Lore workings
I don't know what I'm doing but I think I'm having fun
Created with extensive input from my lore abiding citizen, the littlest guy I know, Huon Croucher
Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the Australian continent pulsed with molten fire, the Earth gave birth to ancient spirits. They sculpted life not with gentle hands, but with eruptions that split mountains with rivers of lava. Their creations — small, flame-tempered critters — thrived in the inferno. But when the seas rose to drown the land, the spirits spent their last embers shielding their favoured critters, then sank into the asthenosphere to dream.
Continue reading...Overall Theoretical Thoughts on Strategy:
Aggressive Disruption: Focus on volcanoes (especially with Lateral Eruption or Magma Bomb if it proves effective), Pack Critters, and Cooperative Critters (against non-cooperative opponents) to actively remove opponents and seize territory.
Expansionist Engine: Prioritize Bountiful Resources, Crafty Critters, and Flying Critters. Aim to create and utilize volcanic soil for rapid expansion and control multiple biome types for resource generation. Island summoning would also fit here.
Pay Sacrifice to the Bonus Boss: Exalted Sacrifices, Frugal Ritual, and churn out sacrifices for points. Target a few key areas to gain the tallest biome and largest biome bonuses.
Defensive/Economic Build: Herding Critters for bonus resources/points, Lava Diversion, and Volcanic Migration to protect assets, while steadily building a wide and connected board presence for biome edge scoring.
Continue reading...
Volcanic power icons
Adding in reminders as to when everything can activate
Strategy
General and advanced tactics
General tips
- Target tiles with multiple players on them
- Set off a volcano, it unlocks you a power, gives you a point, and wipes out opponent critters!
- Maximising the same colour early on will help set off an early volcano
- Look to split up well connected biomes
- Connect opponents together and knock them off
- Look to take over the tallest stack or largest biome (particularly in end game) for big bonus points!
January and the tidbits
Digging into the parts where I'd got stuck
Finally got around to updating the colours across the rulebook so it reads better for colourblind and in black and white. Very annoyed at myself for not doing that in the first place. It took much much longer than expected (even with the select similar and colour adjust in Illustrator).
New volcanic power idea: Amphibian critters - can move off land tiles into the sea in evacuations or move
Continue reading...The Smog Clears
No more smog, colour accessibilty & craftier critters
To do
A public to do list to keep myself accountable
Rules & playtesting
(I have realised all of these points are incredibly hard to check off as they never feel complete)
Visual examples for all the rules
- Make agile critters clearer
- Erosion visual example
- Landslide visual example
- Lava diversion 2 across for large screens resize
- Rift visual example
- Supervolcanic eruption now that smog doesn’t exist??
- Symbiosis play type visual example
- Fix the activating a volcano instructions!
- Volcanic power icons
- Volcanic power cards
‘Finish’ the rules
- Consider wipe-out scarce resource rules/trapped critters
- 4-5 player potential left and right engagement system
- Deep test the powers
Attend Melbourne Incubator at least 3 times
- November
- January
- February
Playtest examples and results page/s (.csv it?)
Play online
The Screentop version
Volcanique Online
You can now play (a version) of Volcanique online!
After what I had thought was an uneventful month for the development of Volcanique (it was), turned out the skills I was learning creating the card game Recency Bias, would prove enough to be able to create a (free!) version of Volcanique online that people can test out - I’m looking at you, interstate friends.
Visit the site here: https://screentop.gg/@albarkeo/Volcanique/
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