Hey Mages! This week we’ve taken the time to check other games. We hope you also get to play a lot and have fun.

What’s up since last week?

No major game design changes, but a whole lot of important work is being done right now.

Checking on other games

We wanted to avoid getting stuck with our design, so we decided to take the time to test out other games. This allows us to make a small pause and get interesting ideas, taking references from other works we didn’t know about.

The good part about games is that there are interesting ideas to get from everywhere, and not only card games of course. Even in very different genres you can find some very cool concepts. Most of them can’t be put in a card game. But a few of them can be an inspiration to create new gameplay experiences.

Opening a new game

One of the very important thng we’ve been studying is the first experience you get with a new game. It can either be the unboxing of your new board game, or simply the first few minutes of gameplay you get on a new video game.

It is a very interesting experience to study. Because there are so many things to see when discovering a new game. It is very important for the designers to make sure the players understand everything. But we don’t want to give them a 1 hour long lecture about how to play the game. It is way better if they can just try it for themselves and learn on the go.

Players will need to assimilate the objective of the game, the setting and the main mechanics in a blink of an eye. This is a lot of information to squeeze in a few minutes of learning time so it has to be explained in a very efficient way.

Since we want to make things right, we’re checking how other games achieved this. And believe it or not, it is very often done by not using the official rules, simplifying them and adding complexity little by little.

This can be translated to Mage Noir by being very careful with the way we present the contents of the box when you open it. Cards should be stacked in very specific piles and in the right order so that your first experience can start as soon as possible in the simplest way. We will also have to make sure the rules of the game are well written.

We’ll continue to check more games to find a whole lot more ways of presenting a new game and pick the ideas that fit best to Mage Noir.

Studying very different gameplay experiences.

As players we’ve actually tried a whole lot of experiences. That’s because games always want to convey the essence of an experience. Mage Noir’s main objective is to make you feel like a true Mage. Mastering spells and magic to cast them on your opponents.

Galactic Mantle by Johann Goutard

But there are lots of other things that can be interesting to check and that could be put beside the main experience. Not all of them will be, but they at least deserve to be studied for sure.

  • How does it feel to be invisible ?
  • How does it feel to track and hunt an opponent ?
  • How does it feel to fight when outnumbered ?
  • How does it feel to go to space ?

These experiences might not all work in Mage Noir, but they are still interesting to study and might give new ideas for clever cards or even deck archetypes.

That’s all for today Mages!

We’ll keep finding new experiences and ideas to implement in the game for future work. We hope you’re having lots of interesting experiences to live these days. Until next week, stay safe and have fun Mages.