You know me, i’m always trying to improve the gameplay rules haha.

Releasing hundreds of cards this past year gave me much needed information regarding areas that the game does well, and areas in where the game falters a bit. I wanted to take a moment and discuss some problems with the current game rules and potential improvements.

Disclaimer: These are only game design concepts and are not set in stone, everything can change. Also, these changes are planned for when all the Millennium Chapter sets are released, and not before that.

The Terrain Issue

Terrains have been an integral part of the game since the start, but they have some obvious flaws, specially in paper play.

Terrains do not belong to either Deck, but they still need to be carried along to a duel (specially in paper play) and they do have effects or relevant information so they cannot be easily replaced by tokens without a reference.

One of these problems is the requirement to have five potential Terrains of each type. And while this isn’t strictly necessary, Terrains can be modified by both the player and an opponent so there’s a chance you might have to play terrains you don’t have with you or you haven’t brought to the duel. Not that big of a deal you may say, and you’re partially right, but is also a sign of potential issues going forward (specially in paper play).

We have 40 different Terrains at the moment, and i’m hesitant when making new ones. You may have noticed how I intentionally reduced the amount of different Terrain markers since Battle City (Arc 1 had 14 Terrains, Arc 2 had 19 terrains, Arc 3 had 5 and now Arc 4 had 2). Personally, i find this design space limiting because i don’t see a strong justification for making 100 Terrains or more, given the potential issue that having such an amount would bring out (is it fair to ask a player to carry a ton of different Terrain Markers for paper play?).

There is also the fact that most Terrains are, at the moment, a bit boring and haven’t been explored as much as they could. For example, something that we discussed a couple of times within the community was the possibility of making multiple layers of Terrain to make gameplay more interesting (placing one Terrain on top of another for example). I was against it due the fear of overcomplicating the field (cards can have attachments and are already on top of a Terrain so adding another one felt problematic, and could lead to even more Terrain Cards to carry around), even though i liked the concept and felt that it could open a lot of design space more akin to the original D&D-esque rules of Duelist Kingdom.

Related to Terrains, the Field Setup Rule cards are also boring at the moment, only used as a reminder at the beginning of the duel for the starting terrains and nothing more.

Potential Changes to Terrains and Field Cards

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this topic, but i’m leaning to the following approach:

• Drastically reduce the amount of Terrains available. Terrains can be considered a shared game component, and i don’t see a strong justification of having dozens or even hundreds of those components, when they are fundamentally different to the uniqueness that a player Main and Extra Deck have already.

• Move away some of the complexity or possibilities that a Terrain has to the Rule cards, in particular to the Field Setup Rule cards that feel underdeveloped and barely useful. An example to illustrate my point: “maybe a particular Mountain placed by this Field Setup Rule is different than a Mountain played by a different Field Setup”.

Which directly leads me to my next point:

Terrain Quirks

So, what if one could change a Terrain by adding a word to it through an effect? In doing so, the actual card doesn’t change and we don’t need as many physical Terrain Markers as we have now, but instead we apply a word to it.

For example: “Meadow (at Night)” or “Sea (Raining)” or “(Jungle) Forest” are changes on how one could interpret these terrains. Further effects from other cards could take advantage of these specific words, regardless of their base terrain (or in addition to them), as they act as phenomenoms or events.

We already did something like this but in a more general way (cards that say “a FIRE ‘Wasteland’ terrain…”, for example), and the idea is to give that more direction and weight.

This would be just a naming convention. Players would take advantage of that with other card effects, visible on the board, without requiring more text on the Terrain markers. Field Rule cards should probably affect all the Terrains in the field the same way (easier for tracking), while specific cards could change one or more specific terrains in a column for example.

These words could act as hazards (something negative like storms, burned places, destroyed cities) or as something positive or at least neutral (darkening the area, having a lake in the middle of a plains, or adding light to a specific corner of a dark cave, stuff like that), just to name a few ideas from the top of my head.

Some cons are that this system is not as clean visually as having separated cards for each terrain, and is also not as easy to track. But it offers flexibility and allows Terrains to have more effects with fewer cards (essentially making a terrain multi-layer system possible too).

This is just a concept. I would love to hear feedback about this idea.

Tilemaps and Terrains

Related to the Terrains are the Tilemaps (grid-based terrains like the Labyrinth). A lot of advancements and rule changes were made on them since the rule rewrite, and i’m quite happy with how they are at the moment. But i would like to go even further beyond, and actually tie them somehow to the Terrains. Nowadays Tilemap and Terrains are not compatible, but i honestly don’t see why not, if a proper system were in place. A tilemap with different terrains layouts within it could be really interesting to play around.

I don’t have anything solid for this just yet, but i would like to explore alternatives.

Doubling down on Duelist cards

In our previous large update, i decided to deal with the overabundance of Rule cards by cutting a lot of the repetitive ones. That worked really well, so i’m doubling down on that!

We reduced quite a lot of Duelist cards, and gave them a clearer purpose. The mechanic of adding up to two cards from your Strategy to the starting hand was well received and performed well during playtest, making everything feel more “anime”. I would like to go even a bit further, and the provisional idea right now would be to have only a single Duelist card per character per chapter. This would mean a single card, with multiple alternative artworks for different moments of the story.

A Duelist card could have one (or more than one) Strategy, but these strategies should only have 5 cards each, to balance them a bit more around each other (because, why would you play a card like “Orichalcos Police” when “Dartz” exists and has the same strategy but with more cards and effects, right?). Having only 5 also serve to represent a more focused and ideal initial hand.

Effects deviating from Duelist Setup Rule cards (like effects copying strategies or allowing different integration summons) could remain on each Duelist card like they are now, or maybe trigger different Rule cards, that’s still to be defined.

Symbol Cards

As mentioned before, i’m not particularly happy with the state of Symbol Rule cards, their gameplay or their clunky tracking subsystem, specially being something secondary and optional to regular gameplay.

Those that actually played with them would notice how weird it is to track the charge system (with a die for example) in a stack of cards (the rule zone) instead of a specific card like it should feel natural. Having to manipulate these charges every turn (specially with those that regain charges) and remembering to use the power within a round instead of a turn is also confusing.

I don’t think Symbols have managed to hit the mark with the idea i had for them.

So, for a redesign this is the current concept:

• I’m leaning directly towards eliminating Charges. You would have 10 action points per day (day resets at 00 for your timezone or something like that), and you would not be able to regain more points in any way. Each card effect would have a specific cost. Additional restrictions would be to make effects “Daily” (only once per day).
• I would like to focus heavily on 4th-wall breaking effects. I want to make them creative, unique, based on things outside the game and completely disconnected from rounds and turns and the game cycle. The idea would be that they could be activated at will whenever you want, and could only be answered by another symbol.

Rulebook Clarifications Needed

There are quite a lot of edge cases going around that need more clarity within the rulebook, or straight up new definitions about them to prevent odd behaviour.

Starter Decks and Tabletop Simulator

I will be working back on the Tabletop Simulator mod once the Millennium Chapter is completed. But instead of adding all the cards directly there, the intention is to have pre-constructed Starter Decks available, and integrate even more our Deckbuilding tool so anyone can create a deck to play with.

This will be specially useful because i tend to change the cards as the game evolves, and i won’t need to keep all the cards updated in 3 places (Downloads, Deckbuilder and Tabletop) but only on 2 (Downloads and Deckbuilder), while also being useful for a newcomer to just pick 2 decks with a friend and play.

I will be making the Starter Decks with the community, so feel free to make suggestions!

Upcoming Summoning Mechanics

You may already guessed that by adapting Yugioh Scrolls into the game we will reach new Summoning Mechanics eventually (like Synchro and Xyz).

When the original idea was to make the story chapters in order (first DM, then GX, then 5D’s…), these mechanics were far away, but since the plan changed and the current idea is to release the story in a more open way, this means that the summoning mechanics need to be ready for when the story drops.

Luckily, the mechanics have been adapted to this game a long time ago. They had received minor tweaks here and there, but the core concept of each one is well defined and ready to go. I will be introducing them soon(ish) so stay tuned for that.

TL;DR:

• Is likely that the amount of Terrain cards are reduced, and “pseudo-layers” are added to them to make them more interesting (“rainy meadow”, “burned wasteland”, “mountain at night”, etc.)
• Some of the complexity of Terrains can be moved to the Field Setup Rule cards.
• I would love to somehow mesh Tilemaps with Terrains.
• One Duelist Rule per character per chapter, with multiple artworks. Each Strategy would be capped at five cards.
• Symbol cards need a full redesign.
• The Tabletop Simulator will have several Starter Decks instead of the full card sets (people can still get all the cards from the Deckbuilder and import them into Tabletop Simulator if they want).
• We will be seeing new Summoning Mechanics soon.