This is to discuss refining Epic Duels into a new dueling game. This is not about Star Wars Epic Duels or sequels to that game, but rather about the underlying Epic Duels system and how it might be re-done.
Overall, while I believe Epic Duels is fantastic at expressing characters we know and love such as Star Wars, Game of Thrones or Marvel, I question how much value it has as a standalone game without licensed characters. Perhaps there would be something if we made decks around archetypes, e.g. a Roman Centurion deck, a Roman Gladiator deck, an English Longbowman deck, a Samurai swordsman deck and that sort of thing. But, let's not worry about that now.
Objective: Refine and evolve Epic Duels from a lightweight gateway game into a more complex, more satisfying combat game. I think it's about fixing some things wrong with the base game, while pushing the limits of the base game just a little further. How much further is something to discuss, as is what to keep and what not, but I'll get it started.
What to keep
- Deck of cards for each character or character set, with attack and defense values.
- Standard deck size, e.g. 31 cards for everyone.
- Decks divided into basic combat cards and special cards, with a standard split in all decks, e.g. 19 and 12, respectively.
- Standard "flavors" of basic combat decks, e.g. Red/Blue/Green/Yellow.
- Some structure to special cards (e.g. at least 3x of one card).
What to change
- I think borrowing the exact structure of 31 cards, 19 basic combat and 12 specials is kind of a ripoff. We all know it and love it and are used to it, but it's not that hard to come up with another way of doing it, enough to differentiate it from the basic game. I'll just throw this out there: 40 cards in every deck with 15 specials. I believe 40 is the minimum for Magic the Gathering so it's a number that gamers are familiar with. In some ways, this is like making prepackaged MTG decks but it plays out on a board.
- Greater variety of character set types. Original Epic Duels has only major with personality minor, or major with a pair of identical minors. Could expand to include single characters, decks with more than 3 characters (e.g. Robert's Viceroys with Droidekas, or the Officer with 4 Stormtroopers), decks with different major/minor dynamics (e.g. Greedo or Nazgul).
- Something Tim Wutke added with his Avatar: The Last Airbender expansion (I'll contact Sultan for an updated link) was to have 2 attack values, one for range and one for melee. I think the ranged attack value was almost always 1 less than the melee attack value, but we could play with that a bit. Some characters might be pure range, others pure melee, while others can do some of each.
- Along with the above, you could change the range/melee rules a bit. Ranged characters could be less restricted as to who they could aim at, but be more restricted by limiting the distance of their attacks (which I think Atom's Smash Bros Epic Duels does). We could say that if you're adjacent to an opponent, you must use your melee attack ability.
- Along with the above, greater variety of basic combat flavors, especially for minor characters. I'd probably have pure range, pure melee, mixed range/melee, strong, middling, and weak designations in addition to major and minor.
- Consider changing the movement rules so that it's less random. Could either change the movement die to something with less variance (e.g. you always have up to 4 movement points to spend however you want, could vary by character) or offer ways of moving without the dice (e.g. any player can spend 1 action moving any character up to 3 spaces).
- Consider allowing "Play any time on your turn" cards to be played before or after moving.
- Consider offering more action choices beyond draw, play or heal, such as move, or maybe there's a way to dump your hand and re-draw, something like that.
Let me know what you think!