Casual Sunday. Pulled together a podcast, and a good one at that.
Kath was kind enough to test First Blood. Revealed a lot of things about the game. So has playing Star Realms, another deck building game. Considering stream lining a lot of cards. Removing single use items. Potentially cutting card count again. Making spells travel down the card stream. Allowing players to shuffle asynchronously (but I want very badly to avoid this). This would bring it more inline with the deck building game standard. But I don't like deck building games, so I'm trying to be mindful about keeping the deck building elements as light as I can while still allowing the player to improve their deck in interesting ways as a single game progresses, but focusing more on meaningful interactions between players through their cards. RNG is coming down as well, I want to keep dice in the game, but to what extent I'm not sure.
Might cut it out of basic resource gathering though, sucks to lose some coin flips and have someone grab an item before you. But that disruption of a set game plan is good for variety reasons. As you can see I'm torn. What I learned today will make its way into the game over the next few days.
The good news is that cutting down the deck size feels right, it may be best if it gets even smaller. Auto Attacks now have a purpose too that feels worth having. But I'm not sold on the positioning path as a positives only mechanic, that might change. But I'm also on the verge of adding another layer of mechanics to that system. I'll hold judgement until that is in. Also runes will interact with it and those only exist in broad strokes for the moment.