Minibots Arena set 3.0

Greetings everyone!

I spent the last weekend designing the new card set and checking balance, taking the old cards out of their sleeves, printing the new cards, cutting them up and putting them in the new sleeves.

Only to realize I used the wrong sleeves (black cover, didn’t have enough) so I had to do re-sleeve everything again. Annoyance.

Looking at every card in-hand instead of on-screen gives me a better feel and helps me realize that I had made many mistakes, so I spent this morning correcting what I could find and tweaking everything.

This afternoon I’ll go print everything again (in black and white, always print in black and white when in early tests to save money), cut them up again, sleeve them again!

Then I’ll be able to play-test for real. I’ll need to find a new board, as I’m moving away from a hex grid to keep things simple and intuitive (hex grids created a lot of questions when it was time to aim, calculate distance, check for cover, etc) and wanna keep the original idea of MtG meets Chess.

Here’s all the new cards from this draft Nothing is final (especially the names, very basic to keep designing and balancing easy). I hope you enjoy them. Feel free to ask any questions or offer criticism in the comments! I find it always helps with designing rules.

Noticeable changes: No more “upgrades” besides upgrading the bots themselves. A unified look (achieved using Heroforge, so I’ll have to change that if I ever plan on actually releasing this game because technically I’d be breaking their copyright rules) and a stronger cycle system. Since I’m not charging any money at the moment, I’m not infringing anything.

One of the changes, for example, is the cost to buy cards and add them to your deck will be to discard cards from your hand instead of removing “Pla” or coins.

So if we look at the 1st card here, Battery v.1. The “1” means that if you want to buy this card and add it to your deck, you need to discard 1 card from your hand.

I know there’s a lot of mechanics that I’m not explaining yet. Keep your eyes peeled for a future post where I’ll offer more details about everything.

If you’re ever interested in print-and-play for playtesting purposes, feel free to reach out to me and we can discuss further.