Today, we are testing version 3.something of the game. My enthusiasm is high and the ideas about how to make the game better are coming quick.

The new major, possibly major, revelation or change to the game is that for quite some time I have wanted to incorporate some kind of different damage types, specifically elemental damage. I want an expansion card pack that is full of elementals that can be added to any army or replace normal army cards. Of course, they would have different damage types based on the type of element that they are. For example, the fire elemental would have fire damage type, and the ice elemental would have cold, the earth etcetera, etcetera.

I’ve wanted elemental damage, and different damage types for the game in general, for a while now. But I haven’t been able to work out how, exactly. I also toyed around in my head with melee versus ranged and things of that nature. Haven’t worked that out yet either, but I think I cracked the code on how to successfully add different damage types. The keyword is “think” because it hasn’t been play tested at this point. This has been a tough nut for me to crack, and each time I’ve thought about it in any great detail, it just hasn’t worked. But, this time, I think I got it; it just needs a little refinement.

The idea is to add custom dice for the different damage types. If a card has damage type fire they would substitute one of their normal hit dice for one of the fire dice. The fire dice would be, at least in my mind right now, a translucent red unique custom dice that would have damage symbols on it: single damage symbols, maybe a double damage symbol, and then blanks. The advantage of rolling elemental dice is that you wouldn’t have to get over a certain number (typically over three), you would just have to roll a damage symbol or a double damage symbol for two hits from a single die.

If this is how it plays out then if you have electrical power then you roll the electric dice, if you’re earth, you get the earth dice, and they would have different amounts of hits and blanks. Maybe there could be other symbols to do other things, like affect adjacent cards or to roll again for chain lightning perhaps.

I need to think about it a little more but I like the idea of adding custom dice. How it’s in my head right now is one custom die for each of the powers. One for fire, one for earth, one for wind, dark energy, and so on. At least that is how I’m looking at it currently. A second possibility would be to have a set of elemental dice and have them all be the same so they could be used for any element. Fire, wind, air, whatever, but have the damage type be responsible for how many of those dice a player rolls. Fire might roll two elemental dice for example, while Air might roll only one elemental die. Not sure if this should be in addition to the normal amount of hit dice or a substitution for them.

Sounds like I have some more play testing to do.