:strip_icc()/pic2019210.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic1997078.jpg)
Of course the bet would not have been possible without our previous collaboration on Quarriors. The basis of Dice Masters was the Quarriors buy-and-field engine, but we wanted to capture the back-and-forth of a traditional two-player trading card game. I had worked on Magic: The Gathering for almost ten years and have designed about a dozen trading card games, and Eric has played over a dozen games of Magic, so we had a solid basis for our Frankenstein experiment. Because of the wide variety of cards and dice in a system like this, we wanted to take away some of the common resource decisions that occurred in every game and were not overly strategic. As a result, the basic sidekicks are free to field and there is a tension on many dice between the base cost and the fielding cost, where the better stats you get for the price, the harder the dice can be to field. The game has a lot of resource management choices, and we tried to make the choices interesting while also eliminating some of the terrible turns in which you got several characters and no energy to field them, or lots of energy but you missed with your big character die roll and got energy with that, too. [Those not familiar with Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men, the first Dice Masters release, can check out my game preview on BGGN. —WEM]
/pic1696990.jpg)
A lot of people are making base comparisons of Dice Masters to Quarriors. The system Eric and I created for Quarriors involves buying dice from a table spread, rolling them, and fielding them if certain sides come up. Typically dice you buy also give you the potential of extra resources as well. This system can be the underlying support for a number of distinct games, similar to how deck-building and card buy is the basis for many different games. Even in Quarriors, you can play the base game, the base game with the advanced buy rules, the base game with the advanced culling rules, or the base game with the advanced buy and culling rules. By just toggling a couple of rules, you essentially get four games with different game flow. Thunderstone had a similar thing with many variants, including solo play and the epic variant (written up by Richard Launius) which in many circles was more popular than the base game rules. The Lord of the Rings Dice Building Game was yet another take on the engine, and Dice Masters is yet another take.
If everything goes according to plan, we will be doing different takes on this system with properties other than Marvel. While all the games in the Dice Masters family will be compatible, there will be some elements unique to the particular properties as we will strive to capture the full flavor of the property whenever possible. It was recently announced, for example, that we will be doing Dungeons & Dragons Dice Masters, which ideally will be coming out at the end of 2014. Eric and I are both diehard Dungeons & Dragons fans. Like many gamers from my generation, I grew up playing in high school and college in the dark ages before personal computers and decent console systems. Our gaming group in high school would often get together at a friend's house and play from Friday night to Sunday morning with occasional sleep breaks. All of the Dice Masters games will be compatible, but each version will have elements that are unique to the particular property. We are both very excited about the D&D version because it was such a huge influence for us in gaming.
/pic535327.jpg)
/pic535325.jpg)
/pic535320.jpg)
Sample Battle Spirits cards
While we briefly looked at both options, Eric and I quickly agreed that the game was much better if you could attack with the stuff you rolled and did not have to wait unless you chose to do so. In a game with no "hand", this also creates hidden information decisions as players have to anticipate which dice the opponent might draw and what might potentially be attacking the next turn. I have won a lot of games by realizing that my opponent can't get a heavy hitter out the next turn, which means that I can afford to attack even when I am very low on life — and thinking about what I have coming up often helps me decide whether to block or take a few points of damage.
The Dice Masters system is designed to allow multiple brands to use the same underlying game engine. The first version of the game worked on by me and Eric was actually designed using the Yu-Gi-Oh! brand, and we hope that this version will work its way through the process soon. Because we got to do two completely separate base sets, the dice costing got a lot of playtesting and balancing. Some of the more astute players may notice that on the back of the rulebook it states that "Assign" means to commit your monsters to attack. This is not because we hate superheroes. We love superheroes. I think Eric owns six capes and four masks and some sort of utility belt thing. This was merely a carryover from the previous version that we missed on proofing.
One of the things I always try to push in games is a catch-up feature. While I was working with WizKids when they were in Seattle in 2007, I worked on a couple of miniatures games in which I added features that let you catch up when you were starting to lose. One of the projects was a game called HeroClix Alpha, which I worked on with designer Seth Johnson. One of the goals of the game was to make a version that was easy for beginning players to learn to play, and we stripped out quite a few of the rules, including the tokens and the pushing mechanisms. The game had a reinforcement mechanism in which if you lost a figure, you got to bring in an even better figure from your starting area. This avoided one of the issues I felt existed with many miniatures games, namely a player who starts losing heads toward a slow spiraling death until the game ends. I learned, however, that for HeroClix, the players were very happy with the original rule system, so HeroClix Alpha faded away into the night with no heroes to save it.
/pic233689.jpg)
/pic233688.jpg)
/pic224701.jpg)
Figures from Halo ActionClix
Undaunted by the lack of success on these previous projects, the idea of having your characters in Dice Masters go to the prep area, where they get rerolled during the next roll, serves as both a catch-up feature and encourages players to attack and block as it decreases the downside of making a bad attacking or blocking decision. This in turn helps to eliminate stalemates and makes Dice Masters a more dynamic game.
There are a lot of strategic decisions in Marvel Dice Masters. Many of these occur while you are putting together a force and before you even bring your dice to the table. Figuring out which spread of characters to bring and which utility characters to have available in case you run into particular opposing strategies can be a long analytical exercise for many players. (As a caveat for my comments on strategy, you should generally not listen to designers tell you about the strategies for a game. The ranking typically goes top-level players beat playtesters, playtesters beat developers, and developers beat designers. Sure, I can beat Eric 100% of the time, but that really does not make me an expert.)
In many cases, your strategy is a reaction to what your opponent is playing and the game is a lot more reactionary than a typical trading card game because of all the open information. You can immediately see all of the possible options your opponent has available during the game and quickly do the thousands of possible permutations in your head to determine which dice you should buy to give you the optimal chance of winning. Each die your opponent buys forces you to adjust your strategy. If your opponent is picking up a lot of cheap aggressive characters, you might want to look at what you can do to get some defense in place to avoid getting run over.
One of the interesting features of the game is the way we incorporated the basic action aspect. In addition to specific dice that have various effects when the faces are rolled, we also added in the global effects. These are basically effects that each player can play at any time and these effects give you a reason to save up resources beyond your turn or in many cases give you an option to spend unused resources to potentially get a positive effect. Because you can use these abilities without having the die out, we ended up making it so that both players could always use any global ability.
The global abilities are printed at the bottom of the cards, and the custom we adopted is to turn any character cards that you have with global abilities to face your opponent so they can read them, since you presumably already know what your cards do. This solved the issue that a player could bring a card with a die on it and just use the global effect without ever having to field the die, and if it was one-sided, this could be fairly unbalancing. We could have required you to have the die out to play the ability, but then they would not be nearly as useful and would be more like attack effects or existing field effects. Doing them as globals that both players can use allowed us to use a lot more design space for the effects, and we could throw a wide range of global effects on cards and not unbalance the game. It also allows us to do effects that make them one-sided with a little effort.
Some people may notice that a few of the characters have burst symbols on the dice and no burst effects on their versions. Was this part of Eric and Mike's 11th-dimensional Chess plan? (Much more fun than 10th-dimensional Chess because 11.) Maybe — or maybe we had to lock the dice down long before we locked down the character card abilities and maybe we had to strip out an effect after playtesting and didn't want to replace it with something completely untested at the last minute. Maybe some of them will have alternate versions later. It's a mystery. No, really — I asked Eric and he didn't know anything about it either, and I ended up having to explain the rules to 11th-dimensional Chess again.
:strip_icc()/pic2018315.jpg)
Marvel Dice Masters: Uncanny X-Men is due out in September 2014
As with most games I work on, Dice Masters is a sandbox-style game with tons of variants. You can play with different numbers of cards and dice. You can play to different life totals. You can play two-on-two. You can play star style free for all. You can do draft style games. My personal favorite is to shuffle all the character cards that one player owns, flip up eight cards (ignoring duplicates that use the same die), then draft with the first player picking one card and the opponent next picking two, then back and forth; you then repeat this process for the next eight cards with the other player starting. You can have variants to this where the first cards drafted are restricted to one or two dice, which can balance out some strong picks, while the remaining draft cards can have up to the maximum allowed number of dice. You can do a sealed style in which you randomly get two actions, then use whatever you get in five packs or the same system in which you also start with a random starter character. There is even a draft format in which you open the packs from a booster display and lay all of the dice out on the table. You then take the cards — after flattening them out of course — and deal out sets of around eight cards to each player. The players take a card, reveal it, take the corresponding die from the center to their keep area, and pass the remaining cards clockwise. Everyone knows at the beginning the distribution of the dice, and you can see who is going for what dice as you draft. The options are pretty wide open.
You can also tailor your gameplay by altering the starting life total or the number of cards and dice you can bring. There are a number of options suggested by the rulebook, but if you want to play a game with 30 life, or with a dozen characters but only one of each die, these are also viable game options. While the rulebook does not discuss any multiplayer options, I am sure several will appear, and Eric and I will probably share a few of our thoughts as well, possibly in a later rulebook. And of course once other brands are available, you will have the possibility of crossing the streams. While there may be various aspects of each brand that are unique to that brand, the intent is for the systems to be fully compatible.
Are some characters stronger than others? Yes. I have been doing trading card games for over fifteen years, but these types of asymmetrical games are difficult to perfectly balance. One of the nice things about having eight characters is that you can bring some that are situational against certain opponents' strategies. In many games, you will purchase only four to six different dice, so you have some space for a few defensive options. The nice thing is that both Eric and I are great at "retroactive" balance. Basically this involves putting out a few characters and actions that make it easier to deal with certain strategy types, restoring the balance to the force. (This isn't a game term, but I figure if I use it enough it might catch on — or some large company with a rodent logo will send people to talk to me.) Basically the goal is to allow a lot of different types of builds to be around and competitive.
There was obviously an issue with the quantity of starters at launch, which Eric Martin amusingly described as all part of the plan. (It wasn't.) WizKids has been kind enough to post a PDF of the starter action cards and hopefully the issue will be resolved soon and the one million or so players that want the game will be able to get it. (My estimates, YMMV.) WizKids also delayed the start of the organized play program to allow players more time to get their hands on dice. While the PDF will not help you in official organized play, it is a way to enjoy the game until you can get a starter. Again, all of us apologize for the shortage.
We are hard at work on future sets, and both Eric and I hope to keep the game fresh and exciting to play. Also, I promise not to make any bets with Eric on the next set, other than who will win the most games head-to-head, but is it really a bet when everyone knows the outcome ahead of time?
Mike Elliott
:strip_icc()/pic2014488.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic2046944.jpg)
/pic2042839.jpg)
/pic2041811.png)
/pic1887424.jpg)
