Spectromancer / Mythoria
Apr. 2nd, 2010 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishThree Donkeys LLC / Apus Software, Spectromancer
Random Star Games, Mythoria
I've been playing a decent bit of Spectromancer lately. Brief summary: you start with sixty life points and a semi-random assortment of twenty spells in five different flavors, four spells from each. Every turn you gain one mana of each flavor and then you cast one spell, which has a cost in mana of its particular flavor. Spells are either one-shot effects or creatures, which are summoned into one of your six creature slots (and sometimes have one-shot or ongoing effects as well). Then your creatures attack. If your opponent has a creature in a slot opposite one of yours, your creature does damage to that creature. Otherwise it damages the opponent. First one to run out of life loses.
It's a good game, as you'd expect from something designed partly by Richard Garfield. There's a bit of luck at the beginning in what cards you get and what cards your opponent might have; after that it's all skill and timing and using the intersecting interacting abilities of the cards. It's fast, too. I think my longest game ran to just under twenty minutes, and ten is much more typical. Bottom line: I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Yesterday I checked out a similar-sounding game called Mythoria. Mythoria starts with you selecting the seven spells you'll use for the game. Then every turn you and your opponent gain one mana and cast one spell. There are no player life points; instead there are seven board spaces arranged in a hexagon. After you each cast a spell, all creatures act once, one at a time, alternating: either moving to a different space or attacking an adjacent opponent's creature. You win if your creatures occupy all seven slots.
These are two superficially similar games, using some of the same mechanics. So why does Mythoria leave me less than whelmed? I think it's due to three choices the designers of Mythoria made in direct opposition to the design of Spectromancer.
First, there's the variance in power. By having five types of mana, Spectro lends itself to letting you save up one or two types for a big spell or creature. Spell costs range from 1 to 12 (with one zero-cost outlier), and have power levels commensurate with their costs. In contrast, the choice to have only one type of mana to power all spells in Mythoria led to spells clumped at the bottom of the power curve. There are a bunch of one- and two-cost creatures with an attack strength of 1 and a minor special ability, and relatively fewer five- to seven-cost spells.
Second, the difference in spell selection. Having twenty spells available versus seven means your decision space during the game is a lot broader in Spectro. Mythoria has shifted most of that decision space to the pre-game, letting you select the seven cards you want to use. There's something to say for this: you can make a plan and keep refining it over the course of several games. Where this hits a problem, of course, is when players figure out the few main deck construction strategies, and play only tiny variants on those strategies because otherwise you'll set yourself up for a pretty bad loss. When every game is a matchup between slight variations on five or six themes, replayability takes a big hit.
(Spectromancer avoids stagnation by allowing you to select one of your types of mana/spells out of nine different options, and making spells from the selectable set a little better than spells from the four types that everyone uses. This also gives Spectromancer an excellent demo version: you can play all you want with one of the options, but if you want to try the other eight you have to pay.)
And third, the board. This is the biggest different and the one that first made me think "eh, maybe not." Spectromancer's gameplay is fundamentally CCG-style (again, no surprise for a game designed by Richard Garfield). The "board" is mostly an abstraction, a place to put your creatures so they can attack your opponent and/or do whatever their special effects are. Damage is easy; gaining life is relatively difficult. So it's hard to drag out a Spectromancer game once one player starts losing. Not that comebacks are impossible: with good play and some well-timed mass-destruction spells I've come back from a life difference of 36 to 3. But if you manage to turn the tables you'd still better be able to kill your opponent pretty quickly, because you're likely down quite a bit in life points. (I think that particular game ran for three more turns, which was one longer than I'd planned. Made me a bit nervous.)
Mythoria is, at heart, a war game. It's all about control of the board: positioning, maneuvering, concentration of forces, all that. So far it seems easy to get into a position where you've got a lock on a win (or are all but guaranteed to lose), and then the process of actually ending the game just drags on. I may be missing something; it's possible that with higher-cost creatures (not available in the demo) the game's not as prone to either last-ditch stalling or seesawing as I expect it to be. Still. . . the potential's there, and it leaves me feeling cold.
I'm also partial to Spectromancer's art style over Mythoria's. I'm willing to write that off as a matter of taste.
Anyway. Spectromancer: great pick-up-and-play game, surprisingly deep and strategic despite the randomness in the setup. Mythoria: possibly equally deep, but seems hobbled by the factors I've mentioned above, and since the demo lacks a great deal of functionality I can't tell whether there's enough there to get me over the war-gamey aspect.
Tragically, neither is available for the Device. Mythoria is written in some sort of proprietary Microsoft development framework and almost certainly won't be, which is sad because the small amount of information displayed (the board, your spells, and your and your opponent's mana) makes it a great fit for a small screen. I emailed the Spectromancer guys last January and they said they were working on an iPhone version but nothing yet. Oh well, maybe soon.
Random Star Games, Mythoria
I've been playing a decent bit of Spectromancer lately. Brief summary: you start with sixty life points and a semi-random assortment of twenty spells in five different flavors, four spells from each. Every turn you gain one mana of each flavor and then you cast one spell, which has a cost in mana of its particular flavor. Spells are either one-shot effects or creatures, which are summoned into one of your six creature slots (and sometimes have one-shot or ongoing effects as well). Then your creatures attack. If your opponent has a creature in a slot opposite one of yours, your creature does damage to that creature. Otherwise it damages the opponent. First one to run out of life loses.
It's a good game, as you'd expect from something designed partly by Richard Garfield. There's a bit of luck at the beginning in what cards you get and what cards your opponent might have; after that it's all skill and timing and using the intersecting interacting abilities of the cards. It's fast, too. I think my longest game ran to just under twenty minutes, and ten is much more typical. Bottom line: I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Yesterday I checked out a similar-sounding game called Mythoria. Mythoria starts with you selecting the seven spells you'll use for the game. Then every turn you and your opponent gain one mana and cast one spell. There are no player life points; instead there are seven board spaces arranged in a hexagon. After you each cast a spell, all creatures act once, one at a time, alternating: either moving to a different space or attacking an adjacent opponent's creature. You win if your creatures occupy all seven slots.
These are two superficially similar games, using some of the same mechanics. So why does Mythoria leave me less than whelmed? I think it's due to three choices the designers of Mythoria made in direct opposition to the design of Spectromancer.
First, there's the variance in power. By having five types of mana, Spectro lends itself to letting you save up one or two types for a big spell or creature. Spell costs range from 1 to 12 (with one zero-cost outlier), and have power levels commensurate with their costs. In contrast, the choice to have only one type of mana to power all spells in Mythoria led to spells clumped at the bottom of the power curve. There are a bunch of one- and two-cost creatures with an attack strength of 1 and a minor special ability, and relatively fewer five- to seven-cost spells.
Second, the difference in spell selection. Having twenty spells available versus seven means your decision space during the game is a lot broader in Spectro. Mythoria has shifted most of that decision space to the pre-game, letting you select the seven cards you want to use. There's something to say for this: you can make a plan and keep refining it over the course of several games. Where this hits a problem, of course, is when players figure out the few main deck construction strategies, and play only tiny variants on those strategies because otherwise you'll set yourself up for a pretty bad loss. When every game is a matchup between slight variations on five or six themes, replayability takes a big hit.
(Spectromancer avoids stagnation by allowing you to select one of your types of mana/spells out of nine different options, and making spells from the selectable set a little better than spells from the four types that everyone uses. This also gives Spectromancer an excellent demo version: you can play all you want with one of the options, but if you want to try the other eight you have to pay.)
And third, the board. This is the biggest different and the one that first made me think "eh, maybe not." Spectromancer's gameplay is fundamentally CCG-style (again, no surprise for a game designed by Richard Garfield). The "board" is mostly an abstraction, a place to put your creatures so they can attack your opponent and/or do whatever their special effects are. Damage is easy; gaining life is relatively difficult. So it's hard to drag out a Spectromancer game once one player starts losing. Not that comebacks are impossible: with good play and some well-timed mass-destruction spells I've come back from a life difference of 36 to 3. But if you manage to turn the tables you'd still better be able to kill your opponent pretty quickly, because you're likely down quite a bit in life points. (I think that particular game ran for three more turns, which was one longer than I'd planned. Made me a bit nervous.)
Mythoria is, at heart, a war game. It's all about control of the board: positioning, maneuvering, concentration of forces, all that. So far it seems easy to get into a position where you've got a lock on a win (or are all but guaranteed to lose), and then the process of actually ending the game just drags on. I may be missing something; it's possible that with higher-cost creatures (not available in the demo) the game's not as prone to either last-ditch stalling or seesawing as I expect it to be. Still. . . the potential's there, and it leaves me feeling cold.
I'm also partial to Spectromancer's art style over Mythoria's. I'm willing to write that off as a matter of taste.
Anyway. Spectromancer: great pick-up-and-play game, surprisingly deep and strategic despite the randomness in the setup. Mythoria: possibly equally deep, but seems hobbled by the factors I've mentioned above, and since the demo lacks a great deal of functionality I can't tell whether there's enough there to get me over the war-gamey aspect.
Tragically, neither is available for the Device. Mythoria is written in some sort of proprietary Microsoft development framework and almost certainly won't be, which is sad because the small amount of information displayed (the board, your spells, and your and your opponent's mana) makes it a great fit for a small screen. I emailed the Spectromancer guys last January and they said they were working on an iPhone version but nothing yet. Oh well, maybe soon.