For the designer diary, I'd love to understand more about the balance between the Pandemic system and the theme. What were the toughest decisions made to either tie the two together or lean towards one over the other?
Hi Matt! I tried DIYing a lord of the rings themed version of Pandemic a number of years ago for fun before I got distracted by other projects so super excited to see this in the works and really curious about your design process!
I’d love to hear the story of how you settled on your mechanic for the ringbearer and associated victory conditions - particularly how to avoid the ringbearer’s movement/actions being too detached from the rest of the game, and how you balanced the mechanics that would enable you to control the timing of the rush to Mt Doom so it doesn’t happen too early in the game but doesn’t always result in a loss either.
I’m hazarding a guess that the board and the orcs etc may take some inspiration from Fall of Rome so also super interested in your process for making Tolkien’s middle earth work well for that - did you start with a structure that worked well mechanically and then map middle earth on to that, or vice versa?
Got it! I'd be curious how *your* DIY version went. Sounds like you encountered some of the same design challenges. I'll cover this stuff in the diary.
Awesome I really look forward to reading about it!
Yeah I felt happy with a lot of the shape of the game - but never had an iteration of the Ringbearer I was happy with.
I tried a few different things - variations where the player deck was made up of characters with symbols for eg combat, wilderness, influence, stealth and the cards could either stay in player’s hands or go to the ‘Fellowship’ shared hand - basically symbol matching for the ringbearer to pass through different regions.
Had a similar variation where in addition to orc cubes there were wilderness cubes, corruption cubes, sentry cubes etc which had to be removed by the Ringbearer when passing through in the same way as armies fighting orcs. Had advantage of feeling better tied to the rest of the game with a unified mechanic for removing cubes, but got overcomplicated pretty fast. I liked it as it had the advantage of being able to use two types of dice for both the ringbearer or players with one that removed more cubes but with a higher chance of drawing the Eye’s attention.
Even just tried mixing in a set number of ringbearer movement cards into the player deck to try and solve the issue of timing the ringbearer’s movement but was much less interesting!
My questions were focused on the bits I struggled most with so super interested to hear how you approached it.
For the designer diary, I'd love to understand more about the balance between the Pandemic system and the theme. What were the toughest decisions made to either tie the two together or lean towards one over the other?
Sounds good – I think I've got this covered, although most of the tensions in the design were in other places!
Hi Matt! I tried DIYing a lord of the rings themed version of Pandemic a number of years ago for fun before I got distracted by other projects so super excited to see this in the works and really curious about your design process!
I’d love to hear the story of how you settled on your mechanic for the ringbearer and associated victory conditions - particularly how to avoid the ringbearer’s movement/actions being too detached from the rest of the game, and how you balanced the mechanics that would enable you to control the timing of the rush to Mt Doom so it doesn’t happen too early in the game but doesn’t always result in a loss either.
I’m hazarding a guess that the board and the orcs etc may take some inspiration from Fall of Rome so also super interested in your process for making Tolkien’s middle earth work well for that - did you start with a structure that worked well mechanically and then map middle earth on to that, or vice versa?
Got it! I'd be curious how *your* DIY version went. Sounds like you encountered some of the same design challenges. I'll cover this stuff in the diary.
Awesome I really look forward to reading about it!
Yeah I felt happy with a lot of the shape of the game - but never had an iteration of the Ringbearer I was happy with.
I tried a few different things - variations where the player deck was made up of characters with symbols for eg combat, wilderness, influence, stealth and the cards could either stay in player’s hands or go to the ‘Fellowship’ shared hand - basically symbol matching for the ringbearer to pass through different regions.
Had a similar variation where in addition to orc cubes there were wilderness cubes, corruption cubes, sentry cubes etc which had to be removed by the Ringbearer when passing through in the same way as armies fighting orcs. Had advantage of feeling better tied to the rest of the game with a unified mechanic for removing cubes, but got overcomplicated pretty fast. I liked it as it had the advantage of being able to use two types of dice for both the ringbearer or players with one that removed more cubes but with a higher chance of drawing the Eye’s attention.
Even just tried mixing in a set number of ringbearer movement cards into the player deck to try and solve the issue of timing the ringbearer’s movement but was much less interesting!
My questions were focused on the bits I struggled most with so super interested to hear how you approached it.