Team Size: 3 | Role: Designer

Responsibilities:
– Lead concept design
– Spell card designer
– Designed mage team systems
– Administered playtests
– Balanced game systems

Dragon’s Hoard is a pvp print and play board game where a team of mages work together to loot the dragon’s hoard. The dragon is controlled by one player and all other players are on the mage team. The game is inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Casting Shadows. The game is made to emulate the mechanical feel of fantasy tabletop role-playing games with a low skill floor and high accessibility.

I developed the functions and system of the mage team. I designed the player actions and the minute to minute gameplay loop. Most of my work came down to developing the spell cards that made up nearly all of the mages possible actions. I used spreadsheets to create a deck of 40 spell cards balanced by resource type, total cost, and power per resource.

I then formatted all of the card data into printable playing cards and went through a couple iterations during playtesting for balance patches regarding card damages, ranges, and resource costs.

I also worked on developing and refining player action economy to ensure fair competition between the mages and dragon across variable mage team sizes. This was done through variable health for mages that changed based on team size; dragons resource cost for actions reducing for large mage teams; increasing the mage win condition threshold; and refining mage action economy.