DECIPHER.com > The Lord of the Rings > Expansions > Siege of Gondor

The King and the Castamir

by Tom Lischke
Senior Game Designer

This article is going to take a look at enduring, the new keyword in Siege of Gondor. But first I want to detour to the card I spoiled last week, Gandalf, Leader of Men. There has been enough discussion to make me think you might want to hear a little bit of the theory behind that card.

Tales of Long Ago

The story actually starts back in The Fellowship of the Ring set. As we tested the initial set, we realized that running a Gandalf deck had a problem particular to his culture. A Gandalf deck, of course, needs Gandalf in play. There were only two options, both of which hurt the deck's potential.

The first option was to start Gandalf. The mechanics of the game dictate that this is a dangerous proposition. A lucky draw by the opponent (or a particularly bad and companion free draw by you), and you are in trouble. The other 4 cost companion at the time, Aragorn, at least had some protection against the early overwhelm because of the defender +1 mechanic.

To address this, we added the option of not starting Gandalf, but instead playing a combination of Gandalfs and A Wizard is Never Late. Usually it would be 4 or more copies between the two cards, which diluted the potency of the other Gandalf culture support cards in the deck.

Fast forward to Siege development. We had some text on Gandalf that wasn't working, so the developers went back to the drawing board. After a bit of refinement, what they came up with solves a problem for Gandalf decks (or at the very least, gives them a new look). The ability to start Gandalf with an additional companion or two, without giving up 5-7 card slots, opens up the option to dig a little more deeply into the Gandalf card pool.

But you came here to hear about enduring and to see some spoilers. Well, we can do that. Just between us, we've already made you wait about four months longer for this keyword than we originally intended.

Pirates and Ghosts

Let's take another look back. When Joe Alread and I sat down to lay out King block, Joe had come up with a number of different mechanics. The idea was to make people change what they valued in the game. For instance, initiative makes the Free Peoples player value cards in hand as opposed to maximizing the number of cards he or she plays that turn. Threats mean that keeping companions from dying has more value than it used to, when losing one had few repercussions.

Joe also came up with a concept that he called deranged that was supposed to impact how people thought about wounds on characters. Originally, this was a concept for minions, but I wanted to make it something that would work both for minions and the Army of the Dead. I might have been caught up in the placeholder word that Joe had selected, and I also wanted something that tied the AoD to the bad guys. I'll add that I'm a big fan of symmetry, and I also wanted a mechanic that could show up in equal parts on the AoD and the other new group, the corsairs (who fight each other in the book). I wanted to be able to play those two groups off each other.

We labeled deranged as a sub-mechanic, and decided to work on initiative and threats first. Both were big concepts that ended up consuming a lot of time and energy in development. Because those mechanics were on so many cards, by the time we got to deranged, we were running out of time. We also started to hear scary things about the availability of Army of the Dead and corsair images for the Return of the King set. We made a decision to hold those two subcultures, as well as the deranged mechanic, for Siege of Gondor. In the long run, I'm happy about the image issues that pushed us into that decision, as enduring née deranged eventually consumed a lot of development energy as well.

The Edge of the Knife

I'm not sure exactly when the switch happened, but by the time the cards started popping into the Siege of Gondor files, deranged had successfully applied for a name change, and become enduring. As I mentioned before, the idea behind the mechanic was to change how players thought about wounds.

The original definition looked like this: A character with the 'deranged' keyword is strength -2 for each wound on that character. A deranged character does not die when it has 0 vitality. Wounds may not be voluntarily assigned to a deranged character if they have less than one vitality remaining. At the end of each turn, discard each deranged minion or kill each deranged companion if that character has less than 1 vitality remaining.)

I asked Development to comment on their assessment of the situation, and here is what they had to say:

Deranged was supposed to be a bonus trait, allowing minions and companions to survive a bit longer than they usually would. To make deranged a bonus for minions, we would have had to make the strength of a four-vitality minion somewhere in the low twenties; it would gradually shrink as it took wounds. However, if a minion has twenty plus strength, it's probably not going to take wounds unless it gets shot by Legolas or absorbs some other form of direct damage. So we'd have these inordinately large minions running amok, with only Legolas, Greenleaf to keep them in check!

Companions were equally problematic. A normal 3 cost companion is a 7-strength 3-vitality character. If that character takes a wound, it's still a 7-strength 3-vitality character. If a deranged companion with similar stats takes a wound, it shrinks; it gradually becomes nothing better than a 0-strength speed bump. Again, to make deranged a bonus trait for a companion, we'd have to start that companion out at some immense size...which would, again, keep it from taking wounds in the first place.

In addition to these structural problems, it was a complicated rule. The fix that development suggested was to turn enduring into a bonus. It was flipped around and streamlined to eliminate the confusing rules. The new definition is essentially the following: An enduring character is strength +2 for each wound on it.

But, of course, there is risk. Each time you grab one of those +2 tokens for your character, you are that much closer to losing him or her. A little direct damage or a surprise skirmish event and you've got trouble.

Ghosts and Pirates

Ok, I've made you wait a long time for the spoilers, but I promise that they are right around the corner.

Remember when I mentioned that originally the mechanic was targeted for minions? One of the ramifications of the change was that it actually worked better on the Army of the Dead. The fact that you are committing your companions to that knife edge makes the decisions involved a lot of fun. When you give your big fighters wounds intentionally, you are certainly looking at the game a little bit differently. Which, of course, is what we were hoping for all along.

Once we came up with the new version of enduring, we rewrote the Army of the Dead. When we laid out their numbers, they had less strength than normal companions with the same cost. The reaction to that round of cards was essentially "why do I want to play with companions that are under the strength curve?" We realized that if we had to convince people that it was a good card, we needed to try again. Thus, the Army gained the theme of adding threats to play (as well as many of their support cards). This goes back to that knife's edge. With enduring, they actually turn into normal strength companions with the potential to go to above the strength curve. The drawback is having those threats looming, waiting to make your companions go off like popcorn. Of course, if a normal Wraith adds one threat to play, the King should add two.

Notice that Swept Away brings back some of the flavor of the unkillable characters from the deranged era.

The last card that I have for you is the Castamir of Umbar. Not much to say about him, but if you look at Geoff's article on the corsairs, I'm sure you'll see his potential. He, and the other enduring minions, also use the knife edge concept that makes enduring fun.

Don't forget to stop by my web chat on Thursday to join the discussion on enduring or tell my why you do or don't like Gandalf!

February 9, 2004