Heroes and Monsters is a tabletop card game I designed and made during my time at my Duke of Edinburgh residential. Over the course of 5 days, I developed from a concept stage through to a working prototype of a card-based dungeon crawlers which has cooperative and competitive elements. This page will document the process that I went through as well as further developments to expand the prototype and enhance the experience.
Day 1: Initial Concept
Day 1 was all about meeting the members of the course, playing some ice breaker games & developing the initial concept of the game. For me, I took a lot of inspiration from Dungeon Mayhem designed by Jordan Comar & Roscoe Wetlaufer. The element that stood out to me was its simplicity. With 5 common mechanics of dealing damage, blocking damage, drawing more cards, healing & playing additional cards, the game felt intuitive and really easy to understand yet dynamic with each character deck being using different combinations and adding unique cards that change the flow of gameplay each game.
I wanted to replicated this, but switch the overall game feel from a direct competition to more indirect competition. The theory I was testing was that if I adding co-operative elements while keeping the game ultimately competitive, it would feel underhanded and like you always have to keep an eye on your opponents. That’s was the goal at least.
Day 2: Theme and Feel
Theme was the primarily development during day 2. Committing to a theme is critical to successful immersion within a game, so I was looking for a theme where there can be a competitive element to a usually cooperative experience. What I settled on was a Dungeon Crawler. Both inspired by Dungeon Mayhem and Dungeons & Dragons, the concept of Heroes teaming up to go into a dungeon for gold could easily work with the feel I was going for. This also helped me craft the core mechanic, Glory.
Glory is the primarily way you generate gold. The person with the most glory gets the most gold. The thematic concept is that everyone agreed beforehand that the person who looks the coolest obviously gets the most gold, cause your all heroes and that’s what heroes do. This gave me a strong thematic foundation to launch from.
I was able to then concept some of the character decks. I decided to also give each a unique ability. I knew I wasn’t going to have enough time to develop them all, but I knew if I could make a lot of concept, the thematic idea was pretty strong. Here’s what I came up with:
That was pretty much it for day 2, with a lot of playing games for inspiration. I did pick up one additional thing from that playing that I wanted to add: true unabashed campy humour. I got the inspiration from one of the funniest games we played called War Against the Evil Power Master. It was a choose your own adventure series turned into a board game full of campy, overly dramatic Sci-fi humour. I wanted to add a little of that to my game.
Day 3: Core Game Loop
Now was time to get to the business of refining the core gameplay loop. My first port of call was combat, as I knew I needed monsters for my players to fight. I looked for inspiration in a couple of games but there was none available that really caught my eye. I wanted a element of the unknown to it, which I wasn’t getting from any of the games I tried. Instead, I crafted the following system.
The idea of keeping what the other player’s moves was doing was to reinforce that while your a team, your out for yourself. Compared to going around the table in order and playing one by one, it brings a factor of the unknown, meaning the choices and thus strategy is not a clear cut choice, it revolves around guessing the other players choices and how they are likely to play. This creates a foundation of tension and release which I wanted.
Having the monster act last and in unique ways makes the game dynamic. Having one monster do 1 damage to each player will play very differently to a monster who does 3 damage to the player with the most health. This means players must adapt their strategy to each scenario while factoring health, glory, & cards.
As a dungeon delver needs more than one monster & some non combat encounters, I decided to make an Encounter deck. The deck was weighted towards non combat encounters which I called Dilemmas. Some Dilemmas were pure positives for all, some were sacrifices, some were pure negatives. To lessen the impact of the purely negative cards, I decided that a player can draw 2 cards and decide between them which to pick. I called this player the Leader and decided as this was a significant strategic role, it could be moved during combat with a card. This means that one player could be the Leader for the entire game, or it can move around a lot. The monsters and encounters I made during production.
Another aspect was how long the game would last. I wanted something that could be played within half an hour, allowing for a lot of playtesting. So to limit the game’s duration and give a definite end, I added a Boss Counter. To each encounter card, I added a Boss Counter Value at the top. This value is added as more encounters are revealed till the total hits 8 or higher. After that, the next card would be a boss. The values for encounters are based on what they are. As combat will take longer, the thinking was that 2 points for Combat and 1 point for Dilemmas would create the limit, and allows a varied length of game, but not one that is overly long or too short.
Another issue I encountered was balancing with an unknown number of players. As the game was ideally aiming for between 3 and 6 players, I needed to be able to have monsters survive long enough for a few rounds each. The simplest way was to balance directly around the number of players with the Health of the monsters being a factor of how many players there were. I calculated that 3 – 5 per player would create the number of rounds I was looking for with any number of players while having variety.
This was pretty much it for Day 3. I had a lot more time to dedicate towards it, so I was ready for Day 4’s production time.
Day 4: Production
First of all, I listed what I needed to make the minimum viable product. The list was the following:
- 2 Character Decks of 12 Cards with additional Ability Card
- An encounter deck with 16 Encounters, split into 9 Dilemmas and 7 Combats
- Counters for Glory, Gold and Character & Monster Health
- A Ruleset
- A Boss
The first thing I got sorted was a single deck. I choose the Warlord as I had a pretty solid idea of how they should play. I also selected the Oracle as a very different option as I also had an idea how they should play. I first prewrote out how the cards should function, and I later was able to add the Barbarian from my list. The rest I didn’t have the time to produce, but I am continuing to build on the project. Below is the Warlord deck build as an example:
Next was the Encounters Deck. I started with combat, as I could very quickly with one card, test how the game function with 2 decks. Below is one of the cards I made for Combat. As you can see, I left a large space blank. This was to mimic where the Art would be, though I never really planned for any to be drawn myself cause I am way too bad at drawing to pull it off.
Next I needed to figure out Counters. First of all I got Yellow and Purple disk counters from the supplies but health I came up with a different idea. I used a board to create a health tracker with a cube for the monsters health, so it was easily displayed to everyone. Then I decided to make each players health a dice rather than using counters. This created an element that I used later with the boss design. It also means its distinct from the other counters and easier for people to check and see. Below is the Health Tracker for Monsters:
This pretty much sums up Production, while some was on Day 5, most was completed on Day 4.
Day 5: Playtesting
Day 5 was all about finishing Production and play testing our games. The most important thing I noticed from playtest was the core assumption that hiding each players actions worked. This was very important and made the game hit the feel and theme really well. The Core mechanics were solid, with each monster feeling different and the leadership moving back and forth, especially in the 3 player games we had.
The only significant disappointing aspect was one of the Classes was just less powerful than I thought. The Oracle that relied on guessing the other players moves was too weak to effectively work. Either I needed to buff the amount of Glory given or switch it to Gold instead. This would make them more reliable generators of winning currencies. The Barbarian was strong but could be easily toppled by clever use of mechanics, while taking the leadership from the warlord made them feel weak but had the mechanics to make it work.
Some of the smaller issues were that the boss didn’t feel as threatening as I would have liked. The boss I made had 3 attacks, 1 damage to the highest glory as well as to the highest gold characters and then rerolling one random players hit points. This was good, except most of the time players on low hit points just had their characters hit points rerolled meaning it was actually easier to survive. What I have thus changed is to switch the order, dealing the damage after the reroll. This means there is a chance for characters with high glory or gold or both to instantly die, which is not ideal but adds that level of peril that I was looking for. The chances of this happening are low however. With 3 players its a 1/15 chance that a player dies instantly which is a significant threat to players who are leading, meaning the players will want to quickly defeat the boss. This would need to be play tested to double check my thinking is correlates with actual play.
Overall, the game was a success. It met the theme and feel to a good level and is easily expanded upon. It met the player count and time requirements and had a good degree of strategy and randomness to keep the game re-playable. Further developments will be to add more characters firstly and develop rules for more players, particularly a review of Monster design for higher numbers of players as I can foresee issues with the amount of damage dealt to players. I’ll continue updating this page when I come up with solutions, refinements and new content for the game.