Physical Media!

One of the cool things Patreon and PayPal donations have helped fund are the prints of two prototype card games: STAVE and GUNNAR. 

Stave is now Art Ready, with a couple gameplay quirks to work out and 2 cards that could use a different wording, and GUNNAR is in its first pass of physical print with temporary art assets and rules in flux.

With Project Morningstar dominating most of our time each day, these two card games are a nice break from the digital grind. 

They'll also make most excellent Kickstarter and Patreon rewards, and help fill out the Radian-Helix store in the interim between SOS & New California (which we can't sell anything related to) and Morningstar (at least 2 years from now it will be an Early Access option.)

2 1/2 to 3 years is a big gap full of 5-8 hours of full time development work. I'm already pretty exhausted with family responsibilities on top daily milestones, so having productive breaks where I can focus on getting these games published, spend time with friends face to face after the isolation of the pandemic, and still get fun playable materials in the hands of backers & patrons, is a welcome parallel track. 

GUNNAR needs a little more time to cook before it's truly ready to go out in public. 

The idea behind GUNNAR is that it's a fun, fast, high intensity sort of party game for two players. It plays like a HEMA (Historical Medieval Martial Arts) or Kenpo sparing match. 

You pick 1 weapon deck from a choice of 3: Sword, Spear, or Axe (with enough cards that both players can choose the same weapon.)

And choose from 2 defense and tactic cards: Shield or Glimmer.

You may pick any number of cards from those 3 decks, up to 6 cards. Choose 5 sword cards and 1 shield, or 4 glimmers, 1 shield, and 1 spear. It's all up to you (just don't mix weapon cards.)

You then play these cards against your opponent at the same time, simultaneously. Once a card is in play it can't be taken back, but you may hesitate and show cards to each other on accident or on purpose to fake them out (cheating is the law of the land here.)

Continue to play simultaneously for 6 rounds until all your cards are gone, or, if turns were skipped, 6 rounds are up. 

At the end of each round, shuffle/toss your cards back into the decks and redraw 6 cards, then play again.

Each player starts with 5 health tokens.

Tally the health lost at the end. The winner causes the other to lose all their health tokens without losing all of their own.

The objective is to play as fast as you can.

At first everyone stumbles and has to learn -- experience and knowing the plays and card descriptions helps a lot -- then as this experience and understanding dawns, playing quicker and quicker feels like trading sword blows, looking for opportunities based on the last card played and anticipating what's next, expecting feints and future plays based on what cards they might have to use, and setting up combos or finishing strategies.  

So far GUNNAR is really fun! 

The initial learning curve takes the "trading blows" feeling out of it, stopping to read cards and explain them to each other, "wait what's that card say," wondering why you'd do this or that as opposed to this other thing. That definitely a drawback I'd like to focus on testing out for first time players, but so far the few actual face to face humans (and digital proxies) have caught on very quickly and picked it up enough to feel confident trying to win against the dev. Haven't had players in the wild try it yet -- got a loooot of data points to collect. :)

Gunnar's first draft has some cards that obviously need rewording, and as a 50 card deck, there are four extra bonus cards that fit into a poker sized deck which is kinda the Card Printing Industry standard issue set, and usually priced the cheapest. So we can focus on having high quality cards that way and still be affordable. So maybe rule explainer cards instead of easily lost paper rules? But I might fit four extra shield or glimmer trick in there. 

The health tokens are actually the hardest to source -- custom resin or plastic tokens that still look good can be pricey. Paper/card stock tokens to me are weak, I don't like um, and they can't really be used for other games like some awesome looking coins with skulls on them could.  They feel like value. (And I might be able to make the coins myself with a hand made resin kit. Make several hundred every 12 hours.)

STAVE is the closet to "done" and needs a publisher. 

GUNNAR needs more work and probably a year in development and testing.

But I feel like these two card games really open up some interesting doors. Expensive to get published and fulfill orders, but worth it.