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Mechanic Monday: Winding Down an Engine Builder

 Welcome back to Mechanic Monday! Been a minute hasn't it? Remember when I did one of these a week for a year? 2020 was such a productive time! Totally worth the complete decay of my sense of self!


Today I’m going to go about things a little backwards.  Normally I start with the mechanical kernel, mock up how it would look in a hypothetical game, and then do a little theorycrafting around it.  This time, I uh already have a v1.0 prototype.  So let's start there.


Gradually Shorter Engines

In Paper Moth Dynasty, you play a young Monarch, with nine Role cards flipped to either their Sun or Moon side.  In the first round you will place 7 of the 9 available cards in your Court tableau, then Exile a card and play the next round with one fewer card to draw and one fewer to play, then do the same again before the third and final round.  You will therefore place 7 cards in the first round, 6 in the second, and 5 in the third round.


So engine builders (and this one certainly draws inspo from those, especially civ builders, thematically) generally start the engine as basic as possible so that each round can build off the previous round in terms of scale and choice.  For this game, since the scope is a single Monarch or family line rather than a full civilization, I’ve decided to make the direction of the engine smaller but tighter.  I do this by making the exile somewhat permeable (you decide which card to exile each round, and there are card effects that let you manipulate card states between exile, your hand, and your tableau) and by allowing the player to change a card from one side to the other, via some card powers as well as by default each round.


By doing so, I feel I have ludonarrative consonance, as it maps a ruler who gradually has a smaller sphere of influence, but who has through familiarity and manipulation curated a tighter and more efficient core group.  By the third round, you have less you can do but you’re more practiced in doing it according to the ways you’ve learnt and stacked the deck.


Alright, that’ll do it - I have been keeping a thread of this design on BlueSky, so check out @fincoe.bsly.social if you're interested.  So long!

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