Rulebook
In-depth instructions for gameplay
Quickstart
Get up and playing in 5 mins
Ready…
This guide gets you up and running in a two player game - instructing you how to make your first few turns, they aren’t necessarily the best moves to take, but cover a wide range of options. It ignores a few things like the volcanic powers and sacrifices which you can skip for the first playthrough, or add them later for a more indepth experience.
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DIY
How to make your own set to play at home
Jewellers Felt
A big prototype upgrade
Well, this has been a long time coming. It required one really hungover day post a masquerade ball where the body and mind decided that crafting, cups of tea, and chill beats were about the extent of excitement we could handle.
Earlier this week, I had done a bunch of searching and found the ‘breakthrough’ crafting material - Jeweller’s felt. Paired with a bit of ‘contact cement’ $2 glue from the Magic Dollar store, we were in business.
Before that I had been looking at adhesive foam and it was always too thick. I need the backing to barely add any measurable thickness to the tile heights as I didn’t need any more potential confusion on which colour was to connecting to what.
Faster! Faster!
How fast is too fast?
Protecting your critters
Strategies for holding on to the little guys
Through the cracks
How an overpowered power snuck on through
Volcanic Migration was removed from the basic gameplay abilities and turn structure in moderately early development of Volcanique. I readded it at some point as an unlockable power in the L3-4 range.
Turns out that I’d forgotten the fundamentals of why I removed this power in the first place - it’s far too powerful in its current state (migrate away from a Volcano for 1 x resource) and essentially just annoying to play against.
This was particularly evident when it was a middle row L3 power, which the last playtest encountered, meaning that everyone can escape every volcano for a very minimal fee. The game stalled and the tiles were all but exhausted. It’s not a meaningful decision, the player will almost always pay the resources to keep their critter.
Continue reading...Power prolificacy
How to assign vps to each caldera power
Here’s the thought. For the Caldera deck (hidden one-off powers and secret points for 1 x each resource).
They need to be worth slightly more than 2VP per card as sing the powers generally will gain you minimum +2 (or at least + 1 to you, -1 to the opposition). Multiplayer that is tricky, as -1 to one opposition is also seen as +1 to other unaffected players.
High-stakes bell curve
- 0 Points: 2 cards
- 1 Point: 4 cards
- 2 Points: 6 cards
- 3 Points: 4 cards
- 4 Points: 2 cards
= 36 total, 2vp average across 18 cards
Continue reading...Print ready rulebook
Directly from this website?
I defaulted to A4 pages, as at least here in Australia, it is by far the most common paper size.
The concept is pretty simple - hide all of the irrelevant things, make a few extra things show, then make it look good. In practice it’s…honestly not too bad.
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