Shield Block Preview

In this week’s design diary, Skaff talked about reactive cards and how we revised our system for blocks and armor cards. Here’s the first card preview of a reactive card.

This is Shield Block – it’s a pretty basic but useful blocking card. How does it work?

You can tell that it’s a reactive card rather than a “for play” card by the grey text box (instead of the usual beige box in the cards you’ve seen to date). This means that you can’t actively play the card – instead you wait for it to be “triggered” by your opponent playing something. In this case, because it’s a block card (which you can tell by the shield icon in the lower left corner), it will be triggered by any card your opponent plays targeting you.

The little die icon next to the shield shows you what you have to roll in order to successfully block. In this case, it’s a 3 or greater, so you’ll block two thirds of the time – pretty good odds.

Reading the text in the rule box, you can see that this card will block any kind of attack, but that if you block a melee attack, not only do you cancel that attack, but you also get to draw a card. Nice!

Of course, this being a computer game, not a real card game, the computer will do all the dice rolling for you. Although I coded the dice rolling code myself, there’s been more than one occasion that I’ve gone back and checked the code after a string of particularly bad rolls…

So, Shield Block – a card that sits in your hand protecting you against most things your opponent might throw at you. If they’re smart and they know you’ve got it, they’ll try to tease it out with their weaker cards. But if they don’t know it’s there, or they aren’t thinking straight, they might let fly with a big melee attack and then you’ll smile as they lose their card and you get to draw one in exchange. Good times.

I hope you enjoyed this first look at our reactive cards. This is a basic foundation from which we’ll explore some much more complex and interesting variants.