Stars Below card deep-dive: The Musicians

This is part four of a five-part series of articles on the design of the cards for The Shipwreck Arcana: Stars Below expansion.

So far we’ve highlighted cards with new mechanics, but as we’ve already talked about, the game also requires a certain percentage of “building block” cards: simple, easy to evaluate, always useful. The higher the average complexity of other cards get, the more these building blocks matter as touchstones during the players’ evaluations. They’re also the hardest cards to make, because all the simple and obvious ideas are in the base game.

To find more of them, we’ve looked for variations on existing cards that eliminate unique ranges when played upon. We often combine this with increased context, making the elimination range depend in some way on what fates are already in play. This does require care, since a building block must remain viable even if no other fates are in play.

For a past example of a late addition to the repertoire of building blocks, check out The Lantern from the original Kickstarter’s stretch goal/expansion cards. Or, if you’re paying attention to Stars Below, check out The Musicians.

If this reminds you of base game cards like The Deep, The Key, or Leviathan, congratulations! It’s intended to fit the same mold. Add up your fates, check a number, see if you can play on it. These cards provide a lot of value because not playing on them often results in a very simple “Your fates didn’t add up to the target number(s)” deduction.

The Musicians finds a new way to twist this effect by letting you add three numbers… but now two of them are unknown. A single equation with two unknown variables isn’t the easiest to solve, but it does a nice job of creating N+1 possible outcomes, where N = the number of visible fates. We’ve seen this on previous cards like Asunder or The Prophet, which become less useful as fates pile up.

Is that a problem? Nope! Good news about building blocks: they’re most important early or when the board is empty. There are plenty of other cards that become more informative as they gain fates, so this aspect of The Musicians is right at home with its stated design goal.

Art from the archive: Part 3

These blog posts will feature art from various projects Matthew has done over the years.

The story: A fake comic book cover I drew for fun (which doesn't happen too often; usually I need a project to get me drawing). The character is from another project, though.

Drawn: 2019

Stars Below card deep-dive: The Fall

This is part three of a five-part series of articles on the design of the cards for The Shipwreck Arcana: Stars Below expansion.

The Thief was attempt at creating the simplest mandatory effect we could think of. Once we understood its potential, the floodgates opened. Well, not really. It’s still pretty difficult to come up with effects that meet all of our card requirements, as spelled out in the first post of this series. #4 (Reliability) becomes a particular problem; wind up with too many mandatory effects in play at the same time, and the game may suddenly grind to a halt.

So, filling the board with cards that can’t be played on directly is a bad idea. Okay, we’ve tried mandatory effects that siphon fates onto the card, which will ultimately cause it to fade. What if we bypass the fates altogether, and let the mandatory effect dictate when the card fades? Suddenly, we can care about something other than the “pips” on each fate in front of the card.

This unlocked a whole new set of ideas, culminating with The Fall:

This is what we normally call a “trash can” card. You can dump any fate here, but you don’t convey much information by doing so… which usually conveys some information, indicating that this was your “best” worst option and implying a lot about the other cards in play. Compound that with the fact that this card has no moons. Instead, it introduces the “comet” indicator, which means that you have to read the card to determine when it fades. The actual fade criteria becomes dependent on your hidden fate, allowing you to convey information simply through acknowledging whether or not it will fade this turn.

There’s a lot going on with this effect. The “at least twice” bit is to let it pile up more fates than normal, something that often makes other cards (like The Prophet) more interesting. Also, keep in mind that even if you don’t play on this card, it could still fade, so the more times you throw trash in it, the more you risk someone being stuck with a 1 or 2 and watching it fade helplessly.

Finally, this combined with The Thief shone a light on something I’ve dubbed the “fade cascade,” where the mandatory effects mean that you have an increased likelihood of seeing multiple cards fade in the same turn (previously encountered when playing with The Feast). Sometimes a cascade is bad, creating tons of doom at once. Often, though, it’s a blessing in disguise: a single correct guess can avoid multiple fade penalties, and one way or another you wind up with a lot of powers at your disposal.

This increased prevalence of fading ultimately lead us to tweak our approach to the new cards’ faded powers, which we’ll spotlight later.

Art from the archive: Part 2

These blog posts will feature art from various projects Matthew has done over the years.

The story: This was a gift for my wife, drawn to accompany a similar sculpture I made her years ago.

Drawn: 2017