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

Counter of Things Dwarven

by Tom Lischke
Senior Game Designer

1

One is for Aggression. It gives your Dwarves damage +1. This card, along with the new version of Gimli and Wish for Our Kinfolk are the "providers" for the new Dwarven damage mechanic in Siege of Gondor.

When we looked at our list of card slots for Siege, we saw that we had 6-8 Dwarf and 6-8 Elven cards on the agenda. The first design for both cultures was pretty flat. There were a couple of ideas we liked, such as Counts But One. This card is the end of a long line of attempts to make Gimli more of a force in skirmishes. That involved some of the strangest cards I have ever written, but I think that is an article for another day.

Development hammered home that they were hoping for something better out of the two cultures, so we went back to the drawing board. One of the things I did in my efforts to find something new for the Dwarves was to take another look at the damage + trait. In my searches, our database spat Lurtz's Battle Cry back at me. It is a card that let you spend strength to get an alternate effect (damage +1 in this case). This led me down the road of spending damage bonuses on Dwarves.

After scratching out a version of the mechanic that made the Dwarfs "damage –X" to do something, we figured out that is was cleaner to look for the total instead of spending pieces of it. It takes commitment to raise the damage total, so you should be able to use it repeatedly in the same turn/skirmish. Besides, constantly tracking the damage spending wouldn't have been a lot of fun.

Of course, the thing that made Aggression catch the attention of testers is that it is both a provider, and a nice utility card that makes use of the mechanic.

2

Two is for the number of days that people have already been playing with Siege of Gondor in the Online version of the game. Because it takes a little longer to get the cards printed and processed than it does to turn them into pixels, LotR cards will usually show up there a little before the physical release date. Play your Dwarven cards there first.

3

Three is for the rating that Wish for Our Kinfolk received (out of 10 possible) in one of the ratings of SoG I've seen online. Obviously, it isn't the quickest way to get damage bonuses, but it is a way to store a few up for when you want them for Honed. We'll see if the other cards in the set change any opinions.

4

Four is for the number of trips I made to the coffee maker this morning trying to think up a theme for this article before I managed to get it started. It is a shame that this article only counts to 10, or I could have had an entry for the number of doughnut holes in my stomach currently... ug.

5

Five is for the number of Elven cards in the set. Only three of which are actually relevant to this article.

Once we had the damage mechanic on its feet, we looked for a similar handle to grab in the Elven culture. That is, what is something that Elves usually have that we could count. Brad DeFruiter wrote up the cards that became Reckless We Rode and A Grey Ship. We added Shake Off the Shadow to round out the drinking game cycle, and had something for the Elves.

6

Six is for Honed. Well, it is card 6 in the set. Kind of weak. Sorry. I'll try to do better.

This is the "simple" payoff card for the mechanic. Dwarves can always use a little more strength. The better to take advantage of damage bonuses, right? With Blood Runs Chill as the "advanced" card and Battle in Earnest as the "medium" card, we wanted to include a simple card that would work well in limited play (a reason to draft Aggression and Wish For Our Kinfolk).

7

Seven is for Blood Runs Chill. That is the highest total number of cards that I was able to make an opponent discard in playtesting using BRC. Other players managed to raise that total a bit.

Originally, this card just spotted the Dwarf, but that was kind of (ok, very) broken. I couldn't decide how I wanted to fix the card. I knew that I either wanted to add an exertion or two to the cost, or limit the effect to wounds. I really couldn't make up my mind. So, in the end, we did both. Blood Runs Chill got one, and then two exertions added to its cost, and Battle in Earnest was born.

8

Eight is for Gimli • Counter of Foes. It celebrates the eighth set! Ok, that was weak too. Sorry. I really will try to do better.

Gimli's text was a relatively late addition to the set. Once we had worked through the damage mechanic verbs, we wanted to add a little more dimension to the mechanic. The text on Gimli at that time was functionally similar to the text that ended up on Counts But One. We were pretty happy with how it was working on the event, and didn't think it needed to be in both places. So, we changed Gimli to be a possible starting place for a damage mechanic strategy.

9

Nine is for the number of tokens on Wish For Our Kinfolk in turn one before we changed the card.

A couple of quick stories about this card and this cycle. If you ever talk to a designer or developer who worked on this set, he will refer to these cards as the drinking game cycle, as the images on the cards originally revolved around a drinking contest between Legolas and Gimli. Characters from each culture stood watching (we think). We'll see if this footage makes it into the director's cut.

The first versions let you exert a character of either culture to get one token, and if you exerted both (like it says now), you got three tokens. When we started running out of tokens during a playtest, we changed things around a little bit.

10

I said I'd go to ten, didn't I? Huh. What was I thinking? Honestly, I probably ran out of steam somewhere around seven or eight. I mean, there are only eight Dwarven cards. Why did I think I'd be able to get ten anecdotes out of that? I'm really sort of at sea here. Ok, I give. There is no number 10.

Thanks for checking out the article. Stop by on March 1st when I'll look at the besiegers. I told you back in King that we'd give them a little shove when Siege came out, and the time has come. See you then!

February 23, 2004