War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time
Transcript
Today we have a pretty unique situation going on here at the table. Of course, we have a game that we're going to preview for you, but Ryan's normally just my co-host, but now he's also the co-designer of this game.
Yeah, big moment for me.
It is a big moment, and this is a big property for you as well. The game is War of the Dragon, the Wheel of Time. I know you're a giant fan. The Wheel of Time.
Uh I don't have any experience with the Wheel of Time. I have not read any of the books, nor do I have much experience with games like this. Sure, because this is a big epic two-player war game in the vein of things like War of the Ring, Star Wars Rebellion, that type of experience, which is also up your alley. I mean, this is like the perfect thing for
sure. This was this was a great merge of things I love. I mean, I've been a big Wheel of Time fan for a long time. I've been wearing this shirt for a decade.
Not straight.
Uh, not not straight. I've had this shirt.
You didn't have it on the other day. I can so when it when I got a chance to design the game with uh I'm on a design team three great designers myself Mike Mahilick uh who was allstar designer and Andy Clais from Direwolf who designed the Clank game so the the Clank legacy game. So that was just an exciting team a bunch of people that really love Wheel of Time. I do want to say if you're watching this video you're you may have come here uh through Man Versus Mele and you want to hear about a new game. We'll talk about that. You might also be here as a Wheel of Time fan wondering if this game is for you. Uh, so to get everyone's qualms out of the way right away, this was a labor of absolute love from everyone involved. Huge group of Wheel of Time fans. So much like Star Wars Rebellion, which you referenced, one of the big goals of this game was to capture the thematic feel of Wheel of Time. And what we did was create this a big epic war game like you said, but we did also kind of scale that back. So, one thing this game offers is two game modes, and we're going to talk a little bit about one of those modes. First of all, we have epic mode. Epic mode is the a giant version of the game. You've got your armies battling across the world.
You've got characters moving around trying to complete objectives. Um, there's a lot happening in the epic mode, but we scaled it back. We created something called hero mode as well. This was all kind of done uh by the direwolf team who's been fantastic. And this is designed for players like you mentioned it, players like you who want to
more like me anyway.
More like you who want to experience Wheel of Time without having to worry about all of that extra epic stuff.
Yeah.
And so yeah, that's what we've got set up here is the hero mode version.
Yeah, I would say uh while I haven't played the epic mode, I think the epic mode definitely is a more granular experience in terms of getting into all the nitty-gritty. It takes kind of the experience that Ryan walked me through with this and every element has more to it. Yeah.
Or a lot more to it. Particularly the battles. If you're a fan of the channel, you know it's not exactly my cup of tea. Those big epic things. Plus the epic mode like play time, we're talking like for hero mode, a full game is going to be somewhere close to two hoursish.
Yeah. Could be less, maybe 90 minutes.
Uh whereas the epic mode is going to be a longer experience.
Correct. But what you're kind of doing in both is kind of uh it's they're along the same guidelines. It's just epic mode adds more to do uh more ways to to strategize and and more of a tactical battle experience which I'll talk about.
Uh but in the game, so if you're familiar with Wheel of Time at all, it's the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And we're set that way. Uh right now, one player's controlling the forces of the light, which is David, of course.
I'm controlling the forces of darkness. We do have some asymmetric starts. We have different decks of cards that we start with in the game. Um, and this is going to be uh an important part of the game because there's a whole element of hand management of tableau management, but you start with a very asymmetric start. And I'll say I'm a little proud of this that a lot of the the start the characters that you'll see on the in the game are all characters from the books and they kind of start in the areas you'd expect them to start if you've ever read the books. If you're familiar with the books, I will say this as someone who's not familiar with the books and playing this just once with Ryan. Our first play, I could tell Ryan was feeling that theme. Of course, again, it should be said he's part of the design team on this thing. So that bias aside, we're going to tell you about the game, but I could tell as we were playing, I would play a card that was somewhat meaningless to me because I don't have any experience with it, but he's like, "Uh, game of dice, you know, it's one of the cards I played." And it was relevant to this character, you know, and and and it I could tell that it was touching him as a Wheel of Time fan in a way that maybe not, you know, something I wouldn't experience.
Yeah. Well, all everything in this game is based on something from the books and we didn't take a lot of liberties. Like you'll see direct chaps of chapters, characters that you referenced. So the tableau building part of the game is collecting these allies and there are a wide wide variety of allies. I mean, this is small.
The deck's huge.
The deck is you'll be able to to collect these allies over the course of the game and add them to your tableau. Each one of these allies is one of the minor characters in the game. Like right here, I've got actually Udo, who is one of my favorite characters. Uh, awesome to draw him. Each one of these is going to kind of give you effects as you draw them into your tableau, but you're trying to build up your tableau so that you're better at taking the actions in the game. There are five actions in the game. Each one is linked to one of these columns in on your playerboard. And as you're adding cards to your playerboard, you're getting abilities, but you're also tucking them. You're growing that out, and you're able to take stronger versions of some of the actions. And that's the same for hero mode and epic mode. That kind of is what drives your strategy, deciding what you're going to focus on and, you know, leaning into these particular actions in different ways because they all affect the board, different aspects of the board.
Yeah. And this is one of those games where all the actions you're doing, all the things you're doing largely affect what's going out here on this board. It also should be said, by the way, this is obviously a prototype. The board is a sheet of paper at this point. So just keep that in mind. The final production will of course be glorious every way possible miniature option instead of just standes and some a lot of these tokens will be more finalized and everything.
Yeah, but like Ryan said, there's an action selection mechanic at the core of this. On your turn, you're going to choose one of these actions. Now, there are some limitations. You can choose an action if the other play is there. It's going to cost you something. If it's the same action you took, it's going to cost you something. If it's both, it's going to cost you even a little bit more. But these actions include getting some of those allies that Ryan mentioned, mobilizing and moving around the board, uh, reinforcing. A lot of these things are just going to kind of give you the things that you need to kind of take all of the actions as well. And then finally, weave, which has one of the mechanics, which relates to the wheel on your player board.
Yeah. I mean, there's got to be a wheel, right? It's wheel of time.
I hope so.
Uh, a lot of the things you're doing in the game give you rewards. They give you those crowns. They give you new characters. They give you new allies to go to your tableau. But every playerboard has wheels that spin. And these wheels do different things. As you move them along the outside edge, you're going to unlock some benefits, strengthen your team of heroes or your armies based on which mode you're playing, but it's asymmetric. So, the light side is more focused about building up their characters. There's a small group of characters. the main characters you consider Ran, Parn, Matt, uh, and you have a whole host of like other supporting characters that can go on the map, but those are like the three focuses for hero mode. In epic mode, you have a little bit of a wider cast of characters that you can upgrade, but the light set is all about upgrading their characters, getting stronger versions of them, whereas the shadow side is all about unlocking the forsaken from their prison. And that's uh a big thematic thing in the game. The seals are breaking, the forsaken are coming out.
there's a big forsaken deck on the board and based on how well the shadow player does, how far they move their wheel every round, they will unleash more of these forsaken into the world and they'll get a little bit stronger as they go, whereas the light will just keep upgrading their characters and they'll get stronger as they go. So, there is definitely that like ramping escalation in both modes.
Yeah. One other difference I noticed and maybe Ryan you can explain this to me. You also had corruption that you were dealing with that I of course as delight I'm not going to be corrupting anything but tell me a little bit about that as it relates to the overall IP and the game.
Yeah. So there's uh a few goals to the game. I mean the whole plot of the books leads to the Tarman Giden the the final battle where light and dark meet. Uh for hero mode we kind of end there because we're not doing any epic battles. Um, but if you're playing epic mode, you actually do fight out the last battle. And a lot of what you're doing throughout the game is to build to that. And one of the things that you're trying to do is raise support around the world. Yeah, you're fighting each other, but you're also wanting to do some area control. Each one of these sections of the map has a little control box where if you control enough spaces, you get to take control and those batters will come fight for you. You've got these banner tracks along the outside edge that are going to give you some points during the game or at the end of the game. and if you're playing epic mode give you some powers that you can use during the last battle, but it's it's asymmetric. You just have one track and if you get all the way to the top of that track, you get 12 points. The shadow has two tracks. So, I'm still wanted to get batters, but I only get eight points if I get to the top of the track. However,
times two, maybe
times two if I can get both trackers. I have a batter tracker and a corruption tracker. The corruption tracker requires me to drop these corruption markers in cities that I've visited and I kind of want to protect them because you might be coming in there and taking them away from me. I lose them. At the end of the round, I will get points for every corrupted city that I have. So, the more I can corrupt, the more points I get. So, one of the things that you're going to want to do at the as the light is take those corruption markers away. Of course, there's more that's happening on the map. You're controlling these areas. You're trying to deal with these uh corruption markers. And every round, there's going to be two missions. And again, these missions are very thematic. We have the eye of the world and the prophet of the dragon out right now. And we're going to put these little snake and fox tokens out on the board. One mission is attributed to the snakes, one is to the foxes. It's a little little inside joke there. If you've read the books,
I'll trust you.
So, you're going to put those out there and you're going to be putting one or two markers out on the board. These are also things that you're wanting to control. So, there's a lot of decisions you're going to have to make as to where to put your focus every turn. Uh, especially in hero mode, you're really focusing down on where your heroes are going to go. Now, there's no direct combat in hero mode. What you have is like strength values for all of your units.
Very deterministic.
Very deterministic. If you go into an area, you have the higher strength. You win. You route my guy. He goes off the board. He runs away. He'll come back later, but he's licking his wounds. And you'll take control of those areas. And you'll get some extra points for doing so. In epic mode, it is a little more granular. You're literally raising armies. There's a whole You want to hand me I'll show you because I built I built a little tray for these. They're just these stacks of different army cards that you can add to your armies and you're actually building out and you're going to have army miniatures or or flags or whatever on the board that are moving around. And when those collide, you'll switch to a giant battle where you're actually kind of assigning your people uh to this battle board. So, one difference between the games is this. Yeah,
the hero mode doesn't have this battle board at all. Whereas for me, I love the battling. It lets me all that strategic thought I put into building my banners and whether it's going to be a heavy attack banner or a heavy defense banner or if I can line up two banners and attack you twice in a row as you try to run away or whatever. There's just a lot of thematic uh strategic thinking that goes into how you kind of build out these armies and then they'll have clashes all over the battlefield. And again, that's what makes epic mode, I think, what you would call epic is just you have these giant huge battles all the way leading up to the last battle, which you actually play out the last battle by kind of taking everything you've done to this point and using it to help you win in the different lanes of the last battle.
Yeah, based on what Ryan's explained to me about the epic mode, I would say that the battles in this, like we said, very deterministic. They happen very quickly. It's kind of like a macro perspective of a battle. The strategy is still there, but the strategy happens from way up high. Right.
For sure.
In epic mode, that strategy still exists. But then when a battle happens, imagine you're just going zooming in and there being probably even more strategic battle that takes place with all the army cards that you've collected.
Yeah, it it's very strategic. You're going to be trying to assign them to these different routes, wondering, okay, if I go to the center, which is where you can route an enemy army, are they going to put all their units in the center, and you're kind of assigning these units in secret, then revealing them, and whoever has the most strength in each lane wins. Sometimes you can win all three lanes if you play smartly. And if you, you know, there's a real mind game of like, are you going to go here? Are you going to go there? Like, just like in a real battle, you're like, are they coming from the left or the right, the center, where am I putting my guys? I would say that that those mind games are the one thing that you've explained to me that sounds intriguing to me. Even though the epic mode isn't generally my kind of game. Yeah,
that aspect sounds really interesting.
Well, when you get to the last battle in epic mode, you have all these tiles. These are awards that you're going to hand out. In hero mode, if you win a different thing, you're getting points. So, if you have you get points from your banners, you'll get points for having allies, and you'll get points for having the highest strength of your heroes or leaders at the end of the game. But in uh the last battle in epic mode, you don't just flat out get points for some of that stuff. You get these tokens, and these tokens will help you win the last battle, but it's not necessarily obvious where you're going to put them. And even if you go into the last battle and you've won like all of the tokens you could possibly win, which is very hard to do, by the way, it's never, you know, very obvious like, okay, I'm going into this last battle. I know I'm going to be destroyed. These are like kind of like combat tricks and there's, you know, some fun things you can pull off with these and with the power cards, which are just powers that you collect over the game, like action cards that do crazy things.
Yeah, the power cards let you do some really unique things when your opponent least expects it. One other thing I wanted to mention too is a lot of the things we've talked about, and we have really kind of glossed over everything, but a lot of them have some interconnectivity that we really haven't touched on. the tableau that you're building, the cards that you're playing. You know, we didn't even mention this, but when you select one of your actions, you're playing one of the cards out of your hand to sort of go along with that action. Now, to some degree, the card and the action can be quite independent, but as the game goes on and you build your tableau, you're going to be playing cards for other reasons than just what's on the card and what the card does, because it might be an icon. And if you have enough of those icons, it enhances the action that you're taking. So, there's a lot of layers to even just the game play. Even though it's pretty straightforward in terms of selecting an action, playing a card, you're done with your turn.
There's a lot more that goes into those decisions.
Well, there Yeah, there is a lot because you're you're kind of deciding which lanes you're going to go into throughout the game. I mean, I talked about all the different things that score, getting your banners, getting the corruption, winning these objectives is really going to give you a lot of small bonuses along the way. Building out your ally pool is going to give you these huge, you know, you could have some huge columns in your tableau, which is going to give you benefits at the end of the game, but it's also going to make that action better. And there are some other things that might trigger based on how many cards you have in specific rows. So, you can really lean into those things. I mean, when I'm playing uh as like even the shadow player, there's so many different things I have to consider when I sit down to play the game. And a lot of it is watching what you're doing. Are you trying to stop me from getting wheel spin so I can't break the seals and get my forsaken? But if you're doing that, you're not stopping me from building my army. So there's just all these tugofwarss that are happening all across the board. And I like to believe that uh you know, it's going to create a lot of thematic moments like when you play Star Wars Rebellion, you'll get these moments that happen organically where you're like, "Oh, that happened just like the movies." Like my Luke Skywalker just blew an X-wing and blew up the Death Star. Like that I couldn't have planned that better. That happens in this too.
And I I I really like those moments.
So is this game going to make me want to? Because mentioning Star Wars, I can relate to that. If I could play Star Wars Rebellion and experience that, I've seen those movies millions of times.
Is this going to make me want to read the books, you think?
I mean, I honestly do think so. I think that people that will play this. And of course, like I'm saying this because I was on the design team and I love Wheel of Time. So, I'm like, I want everyone to read Wheel of Time. But if you find yourself loving this game and you're playing some of these cards and you're like, "Oh, this sounds cool. This card's called the Pit of Doom. This card's called Rats and Ravens: The Shadows Touch." like and you go through these missions and you're like and all the artwork is created for for this uh for the game. Um and it's all phenomenal. So it's not like we're not pulling from you a TV show or whatever. This is all based on the books and it's all original artwork. And I honestly it's intriguing. I think if you've never read the books and you come play this game, first of all, you're not going to be at any kind of loss if you haven't read the books. Like it's not like I've read the books, so I'm going to do what Matt did in chapter four or book six or whatever. like that. That's not how you play the game. Now, those moments might happen, but I I can see the reverse happening.
You're like, you know, you you fall in love with the world. You you get interested in the characters and that makes you want to, you know, learn about the history, the backstory.
Yeah. I think fans of the property will come for the property, stay for the game, and the reverse might happen as well. If the type of game this is sounds like something that's compelling to you, you'll play it, and that might spill over into wanting to know a little bit more about the universe.
Yeah, for sure. And it's a it's a rich universe and people have questioned like how do you fit everything in there? Well, I'll tell you like there there's so much and there's one thing we haven't talked about yet that I want to talk about the last thing. This was a way we squeezed in a lot of the theme was in this epic mode because you're going to have one more tugofwar and that is an events track and you're going to be drawing some of these cards as rewards and a lot of them are going to give you objectives to complete. So that's one more thing you have to think about when you're playing your turn is how to complete these objectives. But every time you do, you get to add one of your cards to that row. Whoever completes the most cards uh gets to the middle slot first is going to win that token for the last battle. But every single one of those event cards is named after something in the books. They're all named after like chapters or events and things that have actually happened. So if you are a fan, especially if you're like me and you're like a diehard fan that can actually name some of the significant chapters of the books, you're going to see those across all of the different cards and events in the game. And that's a really cool feeling.
I I've always said that even if I wasn't on the design team, this is I we designed a Wheel of Time game for us for for people that love Wheel of Time.
That's the best way to go.
But we also wanted to make sure that gamers would have a lot of fun with it because we're gamers at our hearts, too.
Yeah. I will say from a gaming perspective and again even though I haven't played epic mode a lot of the things that it adds and a lot of the things the base game has too or the the hero mode is those var not variable but those different tugs of war that Ryan was talking about which you find in a lot of smaller games right like seven wonders duel things like that where you're like
just like that
he's doing this I haven't done anything over there I'm working on these missions there's a lot of like plates to keep spinning um is it kind of thing where you want to keep all the plates spinning or can you like say you know what I'm going to ignore this?
You kind of want to keep Well, I'm not going to, you know, speak highly on the strategies, but you do. So, I always feel when I play these kind of games, I want to keep all the plates spinning because if it seems to you that I've dropped the plate, then you'll be like, "Oh, I can just win that. I don't even need to worry about if I'm leaving my plate spinning, I'm making you maybe overcommit
to winning something where reality is I might
pull back at the last minute and go, I'm done fighting over that.
Now that you've committed all your resources to that, I'm not even going to come after anymore.
Ryan is let little letting us
I like to spin all the plates.
Giving a glimpse into your strategy, your your strategic way of thinking. I think that for a lot of these kind of games, if there's an area that you're clearly abandoning, like if it's clear I'm not going after these missions, you don't really need to commit a lot to them.
This is why I'm not good at these games.
Like I I look at one thing and I commit to it. Uh but that's that says a lot about my type of play.
That's why we That's a little easier to do in hero mode.
It is. Yeah, for sure. Uh but that is War of the Dragon, the Wheel of Time. If you have any questions at all about it, please make them in the comments below. This guy for sure will be down there answering whatever he can.
And in our Discord, we're talking about Wheel of Time like crazy in our Discord. So, be on there.
All right, until next time, make sure everyone has one at the table and we'll see you then.