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Balancing Drain has been by far the hardest part of designing Captain’s Gambit. Since the very beginning, Drain was meant to serve three main functions:
Allow passive captains (i.e. Puck, Rosalind, etc.) to “attack” other players without actually attacking them;
Prevent players from stockpiling too much energy (this really matters for keeping Prospero in check); and
Disrupt other players from executing their plans
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.
Read moreIn Captain’s Gambit, our cast of characters involves aliens, but of course based on Shakespearian characters from centuries ago.
While we’ve kept the names and pronouns of the original characters, it was a conscious decision to design the female captains as such that we didn’t give them all cis-mammal-human characteristics.
The art and character designs that we went for might look inconsequential, but the design behind them is actually a little complicated. The question boils down to this: how do you make representation of women obvious, without perpetuating stereotypes about what defines womanhood?
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