We started with an idea, what if we looked outside the borders of the Four Kingdoms? As part of that, the design team had to throw some extra difficulty in: Torments. Now, here to talk about these new additions is game designer Noah Cohen.
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Cursed Origins
Today we’re going to talk about torments, the additional challenges making everything harder as you work to defeat the adversary. We knew from the first drafts of Expeditions, before it even had a name, that we wanted an analogue expansion to keep things quick, accessible, and modular. We started by looking for a big hook, which Rob Daviau explained in the previous design diary. Things are worse than ever, so it’s time to explore beyond the Four Kingdoms in search of help.
Once we settled on the hook, we started digging into the specifics. Something is wrong with the kingdoms. Worse and more terrible than ever before. Sounds great on paper, but we needed something tangible, so we turned to our big book of ideas (read: spreadsheet).
We have a document where we keep all of our ideas for expansions, some of them big, some of them small, and all of them lovingly added to whenever something inspires us. Weather, gold, [redacted], special items, etc. One of the earliest tabs in that sheet held ways to increase the foe difficulty for players who want some added danger. Mechanically, you added enhancements to your selected foes that make each one harder in some way. We played a few games with the ‘foe enhancements’ and knew we had something interesting that dovetailed nicely with needing extra help from afar.
It was pretty obvious “Foe enhancements” didn’t fit the vibe, so we started calling them “curses”. When we started drilling down on the narrative of the world around the Four Kingdoms, we changed away from curses, which are the province of the Inkstain Isles, where dark magics can be bent to helpful ends. Instead, we settled on “torments”, which feels appropriate to the increasingly dangerous machinations of the Tower and its minions.
A World of Pain
So how do they work? Each foe has a torment which will affect all foes of that type for as long as the torment is in effect. Some of them twist combat, making each Battle more punishing. Others affect the map near the affected foes, making key actions harder until you hunt down the enemies causing the problem. These make for a fun mix of challenges, but they are all still attached to foes you want to fight anyway. Some of the smaller torments weren’t much of a threat if they disappeared when you defeated a low tier foe. That led to additional torments that aren’t attached to any one foe type, but instead affect the whole board, or even the rules of the game, with no easy workaround.
During setup you’ll select a difficulty level which indicates how many torments you’ll be dealing with. None of them are so bad as to make the game unwinnable on their own (although the nightmare torments will test that claim). The more of them that you have, the harder the game gets. As players, you can try to muscle through these challenges, dodge or move the foes to avoid their new effects. Or you can travel on an expedition to get special tools to handle things, like extra strong items, special sites to upgrade the game board. You’ll even uncover the ability to remove an active torment, which will solve it for the rest of the game. How you choose to tackle them is up to you, but whatever you choose, we think you’ll find a fiendish puzzle waiting.
Check back next time, when we highlight the heroes leading the charge against this new threat and check out the Kickstarter campaign here!