"We should make a healer."
- Mitchell, at some point in development
The reason Rosalind entered the game was that simple. But she’s gone through a few iterations between her time as Henry V and today!
Mechanics
Original: “You win if everyone is alive by round 8.”
Current: “You win on round 8, or if anyone wins before then. You lose if anyone else dies.
Once per game, if another captain would die, instead Reveal and match their health to yours. They’re invincible that turn.”
So yes, she plays as a healer. You spend your rounds pacifying violence, stalling for time, forming alliances and protecting everyone else.
At first, I (AC) was opposed to Mitchell’s suggestion of adding a healer. This is because at this stage in development, we had a problem where everyone was being a pacifist most of time: essentially, people tended to sit in the corner and Overcharge by themselves until basically round 6. Boring! Despite my disinclination for specifically encouraging pacifism, I relucantly agreed to try - good game design does mean listening and testing, and I wanted to be a good designer. By round 2 I realized Rosalind’s true effect, and I was glad to have been corrected.
Because Rosalind wants people to survive for 8 rounds, and Captain’s Gambit ends upon victory, we get into an interesting side effect: the threat of Rosalind winning before you can finish the game encourages captains to start killing each other as soon as possible. This stops players from spending the first half of the game doing nothing but overcharge - in other words, adding this healer to the captain pool increases average aggression, even if she’s not in the current game.
Rosalind’s first iteration as “Henry V”
The additional bonus of having a healing-based win condition is that aggressive players have an easy excuse to start smacking. One of the earlier problems of the game was that the first player to attack another had an immediate target painted on their head - but now, because of the threat of Rosalind, you have a lot more persuasive freedom to come across as a “helpful leader” by “keeping Rosalind in check”.
Interestingly, the most difficult part of Rosalind’s development wasn’t really finding balanced mechanics as much as finding mechanics that could actually fit on the space of the card. When working with physical games it turns out there’s a very real logistics problem of figuring out how to cram as many words as possible into a small text box while keeping things both clear and brief… that’s been the true challenge, and I was not expecting it.
Lore
Our first draft of Rosalind was named Henry V - I liked how his character did his best and then died anyway, and I thought of him as a kinda squid-ish person.
A bit later we noticed that there was only like one woman in Captain's Gambit, and since Richard III was already here, we decided to trade off the mirror aspect of "Henry vs Richard; save vs kill everyone" to get another theatrical production (As You Like It) and another woman in the game. Mitchell suggested Rosalind, so here we are!
Rosalind is my favourite visual design in CG - I love the colours and the feeling of someone who keeps everyone else alive in order to actually just win herself later on.
Obviously every captain has a different origin story, but you may have also noticed that some captains started as a necessity for a character while others started with a mechanic idea that later had an identity attached to them. How it is, I guess.
The final infusion of lore, that makes Rosalind feel most like Rosalind, is allowing her to win from the victory of others. Because Rosalind in this play is a highly social person, regardless of her current gender she is doing something in service of companionship; thus, having the player seek a potential suitor and ask to work alongside them for victory is quite fitting of her abilities. It also makes her more balanced.
And that’s Rosalind!
“If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.”
Rosalind, As You Like It, Act V Scene 4