Things have continued moving along! Dungeons and Bosses are now in good shape, the Relics continue to be a lot of fun, and we've finished rebalancing all of the skills, spells, potions, and encounters to reflect the new fuel and forge system. Previously, a lot of skills were consuming some amount of fuel as a resource for secondary effects. Instead, many now let you forge a fuel to gain a benefit.
For example, Quick Strike:
Quick Strike is a relatively simple skill, exchange a yellow die for two better dice. But now you can feed a fuel into it to do it twice - even potentially using the gained 3 to pay for it! The drawback is that one fuel's added to the forge, bringing it one step closer to a Flare.
The Forge card (still temporary graphic design as we continue to balance) now lists its flare effects (in addition to your relic):
Spoiler: they're all pretty rough! But, with the ability to influence *when* the flare happens, you have an interesting strategy lever to pull during your runs. Finessing the just correct amount of extra forged fuel will be key to success.
The Print and Play has 5 relics included at the moment, and we'll be adding more to it in the coming weeks. Here's one that we're still testing internally but will be adding soon:
The Dimensional Key is one of the weirder Relics, it plays with the concept of throwing dice into exile and then getting them back to roll them in a torrent of power! Adding up to 4 dice to an encounter is great, but it comes with a great cost of potential damage. We're still tweaking the numbers a bit.
Also, I should note what while this visual presentation of the Relic is definitely better than the spreadsheet version, it is not actually done. We're working on something very cool for the visuals, and hope to share it later this summer as we get ready to print the game.
How about a boss? The Fire Drake has beefed up a lil bit since you may have seen it in demos:
The Drake's design reflects my overall goal with Relics' bosses: interesting choices and fights! As you can see, you have a couple different ways to tackle it!
Print and Play / Playtesting The Print and Play PDF linked up top has all the encounter cards, bosses/dungeons, heroes, and the current forge card, along with 5 of the relics that will be in the set. You'd need a normal set of Dungeon for dice and some supporting cards, and you'd need to know how to play already. It's not a full from-scratch PnP.
Playtesting discussion and feedback will be happening on the Discord, but you can always send us feedback directly if you've got it. We're excited to have more people get to try out the game!
Schedule We're closing in on gameplay completion for balance/design, but we're still a month or two away from locking everything down. Fortunately, most of the artwork is done so we won't see much for delays there.
We will be at Gen Con at booth #1523, and PAX Unplugged in the fall. We're also going to be streaming starting today, and we have plans to stream the next two Thursdays (7/17, 7/24) in the same 3PM slot with a mix of upcoming games alongside Dungeon.
