Duel of Meloch: My Favorite Mechanism
Transcript
Hey, I'm Jamie from Stonemaier Games, and today I'm really excited to talk to you about my favorite mechanisms in our new game Duel of Meloch. This is a Scythe versus Expeditions stand-alone dueling game that also expands Scythe and Expeditions and can be expanded by Scythe and Expeditions. I'll talk about that more in a minute. I have a few mechanisms to talk about here, but the overall idea was that I wanted to make a game set in the 1920+ universe of Scythe and Expeditions where each player or one player would play as Scythe and one player would play as Expeditions in kind of an epic duel. Like, who would win in a fight basically between if you had a giant Expeditions mech and a and and and the card play of of Expeditions versus the engine building, the sheer number of units in in Scythe, who would win in that? And this game answers that question. Um or you can answer that question when you play this game.
This is a completely stand-alone game. So, it comes with a new Scythe faction, a new Scythe player mat. Uh I'll hold those up while I'm talking. New Scythe faction, new Scythe player mat. And it also comes with a new Expeditions mech mat and mech and mech miniature. And along with all the Scythe miniatures, of course. And you can see the scale of these. The Scythe miniatures are of course Scythe size and the Expeditions miniature is quite big. Kind of has a riverboat theme to it. Um along with a new character, a new companion, and a bunch of expansion components for those games like new factory cards, new encounter cards, new discovery cards for Expeditions. But, let's talk about my favorite mechanisms um mostly related to this game specifically, the stand-alone game element specifically. So, I think one of the biggest differences is uh or not differences, one of the biggest mechanisms that I really love is how the triumph track works. The triumph track is double-sided. This game is a race to put four stars on this Triumph track. And we each have different but related goals on this track. So if you are playing as Scythe, you are going after these goals. And if I as Expeditions, I'm going after these goals up here. So for example, let's look at popularity.
You are going for 10 popularity if you're playing as as the Scythe player. I'm going for three. The term isn't popularity in Expeditions, but here we're we're using the same icon because it is the same icon. There's a lot of icon overlap between the two games. Um if uh I complete this goal before you do, or whoever I guess completes the goal first, they put a star right here. And unlike the Triumph track in Scythe, only one star can go here. So if I have gone here, I've blocked off that category for you. And so that's where the race component for this game comes in. We are both racing to complete four of these goals. And sometimes we're going to go after the same goals. Sometimes I need to really pay attention to what goals you're going after and focus on something else instead. Because I I see that maybe you already have a pretty good head start in so some of these goals. So there's a little bit of this tug-of-war element, even though you're not necessarily pulling something away from the other player, um where uh you the maybe another player does pull ahead, but you have a way that you think you can race ahead of them. And there's a few ways to be sneaky with that as well, that you might pursue it anyway. Also importantly, uh this is double sided so that there's a lot of good variety I think from from game to game.
The Triumph track, one of the biggest elements of the game, it is a race to four stars on this Triumph track. Also notably for kind of replayability is a double sided map. Um so this map is designed specifically for two players. And yes, this is a natural rubber playmat. Yes, this is in every box. This isn't like an add-on. This is just part of the game. Um it's a double sided rubber playmat here. And one side kind of has the the expedition style art, and one side has the top-down bird's-eye view as seen in Scythe, but they are two different maps here. Um and they are designed for for both the Scythe player and the Expeditions player. Although you can play Scythe versus Scythe, you can play Expeditions versus Expeditions if you have Scythe, if you have Expeditions. But notably in terms of mechanisms, it's just a tight map. Like you can't really avoid the other player. And oftentimes you're kind of tiptoeing around the other player.
You're you're trying to stay just out of range of the Scythe mech, which has a great range, or or of the Expeditions mech, or the Scythe mechs and character, which can pretty well jump across the board through the tunnel, through special abilities, things like that. So you're really keeping an eye on where the other player is. And that again, this is double-sided, too. So this is double-sided and the Triumph Track is double-sided. So even just out of the box you have a a lot of replayability based on those combinations. As for combat, combat has a few things that I think are mechanically are new and different here. And part of it is tied to the tight map. One element is that if our units share the same our combat units share the same uh territory, the same hex, they don't necessarily have to fight. It is a player decision for them to enter combat. For the Scythe player, they're deciding I want to enter combat. They have to stop, their movement ends, but they still get to decide if they want to uh proceed with combat or not. That's their choice. And I think this is pretty cool sort of the game because there are times that they might not actually want to engage in combat. And for the Expeditions player, there's an action called uh vanquish in in Expeditions.
That's how you typically get rid of corruption, and uh the Expeditions player kind of views the Scythe player as corruption in this game. So if they want to engage in combat, they need to gain a vanquish benefit or use a vanquish action essentially, to engage with combat. So, it isn't ever inherent that uh an Expeditions player will fight the side player. They need that vanquish benefit to do so. Also, and this is one of my favorite things about this expansion or this the stand-alone game slash expansion. Again, I'll go to the expansion element in a minute. Are the new combat cards. There is a new deck of 60 combat cards. Now, they're not all different. There's one different card per number ranging from zero all the way up to seven. So, that aspect is a little bit similar to the original combat cards, which were numbered 1 through 5, and there's different quantities of each card depending on the number. Kind of a a parabola of numbers here.
So, from zero to seven, so slightly different numerical range. Um that is a a little similar to the original combat cards. But, what's different here is that each of the numbers has a different ability. So, for example, zero here says uh it's a munitions bounty. Increase the value of this card to the power spent on your dial. So, if I play this card and I've spent seven power on my dial, this number becomes seven. Uh and so, my total combat combat strength there is 14, which is a lot. Same as in Scythe, you can play one of these per uh combat unit that you have in the combat. And that's not all cuz there's one other thing you can do if you're getting combat cards in this dueling game. And actually, you can use these in Scythe as well. Um you can even technically use them in Expeditions cuz Expeditions isn't really designed for mech versus mech combat unless you're using the duel format.
But, um if you have a bunch of combat cards and you're not really using them, maybe you're done getting combat stars, combat victory stars in the triumph track, every combat card has a discard ability that you can use on your turn. There's four different abilities here. And I picked them based on things that could work for both Scythe and Expeditions. So, let's see if I can get all of them up here. Yeah, here we go. So, there is gain a power up here. There is um and these are you can discard these on your turn and not in the middle of combat. You can discard these on your turn to gain these benefits. You can gain coins, which is pretty crucial in this game because coins are one of the triumph track categories. So, you might look like you're behind on coins, but if you have a few combat cards with coins, you can spend them on your turn to jump up that up towards that goal.
Get workers. Workers apply to both side of an expeditions and refresh. Refresh is something that was originally in expeditions where it it refreshes your action token, but in side it's a new benefit that you can gain that says move your action token from um its current section on your player mat to a different section. So, if I have it on this section, I can move it over to this section. And if I do that in the middle of my turn, so say I take this top row action and then I discard one of these cards for a refresh benefit, I can move my token over here and proceed with the bottom row benefit of the second action. Um so, I think that's that's pretty cool that you can you can actually combine two actions from separate sections on your player mat, which is something you couldn't do before.
All right, I've rambled on long enough, but these are my favorite mechanisms in Viticulture. Actually, I almost forgot the other thing. It is a standalone game, but it is also an expansion and it also uh is expanded by Viticulture and Expeditions. And what I mean by that is that there are components in here including like the map, the dual format in general, the um the combat cards, the the discovery cards, and most importantly, the new faction, the new player mat, the new uh mech mat, the new character, the new companion, all that stuff expands Viticulture and Expeditions and you can bring in any faction, any player mat, any mech, any character, and any companion from Viticulture or expeditions into the duel um to to have a bunch of different match up. So if you already own side or expeditions, you essentially already own a pretty robust expansion to duel of Melch.
Anyway, those are my favorite uh mechanisms for this game. If you have any questions about it. Oh and I actually didn't really show you the answer, but here's here's the insert that has um everything organized in here. Um but yeah, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I'm happy to talk about the mechanisms of this game there. Thanks.