This week I took a look at a completely different type of game from my traditional tabletop RPG. Witchway Wars is a miniatures tactics game where you play wizards battling for control of leylines you place yourself, creating a constantly changing battlefield. This game is still early in development, so a lot might change once it hits the table for the first time as very few games survive their first playtest completely intact.
I have very little experience with miniature tactics games outside of some Warhammer when I was a teenager, so I learned a bit about miniature design here as well. From my readthrough, the core rule set of Witchway Wars is solid. Each player controls 1 to 3 wizards and a number of acolytes and minions. You draw cards from a tarot deck and use those cards to issue commands to your minions, channel leylines, and cast spells. The only rules I did not get to review were the specific spells created from each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot cards.
Since this game is early in the design phase, there are a lot of neat mechanics, let’s talk a bit more about some of them in detail. I really like how cards are drawn, how the suits matter, and how the map changes over time.
You draw one card for every card your opponent plays. I like this mechanic because it always ensures the game is progressing. For every action performed, the enemy how has an additional action they can perform. In a two-player game, this means that you are both progressing the other forward with your actions, but it a 3 or 4 player game, there is a disparity between who draws how many cards as each player will force a different player to draw cards. I think this is interesting as it means there is an additional cost for your attacks and spells, the opponent gets a card that may be better than the one you just used.
The suits of the tarot cards matter. As someone who is making a ttrpg system with playing cards, the suit mattering is important to me as it adds strategic depth to the cards. Witchway wars makes suit matter by having each action for minions have a trump suit. Because actions are contested, where the opponent can play a card to counter an action you take, trump guarantees that low number cards are useful when used correctly. This gives strategic depth to the contests where you can time using lower numbered trump cards to counter the actions of certain types or use them on the offensive instead. Additionally, this gives each of the normal cards additional flavor by associating certain cards with certain actions, helping further guide your actions if need be.
Finally, a very unique mechanic comes from the fact you can mark leylines on the map as an action, and then any interaction between the leylines on the map create a resource that can be gathered, spent, and then used to cast a spell. This means that as new leylines are created and old ones destroyed, these important resources will move around the map, forcing the players to constantly change tactics and positions. This is the most interesting mechanic to me, and I am interested to see how it does in playtest.
I really like where this design is going, and a lot of the choices made allow for an interesting and dynamic game. There are still many design decisions left to be made, especially with the spells not being defined, so the complete game may be more or less fun than what I have described here. If the spells are too game warping, then luck in which arcana you draw would be too important and other actions may become trivial. If the spells are not powerful enough, then the leyline mechanics can just be ignored and this game just becomes any other miniatures tactics game.
When you start a design of your own, what do you work on first? What parts of a new design do you flesh out before others?Let me know in the comments below.As always, if you like what I’m doing, follow me on Twitter @c22system.