into the rules:

The Firefly Jar :: Base Rule Concept

The Firefly Jar exists to help jumble the gameplay flow through the mechanical layout Phoenix Farm. It adds some faster moving randomization that makes players more likely to succeed for free by delaying their other actions in the game.

We decided at first that there would be three categories of mechanics that the Firefly Jars could impact once a player acquired one:

•Bonus Dice when attempting to Farm
•Easier access to successful dice rolls
•Free access to currency in the game

To help differentiate between the effect types within the Firefly Jars, we made it so that these effects would be color coded. Bonus Dice would feature green fireflies, modified dice numbers would feature golden-yellow fireflies, and currency access would feature red glowing Phoenix Feathers as an alternative outcome during the “foraging” (encountering a phoenix rather than finding a firefly).

Let’s take a look at all of the examples by category, starting with the Bonus Dice:

The Firefly Jar :: Bonus Dice Mechanics!

When a player discovers green fireflies during the foraging process, they will be gifted an opportunity at increasing how many dice they roll during the turn. To diversify how helpful this bonus will be, some jars are better than others (did you catch two or three fireflies during your hunt the night before?).

Upon use, the player will have two or three dice to roll any time that they farm with a tool on their turn. By going to the market to buy the jar and then skipping the 2nd half of a turn to flip it over, this player may have two attempts to use the jar on another turn.

When done correctly, this opens up the possibility for this player to roll as few as two and as many as six dice while farming, which is substantially better than the normal 1-2 dice that they get on any other turn in the game. This makes it far more likely for the player to succeed in very controlled ways.

There is a caveat to this bonus though…
Every 1 that is rolled on the multiple dice still pays out Feathers to the other players in the game. This means that on extremely rare occasions, a player using the x3 dice might give out was many as x6 feathers to the other players in the game!!

The Firefly Jar :: Dice Alteration Mechanics!

The Golden Firefly Jars come with very different rules than the Bonus Dice. Rather than giving you more opportunities to roll a high number, these cards change the values needed to find success during your farming process. Though they are thematically the same, the results of these two cards are very different:

x1 Golden Firefly Bonus
With the Golden Firefly Jar on the left up above, a player has a significant upgrade to the odds of rolling a successful number on the dice.

Rather than 50-50 odds, it is now 84-16. Any number other than ‘1’ will net a reward for the player, but the unfortunate downside to this bonus is that there is no longer a “Critical Success” when rolling a ‘6’.

x2 Golden Firefly Bonus
With the other card shown above, the player has both an increased likelihood of success when rolling the dice to farm, but also double the chance of a “Critical Success!”

Rather than 50-50 odds, it is now 67-33. Also! Rather than a 16% chance to land the “Critical Success” on the dice, it is now a 32% chance! (This is arguably the best card out of the whole batch to get).

The Firefly Jar :: Phoenix Encounter Mechanics!

We did not want every single Firefly Jar to act the same way. Where every other option gives the player better chances at rolling the dice in certain ways, these two cards do something completely different. They help to alleviate a players chances of poverty rather than aiding the success of their farming. And, as akin to the golden Firefly Jars, these two cards act slightly differently from one another:

Single Phoenix Encounter
With the card on the left up above, there is a special bonus offered to the player. By turning this card in, the player essentially gets a new starting kit for the game (another Phoenix Ash, and enough Feathers to purchase the Tools necessary to get that Ash to become an Egg & Chick). There are two effects that this offers the player:

•Two Phoenixes to take care of in the game if you missed hatching twins

• Extra fluid currency to use however you need (it doesn’t have to be used to take care of the ash, it can be applied however you like).

Double Phoenix Encounter
With the card on the right up above, there is a totally different kind of bonus offered to the player. They are given the chance to sell things back to the store, which otherwise is not an option in the game. This special opportunity can be used in a variety of ways as well depending on the strategy you are shooting for:

•Extra Ash that you do not want to take care of can be used to turn a profit (the two cards here work very well together when used back to back).

•The player can return this jar, purchase cheap tools, and turn a quick profit on the marketplace (i.e. send this jar back, buy three brooms, and sell them back for a bonus of x3 feathers, leaving you with +3 more than you started the turn with).

•Also, in conjunction with the Dragon Rules… if you have lost a phoenix in your journey, you can use this moment to recover funds for your farm after an attack!

Though this is just the start of an entirely new series of play tests that will need to be done for Phoenix Farm, this is a monumental upgrade to the play experience for the player that I am excited to do some science with in the months to come.

From my perspective, there is a pretty strong chance that these cards will be changed again before publication… some things might turn out too strong, or not strong enough, but in order to figure this out, we will need to see how they act in the gameplay across many many incalculable variables from where we currently stand.

There will be another time in the future where we cover the results of how these cards impact the game, but for the time being, we’ve got to go play some more games! Check back soon my friends for more updates to the Librarium games Design Journal!