TLDR: at the bottom :).
Our last post (two months ago!) promised some news about the future of the release. We lied!
For a long while, we weren't satisfied with dice as the engine of the gameplay. While on the surface things felt okay, on a closer look, dice had a number of issues that were either too difficult to solve or made the learning curve significantly worse.
Here's a brief summary of the problems:
The split between symbol and numeric faces made some mechanics awkward.
The split between character and support dice also made some mechanics awkward, especially regarding runes..
Playing with 5 dice meant a lack of "breadth" in terms of interactions with cards or situational dice faces.
Having 5 dice also led to the "one-way door" issue of dice vases. Changing the type of a die or finding the right one was difficult or led to always skipping the vase's content.
Not all faces provided Tak. This meant that a player could trap themselves by building dice/faces with too many non-Tak providing faces.
We realized this was a fault in the gameplay that couldn't be fixed with incremental changes; we needed a drastic one. This is when we decided to move towards a gameplay that's more similar to a poker-inspired one that we (and so many others!) love so much, with our own twist and flavor.
Lots of words to say we removed dice and went for a cards/tiles-based gameplay. The gist of it:
Just like before, the power of your attacks is the product of Tak and Ni.
To attack, you make a combo of tiles (one of a kind, 2 of a kind, 3 of a kind... etc.). The harder the combo, the more Tak and Ni it will provide.
Cards work just like before, with run-altering effects, interactions with tiles, etc
Needless to say, different tiles have different trigger/discard/in-hand effects, with characters bringing their own set of tiles to spice up the gameplay. We went for tiles instead of cards not only because we already have cards, but because the two-halves nature of tiles allows us to
Explicitly show the Tak value of a tile by default.
Allow for mechanics that duplicate a tile face onto the bottom part, or merge two tiles into one, with the top part and the bottom part having the symbols of the merged tiles.
There is room to apply more than one rune per tile.
We have reworked lots of existing cards and introduced a whole set of tiles for the demo. For this reason, you'll find that all unlocked entries have been reset.
For the time being, the demo will only include Balthaz; we are planning to introduce Kagu back into the demo once we have worked on his tile set. Try out the demo and make sure to play the tutorial!
Make sure to check out other games at the Ukrainian Games Festival :P
TLDR: reworked the game from dice to tiles, with a combo-based system that will surely remind you of Balatro.