Hey everyone! I’m your Community Manager, Luke.
We’ve had a few cards change drastically from their initial inception up until now, and we expect cards to keep changing well into Early Access. But how do we decide when a card needs to change? We wanted to give you some behind the scenes insight into how sometimes decisions are made and the cards evolve.
Bilbo’s Cloak has a particularly interesting development story. The card, part of the Faithful Servant Hero Pack, featuring Sam Gamgee, was created to solve a specific gameplay problem.
We have something called a soft mechanic tied to our two Hobbit heroes in the Core Set. A soft mechanic is an ability or theme that occurs across multiple cards without a keyword tied to it. Soft mechanics are a great way of building unity across a certain characteristic. When players recognize a theme across multiple cards, they’ll search for other similarities or tie-ins. It makes them feel more engaged with the setting and lore and allows us to communicate ideas about the game’s thematic world using the game’s mechanics.
Both Frodo and Sam Gamgee have abilities that hinge on Sauron’s depleted resources. They rise to greater power when Sauron’s attention is elsewhere. Thus, their abilities only trigger if Sauron’s resource count is at 0. This mechanic also communicates the nature of Hobbits as burglars—the little thieves take resources away from The Dark Lord.
But this mechanic didn’t give players a lot of dimensions for control. We found in testing that there were just too few ways for players to interact with Sauron’s resources. As a result, the Hobbit soft mechanic kind of felt more like a slot machine. You were at the mercy of the AI, and Sauron usually was too smart to go down to 0 resources. While the mechanic was thematic, it didn’t create the dynamic play space that we wanted.
Instead of choosing to rework the mechanic completely, we decided to re-contextualize it. We came up with some ideas for cards that could potentially disrupt Sauron’s resources, including a modification to the previously textless Wandering Took and an innocuous-looking attachment called Hobbit Cloak.
The design for Hobbit Cloak was simple, but it served a few valuable purposes: One, it helped trigger Sam and Frodo. Being that it was included in Sam’s Hero Pack and part of Frodo’s sphere, we felt the synergy would be immediately communicated to players. Two, it solidified the identity for Hobbits as burglars. Of course, not all Hobbits are thieves. But we felt that Bilbo’s legacy was strong enough to build into the game mechanically. Furthermore, the idea of a cloak communicates something sneaky, something stealthy, so we thought that tying it into resource control was something of a flavor win regardless.
Finally, it was an attachment that played with some of the dimensions of the game outside of combat. We had plenty of swords and shields within the Core Set design file, but we didn’t have quite as many ways to alter the game outside of fighting. Hobbit Cloak let us experiment with the strength of attachments that didn’t focus on altering combat stats.
Overall, Hobbit Cloak felt like a compelling design. We weren’t immediately sure about its cost or strength relative to other attachments, but we were ready to answer those questions through testing. We put it in the file, loaded it in the game, and moved on to other cards.
This design remained the same for quite some time. In fact, we even first spoiled Hobbit Cloak in its original, untested inception on our video stream. While we didn’t get a chance to play the card on stream, viewers immediately had the same reactions we did: The card looked interesting and cool, but was it costed correctly? And could it be too powerful?
The biggest concern, of course, came from the idea of having multiple Hobbit Cloaks. In a single-player game, players could easily get two copies of the card in play, attached to two separate characters. That would take away 2 of Sauron’s resources every turn, leaving him with only 1 and effectively grinding his plays almost to a halt. It seemed like a fairly easy way to lock down the game.
What about cooperative play? If, by some chance, both players had 3 or more copies of Hobbit Cloak out on the field at the same time, they would be taking away all of Sauron’s resources, locking him out of the game!
What had started life as a fairly innocuous design had become an oppressive tool of control. In our quest to design an enabler for the Hobbit soft mechanic, we had accidentally stumbled on a way to break the game.
Now, there’s something to be said for leaving in combos and powerful tools for players to discover. But the Hobbit Cloak exploit was just too simple to assemble. It wasn’t a combo that made players feel smart—instead, it was obvious enough that it felt like it punished those who chose not to take advantage of it. Good combos open deckbuilding up. Bad combos make deckbuilding feel narrower. Plus, it limited possible card design space. If we put a powerful combo into the game, we have to make sure our future designs don’t strengthen that combo or make it easier to assemble. If we wanted to create a way for players to search their deck for an attachment, for example, we’d have to think twice about the Hobbit Cloak.
We threw around a few possible solutions, but most of them damaged the purpose of the card. We still wanted to give players a way to mess with Sauron’s resources, and we wanted the card to feel thematic. Changing the cost on the Cloak wasn’t enough, as it didn’t quite limit the card in the way we needed it to.
To recap, we couldn’t change the card’s cost, adjust its numbers, or tinker with its text box. So we approached the problem from a different angle—how about playing with its name?
What if the card was Unique? Then, players could only have one copy of it in play at any time. Sure, in cooperative play, two players could still have one copy each, reducing Sauron’s resources by two every turn, but we were ok with that relative power for that amount of work.
With its new designation as a Unique card, Hobbit Cloak needed a fresh identity, one that made it feel thematically special. Since we were already channeling his spirit in the card’s design, we named it Bilbo’s cloak, imagining it as a sort of old family heirloom passed down to Frodo, a cape that was something of a good-luck-charm, having been on a series of adventures itself.
Since the adjustment, we’ve found that Bilbo’s Cloak is behaving the way it was intended. It’s a nice way to enable both Sam and Frodo, and while it doesn’t affect combat stats, it does affect the board in a tangible, ongoing way. While it may change between now and Early Access or now and full release, Bilbo’s Cloak is proof that quite often in game design, the simplest solution is the right one.
This is just one of the decisions we have to make across the hundreds of cards that will appear in Early Access, but gives you an idea of how testing, play and revision are part of the game design process.
Oh, and the Hobbit Cloak name is gone, but only temporarily. We’ve reworked a new Hobbit Cloak design that will be making its way back into the game in a future expansion— but that’s a story for another day.