Project Swallowtail!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:36 PM Pacific

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game!

Gencon 2013

Character based deck building card game.

You'll have to hope Vic makes an awesome post with the rest of the details because I can't keep up with all the awesomeness!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

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Tags: PaizoCon
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 32

So, a collectable card game like MTG, or a deckbuilding game like Dominion?

Dark Archive Bella Sara Charter Superscriber

Deckbuilding like dominion

Dark Archive

Bet you two platinum pieces there will be a PFS tie in!

Silver Crusade

Who is heading up development? So hyped for this type of non-random collectable card game ala Dominion and Ascension!

Lantern Lodge

Mike Selinker

Silver Crusade

Sara Marie wrote:
Mike Selinker

Thanks, Sara!

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

For me it feels like Dominion meets Arkham Horror, but not with all the fiddly bits of Arkham Horror of course. That same feel of your band against overwhelming evil, and the need for self-sacrifice to stop that evil at any cost. I'm super excited to play it again.

Silver Crusade

Russ Taylor wrote:
For me it feels like Dominion meets Arkham Horror, but not with all the fiddly bits of Arkham Horror of course. That same feel of your band against overwhelming evil, and the need for self-sacrifice to stop that evil at any cost. I'm super excited to play it again.

So is it us vs the darkness, or competitive? I'd love a more team based game ala the WotC boardgames over the standard player vs player situation that we normally get in card games.

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

Cooperative. There's really no mechanic to do anything to harm another player, and lots of incentive to spend cards to help the other players. No board as such, though there are location decks that serve a similar role as a board. A simplistic explanation of this draft of the game is that you seek to close either temporarily or permanently all possible locations so that you can corner and defeat the villain. And you fight a lot of other troublesome monsters along the way.

Dark Archive

wait, what?
this does sound very interesting...

Sczarni RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16

Sounds like it has some parallels with Sentinels of the Multiverse. Which is a great game, so that is a good thing :-)


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Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, LO Special Edition, Maps, PF Special Edition, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

It also sounds very similar to the Lord of the Rings LCG from FFG. Seeing as that is one of my favorite card games, that is a very good thing!


Well, this is getting a preorder from me as soon as it becomes available to do so, based on heresay alone. My game groups default non-rpg games are thunderstone and Arkham horror so a game that combines the two like this one sounds like it does is a must have.

Silver Crusade

Excited for the playtest.


Sara Marie wrote:

You'll have to hope Vic makes an awesome post with the rest of the details because I can't keep up with all the awesomeness!

First of all, @Sara Marie: Thank you [okay, and others, I suppose] for the blog posts, keeping us poor souls who couldn't make Paizo Con from being totally clueless.

Now, that said, I was somewhat frustrated by the "teaser" aspect of many of the microposts this weekend, which for me boiled down to "look at all the cool things you would have heard about if you'd been here!" I know that wasn't the intent, and again, thanks to Sara Marie & co. for any tidbits we did get.

For anyone who did attend this weekend, staff or otherwise, my question is this: which of these annoucements came with substantial information for those on hand, and which remained "teasers" for Con attendees?

Project Swallowtail
Erik Mona talks about fun stuff from future (PF comic, Shattered Star minis)
Wes announces changes to player companion line
Reign of Winter AP: Return of Baba Yaga to Golarion
Ultimate Campaign in Spring 2013

Thanks.

Oh, and did I mention...? Thanks again, Sara Marie.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I didn't see any Dominion at all. It isn't a deck building game like Dominion or Thunderstone. It is more like deck management. Your character's deck is a mix of their offense and defense. You draw cards to gain the tools of your trade, items, weapons, armor, and use these tools to accomplish missions, fight monsters, and eventually beat the adventure path you're on. However, when you take damage, you discard cards. When you take explore or actions, you usually discard cards or put them at the bottom of your deck. When your deck is depleted, you are dead. Fortunately, there are also boons granted by the Paizo pantheon the party use on one another to achieve their goals.

It was a solid game, one I would like to play again, even in its neoalpha state. It was a fun two hours, with enough variables that each playthrough is guaranteed to be different.

Dark Archive Bella Sara Charter Superscriber

Yeah, after playing the game, it's much less Dominion-esque than I imagined. The deck building element appears to take place over the course of many, many games, and is not the core element of gameplay ala Dominion.

Lone Shark Games

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First, thanks to everyone who played our "neoalpha" (love that word) version of Project Swallowtail this weekend. Developers Chad Brown and Paul Peterson did a great job of running the games, and Vic and I learned a ton from watching it go down.

On the "deckbuilding" front: We've been bandying about what to call this type of game. It has some aspects when you build your own deck, so we call it a deckbuilding game, and yet that immediately makes people say "Oh, like Dominion!" But of course, it's not really like Dominion at all. So maybe it's its own thing. We'll figure it out. We have time.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, and I hope you'll like it when it's ready to see the light of day again. Good seeing some of you at Paizocon!

Mike

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I love non-collectible CGs. Dominion, Infiltration, Thunderstone... So happy that it's going this way!


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Ryan. Costello wrote:

I didn't see any Dominion at all. It isn't a deck building game like Dominion or Thunderstone. It is more like deck management. Your character's deck is a mix of their offense and defense. You draw cards to gain the tools of your trade, items, weapons, armor, and use these tools to accomplish missions, fight monsters, and eventually beat the adventure path you're on. However, when you take damage, you discard cards. When you take explore or actions, you usually discard cards or put them at the bottom of your deck. When your deck is depleted, you are dead. Fortunately, there are also boons granted by the Paizo pantheon the party use on one another to achieve their goals.

It was a solid game, one I would like to play again, even in its neoalpha state. It was a fun two hours, with enough variables that each playthrough is guaranteed to be different.

Yeah, it's not really like Dominion, as it seems that you make most of your deck composition decisions in between plays.

For those of you getting excited about Project Swallowtail, here's how the neoalpha worked when I played it (but as they said, it changes every day, and I could be mistaken on any of this, as I was just a playtester):

Some Details:
Play is composed of ~1 hour scenarios (like "The Attack on Sandpoint"). If you complete all the scenarios in an adventure (like "Burnt Offerings"), you can move on to the next adventure. It looks like the current plan is to sell them on an adventure-by-adventure basis, which nets you a bunch of scenarios which can be easily replayed as one-shots or strung together into the adventure as a whole. The deck building aspect is only fully present in the latter case.

Each scenario has certain locations to explore (for instance Sandpoint has Junk Beach, the Cathedral, and the Rusty Dragon Inn, among others). At the start of the game, these locations are randomly dealt a bunch of event cards, similar to those you might find in Talisman or a similar game (so things like monsters, items, and NPCs) in a set proportion based on the location's flavor (Junk Beach, for instance, has plenty of items strewn about).

Once the locations are full, you randomly shuffle the boss of the scenario as well as one mini-boss called a "henchman" and distribute one of them to each location (crucially you don't know which location holds the boss). The goal of the game is to find and defeat the boss without allowing the boss to escape. The boss can escape to any location that does not have an active player on it to attempt to prevent the boss's escape. Since the max is six players and there are eight locations, this means at first it's impossible to win.

In order to corner the boss, you have to close some of the areas, which can be done by beating that area's henchman mini-boss followed by defeating a second condition dependent on the area. Since the second condition is public knowledge, you can strategically send the character best suited for fulfilling the second condition to that area (so if it requires Charisma, send Seoni or Lem, for instance).

Each turn you may move to any location of your choice, followed by exploring at that location (checking the top event card at the location). You then have to deal with the card, either by defeating a challenge card and removing it from the game or attempting to obtain a beneficial card like an item, adding it directly to your hand. Failed challenges stay in the stack and for combats you take damage equal to the amount by which you failed, but even if you fail to get a beneficial card, it is removed from the game.

Whichever you are doing, the core mechanic is essentially the same--you roll a dice, varying from d4 to d12 depending on how awesome you are at the type of check in question, and you try to beat a certain target number to either defeat the challenge or gain the boon. The DCs tend toward 6 or higher, so even if you are working in your area of greatest expertise, you'll often fail without help. Fortunately, there are blessings which will let you roll another die of the same type and add them together. Anyone can use a blessing on you, but they all must be declared before you start rolling. If you use a blessing that is thematically linked to the roll in question (like a Blessing of Erastil for a ranged weapon attack), you get to roll 2 extra dice instead of one. The team can use multiple blessings if the check is very important (such as beating the boss). There are also other ways to assist a roll dependent on character abilities, items, and spell cards.

There are several things that might happen to your deck throughout the game. Sometimes you can reveal a card to gain its effects, keeping it in your hand. For slightly more powerful abilities, you might need to "recharge" the card instead, which puts it on the bottom of your deck. Even more powerful cards might need to be discarded instead. Discarded cards are placed to the side, though they can be healed later. Sometimes you can attempt a check to recharge the card instead of discard it when you play it from hand--this is generally the case with magic items and spells. Damage forces you to discard directly from your hand, so if you have lots of good stuff in there and you get ambushed (there are many ways to take damage even if you don't lose a fight), watch out! You might also be forced to return a card "to the envelope", which means it is unusable for the rest of the current scenario but comes back out as soon as you finish. Finally, cards can be banished, in which case they are gone forever. Potions in particular are usually banished when used. You can also add cards to your deck by gaining them when you find them, and characters who start in your space at the very beginning of the turn can flat-out give you a card from their hand.

At the end of the turn, you draw back up to your hand size, which means if you have a slender deck and you use a lot of recharge cards, you can get them back pretty quickly. But there's two dangers you have to worry about! If you ever need to draw and have no more cards in the deck, you die completely, losing everything you've gained throughout your travels so far. If you end the turn with more than your hand size worth of cards (one simple way is to explore, find a boon, and succeed on the check), you must discard the remaining cards, which can be painful.

There are only 30 total turns among all the characters before you lose the game (this can be changed for better or for worse by certain happenings in the game, though from what I saw, usually for worse). Each of the eight locations has 10 events in it plus the boss or henchman, so if there wasn't a way to explore more than once a turn, you'd have pretty poor odds of defeating and cornering the villain. Fortunately, the game gives you the ability to hasten your exploration in exchange for weakening your safety net, a balance that it seems will be crucial to victory. You can always take another extra exploration by discarding any one of those blessing cards (as well as a few other cards), but of course, as you keep exploring, your hand is getting smaller and smaller, so your ability to deal with the challenges is weakening. Fortunately, damage can't reduce your hand to below 0 cards, so at least you don't stand to lose quite as much if you overextend (though your last few cards you stand to lose may well have been your best ones).

Each character has a very distinctive feel to them. Valeros has a tiny hand size but a lot of strong reveal cards, so much like a PFRPG fighter, he can often trudge around all day without overextending himself too much. Kyra has tons of blessings and the ability to heal, making her great for support. Seoni automatically recharges her spells, allowing her to cast them again and again, though she has few to choose from, much like a PFRPG sorcerer.

If you win, you rebuild your deck to have the same number of cards in every category as you began with, but you pool all the cards among all players and can take the best ones around for your playstyle. For instance, a Seoni player might ask for as many easy-to-expend (a card is hard to expend when you can only use it on certain conditions which are out of your control, as the card will sit in your hand if those conditions don't happen) recharge cards as possible so she can cycle her spells back to her hand as quickly as possible without massively discarding towards death. A Valeros player might ask for the greataxe Harsk found in exchange for the shocking bow Valeros found, since eah does better with the other sort of weapon. You also gain another tangible boon each time you beat a scenario and another if you beat the whole adventure, though those weren't demoed.

It was a whole lot of fun to play, and I was actually most impressed with the way the designers managed to capture the feel of various Pathfinder elements in the vastly different medium.

Hope that serves to whet non Paizoconners' appetites for details. If you want to see more, I heard that your local PFS Venture Captain will likely have details some time this winter on how to join the next round of the playtest!

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

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Rogue Eidolon wrote:
** spoiler omitted **...

Well done, especially since that's from memory!

Here are my crib notes from the announcement at the banquet:

• "Project Swallowtail," aka the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game
• cooperative, nonrandomized deckbuilding game
• designed by Mike Selinker and his team at Lone Shark Games
• published by Paizo
• scheduled for release at Gen Con 2013, if not PaizoCon 2013

• each player has a unique character comprised of a set of stats and a deck of cards
• stats are familiar: Classes include fighter, wizard, rogue, etc.; characters have Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc., also skills and built-in proficiencies
• as you adventure, you gain access to new items, allies, spells, and weapons as you explore and overcome challenges
• improve your deck over time, tailor it to your own vision of your character

• begins with the Rise of the Runelords Base Set, a big box of about 400 cards including the "Burnt Offerings" Adventure Deck
• your party will explore locations such as the Sandpoint Cathedral, the Rusty Dragon, the Glassworks
• meet NPCs like Ameiko Kaijitsu or the friendly and helpful Aldern Foxglove
• visit the Swallowtail Festival, Catacombs of Wrath, Thistletop
• fight goblins, sinspawn, Warchief Ripnugget, maybe even face the Sandpoint devil
• eventually, become the heroes of Sandpoint

• add Adventure Decks for the other five chapters of Runelords
• if all goes well, other APs!

• plays in an hour to an hour-and-a-half
• easy to learn, yet offers a lot of variety
• Mike's team did a stunning job capturing the feel of the RPG, PF campaign setting, and RotR AP in a card game

• large-scale playtesting begins late this year, through PFS—details forthcoming
• we'll be looking for dedicated gamers—let your Venture Captains know!

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

Mike Selinker wrote:

First, thanks to everyone who played our "neoalpha" (love that word) version of Project Swallowtail this weekend. Developers Chad Brown and Paul Peterson did a great job of running the games, and Vic and I learned a ton from watching it go down.

On the "deckbuilding" front: We've been bandying about what to call this type of game. It has some aspects when you build your own deck, so we call it a deckbuilding game, and yet that immediately makes people say "Oh, like Dominion!" But of course, it's not really like Dominion at all. So maybe it's its own thing. We'll figure it out. We have time.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, and I hope you'll like it when it's ready to see the light of day again. Good seeing some of you at Paizocon!

Mike

It's actually the scenario element that reminds me most of Dominion - one box (plus eventual expansions) with elements you combine differently to play different scenarios. Since the game consists almost entirely of cards, that aspect makes me think of Dominion. It's not as firmly delineated into different decks for certain, but there's still that element of assembling a different game each time. And not in a way that's like say mixing expansions for a Talisman game.

The deck management reminds me *a bit* of Dominion, where you have some influence over how cards go back into your deck, but it's really more like Blood Bowl Team Manager. And probably closer to other card games I don't play. To really be like Dominion in that aspect, I'd have to be deliberately selecting new cards instead of relying on the card frequencies in the individual locations.

Certainly its own thing. But there are familiar elements nonetheless.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16

I'm super glad I got in on the playtest. I had a blast playing. It was really a great fusion of a card game and an RPG, with elements you can use to advance your character for future (and harder) adventures. The gameplay reminded me of a mix of Talisman (but in an hour or so), SPANC (that's Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls by Steve Jackson games), and Savage Worlds (in that your ability scores and skills are based on different dice, from d4 to d12).

I'm also super pleased that a) it's non-collectible, each set/deck/box will be a full set of whatever it comes with, and b) while sets can build on each other, any given game will use a certain set of cards (though it could mix and match stuff from a particular adventure, the basic set, and expansions based on the particulars of the adventure played and the way characters advanced to get to that point), unlike other board/card games that as you add expansion after expansion get huge and unwieldy (like Killer Bunnies).

When's the next playtests? I don't want to wait until August 2013 to play again!


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Played this at Chad's table on Sunday afternoon and came away very much looking forward to this. There are a few rough spots, as I was less-than-shy about sharing afterwards ;-), but assuming it keeps much of the cooperative game play the neoalpha game has, this goes on my must-buy list. :-)

Scarab Sages

Me, too. I gave all my negative feedback after the playtest. For those (like me) who don't want to futz around building decks: we used randomized player decks as well as randomized locations decks, and the game seemed to work just fine with it.

I will probably buy this when it comes out, and don't want to spend tons of time tweaking a deck (I know that's just me. I don't play Magic the Gathering, either, but I'm aware there are a few people who do :) so I'm glad that there's that option.

It certainly did a good job of capturing the feel of travelling around, exploring different areas, and each character was unique enough to be flavorful, so that was cool.

And, yeah, the cooperative play was at a whole new level, even more than Arkham Horror, where it's possible for a single character to "win" (or so I gather), and there's competition there for resources as well, which there isn't any of in this game.

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

There's only one way I'm aware of for a single player to win Arkham Horror, and that involves a card from an expansion deck and an almost impossible amount of work. It's slightly more cooperative than AH during a turn since you can use blessings and a few other things on others, but less in other ways (extremely restrictive equipment trading, for example).

Silver Crusade

Hopefully there will be some play testing at Gencon. I'd love to get my mitts on this for an hour or so. :)

It seems like a sneaky way to get nongamers in on some Pathfinder action/concepts so I'm all for it.

Contributor

My impression (from the playtest): It's Munchkin, but serious. You have a race, class, items, spells, all represented by cards. You kick in doors and fight monsters and steal their treasure. No puns, lots of Golarion flavor.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Pat Luther wrote:

For those (like me) who don't want to futz around building decks: we used randomized player decks as well as randomized locations decks, and the game seemed to work just fine with it.

I will probably buy this when it comes out, and don't want to spend tons of time tweaking a deck (I know that's just me. I don't play Magic the Gathering, either, but I'm aware there are a few people who do :) so I'm glad that there's that option.

That's on the topic Mike was talking about earlier, where calling it a "deckbuilding game" may be misleading to some folks. You don't really build your deck up front—you start with a random-ish selection of cards*. During the course of a scenario, some cards will leave your deck and other cards will enter it, and at the end of the scenario, you'll rebuild your deck using the pool of cards that you and your party ended up with.**

* It's not truly random; decks follow a sort of recipe that's specific to your character. The fighter's deck begins with a large preset number of weapons and no spells, for example, while the wizard has a lot of spells but no armor, etc. But while the recipe specifies the number of each card *type* that a character has, we don't specify exactly what those cards *are*, so even two beginning clerics will be different from one another. (Locations are seeded with similar recipes, so they're also not truly random.)

We haven't decided on this for sure, but when you open the box, we may be providing prebuilt character decks just so people can get playing faster; even if we do that, you'll have the option of swapping out spells for other spells and so on, so that you can contribute your own flavor to the starting deck if you want.

** That process can be as quick or as complicated as you want. If you want, you can just grab the first cards you find that conform to your character's recipe and be done in 30 seconds, or you can go through every single card in the party's asset pool and individually determine which character would benefit from it the most.


Vic Wertz wrote:
Pat Luther wrote:

For those (like me) who don't want to futz around building decks: we used randomized player decks as well as randomized locations decks, and the game seemed to work just fine with it.

I will probably buy this when it comes out, and don't want to spend tons of time tweaking a deck (I know that's just me. I don't play Magic the Gathering, either, but I'm aware there are a few people who do :) so I'm glad that there's that option.

That's on the topic Mike was talking about earlier, where calling it a "deckbuilding game" may be misleading to some folks. You don't really build your deck up front—you start with a random-ish selection of cards*. During the course of a scenario, some cards will leave your deck and other cards will enter it, and at the end of the scenario, you'll rebuild your deck using the pool of cards that you and your party ended up with.**

* It's not truly random; decks follow a sort of recipe that's specific to your character. The fighter's deck begins with a large preset number of weapons and no spells, for example, while the wizard has a lot of spells but no armor, etc. But while the recipe specifies the number of each card *type* that a character has, we don't specify exact what those cards *are*, so even two beginning clerics will be different from one another. (Locations are seeded with similar recipes, so they're also not truly random.)

We haven't decided on this for sure, but when you open the box, we may be providing prebuilt character decks just so people can get playing faster; even if we do that, you'll have the option of swapping out spells for other spells and so on, so that you can contribute your own flavor to the starting deck if you want.

** That process can be as quick or as complicated as you want. If you want, you can just grab the first cards you find that conform to your character's recipe and be done in 30 seconds, or you can go through every single card in the party's asset pool and individually determine which character...

Yeah, it strikes me that even if you always just kept your original cards for the most part and only replace for obvious improvements or to replace cards that get banished during play, you should be able to play just fine, at least for the first scenarios we saw. So the hardcore deck strategists can try to fine-tune their deck and eke out a small advantage and those who don't care for it will still be just fine.

Heck, if you play as a one-shot and not an ongoing series, it seems like there's basically no deckbuilding at all.

Dark Archive

Will the card game spoil runelords plot?


thebwt wrote:

Will the card game spoil runelords plot?

It seems like it does give you names of villains, which could spoil the reveal. I'd personally not play it with a group that I expect to run Runelords with in the future for that reason, but it also makes it perfect for nostalgia if you've played through Runelords already.

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

Yes, it spoilers lots of things you should not know, like the identity of a person helping the enemy.

Silver Crusade

Reminds me of Ani-mayhem from the description, going to locations, fighting events.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Rogue Eidolon wrote:
Yeah, it strikes me that even if you always just kept your original cards for the most part and only replace for obvious improvements or to replace cards that get banished during play, you should be able to play just fine, at least for the first scenarios we saw.

That'll work early on, but you might have problems long-term unless you at least add in new cards from later chapters, as the power level does increase a bit over the course of the storyline. The first scenario assumes that you have a deck that's not very tuned at all, and later scenarios assume that you've upgraded a whole lot of what you started with.


Vic Wertz wrote:
Rogue Eidolon wrote:
Yeah, it strikes me that even if you always just kept your original cards for the most part and only replace for obvious improvements or to replace cards that get banished during play, you should be able to play just fine, at least for the first scenarios we saw.
That'll work early on, but you might have problems long-term unless you at least add in new cards from later chapters, as the power level does increase a bit over the course of the storyline. The first scenario assumes that you have a deck that's not very tuned at all, and later scenarios assume that you've upgraded a whole lot of what you started with.

Yeah, that's what I figured as far as the later adventures having stronger stuff. With what we got after the first game, at least, I think I changed only two cards, though I think some of the players who gained the most new cards left without putting their extras in the middle, so that might have changed things.

I also think that in a long-term game, we'd have seen more blessings spent to ensure securing a really powerful item, spell, or NPC than we did for the one-shot where winning was all that mattered. There were at least two or three extremely juicy cards that popped up but we failed to obtain.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Rogue Eidolon wrote:
Yeah, that's what I figured as far as the later adventures having stronger stuff. With what we got after the first game, at least, I think I changed only two cards, though I think some of the players who gained the most new cards left without putting their extras in the middle, so that might have changed things.

There was one other notable thing going on in the playtests: in each session, one table was playing the first scenario in Burnt Offerings, and the other table was playing the third scenario, yet both tables started with decks that were randomly created from all of the cards in the base set. In the finished game, it's likely that beginner decks will actually draw only from a slightly less powerful subset of cards, called "basic" cards; that means the people playing the first scenario (the one with Ripnugget) actually had slightly more powerful decks than they should have. On the other hand, by the time you get to the third scenario, most players will have already replaced many of their basic cards with things that are a bit better, so people playing that scenario actually had decks that were slightly underpowered.

Rogue Eidolon wrote:
I also think that in a long-term game, we'd have seen more blessings spent to ensure securing a really powerful item, spell, or NPC than we did for the one-shot where winning was all that mattered. There were at least two or three extremely juicy cards that popped up but we failed to obtain.

Similarly, when you're thinking long-term, you may be more likely to balk at some of the effects that require you to banish cards.

Dark Archive Bella Sara Charter Superscriber

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One delayed comment from playtesting - the cards reference the concept of your deck envelope. I understand the concept (you keep your deck from game to game, and the envelope is a means to store it), but I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to push players in the direction of creating their own personalized recipe card/decklist instead. The envelope idea seems to invite the loss of cards from the game (like a lost character sheet, but more so) and would seem to impair the ability to play a new game while there is already an ongoing game (because some of the cards are missing and in envelopes). Given that the decks are only 10 cards, it seems like a deck list will give you continuity but with significantly less pain if you lose it.


Vic Wertz wrote:


There was one other notable thing going on in the playtests: in each session, one table was playing the first scenario in Burnt Offerings, and the other table was playing the third scenario, yet both tables started with decks that were randomly created from all of the cards in the base set. In the finished game, it's likely that beginner decks will actually draw only from a slightly less powerful subset of cards, called "basic" cards; that means the people playing the first scenario (the one with Ripnugget) actually had slightly more powerful decks than they should have. On the other hand, by the time you get to the third scenario, most players will have already replaced many of their basic cards with things that are a bit better, so people playing that scenario actually had decks that were slightly underpowered.

I was wondering about that. Of course, we managed to almost lose despite having a more powerful deck!

Vic Wertz wrote:


Similarly, when you're thinking long-term, you may be more likely to balk at some of the effects that require you to banish cards.

Yeah--for the playtest with potions, it was a no-brainer to use them as soon as applicable, but I think those healing potions would be a lot more precious over the course of a campaign, with strategy decisions on who holds onto them.


This game sounds completely awesome. I know the meme is overused but hush your word-hole and accept my Republic credits.

I will be begging to try the playtest or at least learn more about the game at your booth at Gen Con. And likely purchasing it at next year's Gen Con.


Any comments from people that got to playtest this at Gen Con?

Unfortunately when I asked about it I was shot down - Saturday morning I was told there were no more playtest sessions for Gen Con. This was pretty much on par with everything else I tried to do at the con.

Still, I think it could be fun and I'm looking forward to the game coming out next year.

Dark Archive Bella Sara Charter Superscriber

Great minds apparently think alike...

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/09/10/c4rd-4ri0rz-working-title

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Sebastian wrote:

Great minds apparently think alike...

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/09/10/c4rd-4ri0rz-working-title

Even with that little information, I can confidently say that the game described there has very little in common with our game.

Sovereign Court

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Sebastian wrote:

Great minds apparently think alike...

http://penny-arcade.com/2012/09/10/c4rd-4ri0rz-working-title

And they're all thinking. "How long as a Paizonian and Sebastian still can't create a link?"

Dark Archive Bella Sara Charter Superscriber

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Creating a link is hard! The PMG needs to put making quoting easier on his to do list.

Scarab Sages

1. A modern browser will treat it as a link for you :)
2. I agree, the Penny Arcade game is nothing like the game I played at Paizocon.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

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We're on target to begin the first (roughly) six-week playtest at the end of the month, so now is the time to let your Venture-Captains and Venture-Lieutenants (those are regional coordinators for Pathfinder Society) know you're in!

We are looking mainly for groups willing to commit to playtesting two chapters, which means they'll need to be able to run at least ten sessions in that first six-week phase. We are also looking for a few groups that are able to run all six chapters—30 sessions—in the same time. We'll be looking for groups of 1 to 6 players, with the majority of groups having 4 or 5 players. (Everyone's a player; there's no GM.)

The first session will involve a bunch of setup (organizing hundreds of playtest cards) in additional to familiarizing yourselves with the rules, so plan for the first session to take up to 3 hours with 5 or 6 people; 4 or fewer people might take up to 2.5 hours. (We'll be able to provide more out-of-the-box organization in the final product, so it won't take as long to set up as these playtest decks will.)

I'd expect later sessions to take up to 1.5 hours for 6 people, and maybe just a bit more than an hour for 4 people.

We want a variety of experience levels in the playtest; players don't need to be familiar with Pathfinder, but they should probably like card games at least a little bit.

We intend to distribute playtest decks by sending them to be printed at FedEx Office (formerly Fed Ex/Kinkos) locations near each individual playtest group, so somebody in the group will need to be within driving distance of a FedEx Office location to participate in the playtest. (If we can't get enough playtesters near FedEx Office locations, we'll look to expand to other places, such as Staples.)

Each playtest group will need one person designated as the group lead. The group lead will be responsible for paying for the print job when it's picked up. We can't get firm quotes until we actually have print-ready files, but we anticipate that the playtest sets will cost in the neighborhood of $50 for groups playing two chapters, and more like $100 for groups playing all six chapters. If the group lead participates on the playtest forums during the playtest period, Paizo will credit the cost of the print job to the paizo.com account of the group lead. (In short, we're asking playtesters to put up the cash for the cards, but if they actually participate in the process, they'll get their money back in paizo.com store credit.)

All players in the group (not just the group lead) will be able to participate in the playtest discussion forum, which will take place on a private messageboard.

If you don't already know who your Venture-Captain/Venture-Lieutenants are, please go here.

Grand Lodge

Will this playtest be limited to PFS players or will people with a regular group be able to contact the VC/VL for their area to participate?

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