King Lear was here with us in the early days of Captain’s Gambit, but was eventually replaced with Cordelia as the game evolved.
But thanks to all of our backers who unlocked King Lear as a stretch goal, he now makes a triumphant return as a unique captain in his own right! He’s gone through so many iterations that I can’t even remember a good chunk of them. But we’ve been honing towards a satisfying version of Lear that changes the landscape of the game in a manner befitting of his status.
His current iteration is just a bit too strong, though, and it makes for some gameplay loops that will quickly become boring unless we change him. So we’re forcing him to strategize more: this tiny change should open up more interesting gameplay for everyone - take a look!
On the left is his first iteration, on the right is our latest one:
King Lear has been changed so that his Reveal is at end of turn. His Reveal was not great gameplay at instant speed for the following reasons:
Lear gameplay mostly consisted of sitting around and waiting for the last moment to give aid. The main problem is that Lear only really had one way to play (keep himself healthy, vaguely protect people with a lot of loyalty). At least with Cordelia, she has a specific target to build her gameplan around, but since Lear's loyal target changes, it feels like there's only one real strategy. That is no good - each captain needs at least two!
Lear didn't have much risk/reward to his gameplay. But now, he has to actively choose between being greedy [and waiting too long for loyalty to pile up!] or being antsy [and giving the benefit when it's not needed, maybe even drawing unwelcome attention to his target.]
Lear was just too strong with Prospero, and to an extent Lady Macbeth as well. Prospero can have 2 energy (outside of drain range!) and 3 loyalty, and with autocharge+overcharge, actually gain 8 energy out of nowhere with Lear.
Sure, it's helpful if the metagame can shift to start treating loyal targets like the threats they are, but it's too exhausting to have to be scared of someone with only 2 energy. At least if Lear has to Reveal at 'sorcery speed', Prospero can't exactly shout "Hey Lear when it gets around to your turn, reveal because I'm gonna win".
Thus, Lear will next be tested out with a slightly weaker version of his Reveal ability. There’s a few other changes that we can make if needed to ease him one way or another, so while this may or may not be his final form, we’re far from being in a rut with our favourite mad king.
Overall: this should make Lear have a more interesting tension within himself regarding when to bequeath his kingdom. Once he's Revealed, it then becomes a game of making sure those loyal targets actually win, which is kind of like how Richard III can play half the game face-up.
(It's also more accurate to the actual play King Lear, which happens mostly post-’reveal’.)
Keeping an eye on certain things:
Giving the choice of energy or health might be overpowered.
Choosing up to 3 captains is obviously trinket text (rules that don’t come up often but give some flavour to the character). Realistically Lear will only choose 1 or 2 captains, so removing the choice of 3 is on the block if we need more text space. Hopefully not though!
We could move the "players may gain loyalty" text outside of the card, but that might not be optimal information design.
Lear's own loyalty mattering. It'd be really a really interesting and cool idea if he said "You may Reveal and give up to 3 captains your Loyalty. Each of them then takes one [h] or [e] from you for each [l] they have." But that’s a lot of text and complexity, and the gameplay might not be worth the ‘interestingness’ of giving his own loyalty. It’s worth keeping an eye on, though…
That’s all of our updates for now regarding Lear.
Let’s go out and see how he fares in his new form!