What is The Wards of Ursting?

Wards is set in the fictional city of Ursting during the Victorian Era.  Think Gangs of New York, but without all the nationalist and racist undertones.  In the game, players will take on the role of a Faction leader, vying for control of the 4 wards of Ursting.  Strategy, influence, and a little bit of luck will be necessary tools to master to gain control of the Wards.  

Fiction aside, in this game, players will be rolling dice and playing cards to ensure that they have the greatest total value over their opponents.  The object will be to collect as many dice as you can and knock your opponent out of the game.  Wards is a “Roll High, Take-That” on its face that has enough strategy to give players chewy decisions, but has just enough swing to always give the underdog a fighting chance.  Let's dive into what makes this game tick.

Design

This project was an exercise in constraint.  We had 3 goals that we set out to meet as we were designing Wards:

1. The game must be simple but have depth.
2. The components needed to be common enough that someone might already own them or could be easily and cheaply purchased.
3. The rules must fit on a single sheet of paper.

The initial concept: each player has a set of polyhedral dice that they wager and roll against each other, hoping to have the greatest total value to gain all the dice wagered; the player who collects all the dice wins.  Simple enough.  We imagined that the sets of dice were warring armies, and you, their fearless commander.  You decide what units to send into battle, recruiting if necessary but realizing that the more you risk the more you lose.  This was interesting for about 10 minutes.  We knew that the concept was simple, but taking it from that to something that had depth was going to be a challenge.

Everyone has an old deck of cards laying around, so that seemed a natural fit for our design.  We went through a number of different ideas on how to incorporate cards into the game.  Maybe we should have a market of a few cards, and you can pay for them with dice in your control?  Or maybe instead of simply paying for the card with a die, a player might roll a die and hope to roll higher than the value on the card to be able to purchase it?  Once a player has cards, what do they do with them?  Should we create a reference sheet, so each card in a standard deck could be related to an ability that can be used when the card is played?...  On and on we went trying to find the right answer.  We wanted to make it simple, we didn't want there to be extensive referencing, and we wanted the abstraction of the cards and dice to make sense working together both mechanically and in the fiction of the game.

The single sheet of paper constraint was probably the best thing that we could have done for designing.  Games are notorious for being contrived and complex for the sake of showing the number of mechanics that the designers can string together, for the likeness they hold to a style of video game that they want to recreate on the table, or simply because they want to account for every conceivable scenario.  Those attributes were enticing if not sometimes sneaky with how easy it was to just make a rule for everything, and before long we had a document that was 6 pages long.  This was necessary because it led to some of the most challenging, but ultimately rewarding, design problems that we had to solve.  Cut after cut, distilling down to the essence, we found that we were able to say what we needed with as much flavor as we wanted and keep it approachable to play with some friends in a pub.  If it wasn't clear before, just because it could be done doesn't mean it should.  Holding true to our original goals defined the constraints that made Wards as tight, punchy, and quick a game as we could have hoped.  

Theme

Eventually, we let go of the idea of players commanding warring armies as that felt a little too grandiose for what we were working with.  We shifted gears and found a lot of inspiration both in theme and mechanics when we imagined this as a turf war fought by gangs in a Victorian setting.  This opened us up to understand how cards could work and juicy tactical decisions that so easily married mechanics to the setting and theme.  One of the first applications of this was with the creation of the “Influence Deck”.

The Wards of Ursting plays like a battle royal, as players try to gain as many of their opponents dice as possible by rolling the highest value in The Fray.  Everyone loves to roll grips of dice, but dice are more or less random chance and the basic concept didn't lend itself to any substantial strategy.  The idea that seemed to stick in our head was the idea of the cards being used to manipulate the dice, either by forcing a reroll or by changing the value of a die.   Calling the cards Influence just seemed like a logical jump, because you aren’t always certain that exerting Influence will result in how you intend.   The theme also lends itself to the mechanic for how a player would gain Influence throughout the game.   Picture this – a fight is about to break out and a faction leader sends one of the rank in file to go bribe the authorities to stay out of the way or to get some dirt that could be used when the time is right.   The officer could oblige and provide some desired information, or they could turn on the factions and conduct a Sting on the faction safehouse and round up some of the more roughed members, using the distraction of the Skirmish to hit when the Crew is disposed of. 

Swing in the game

The first thing that we needed to solve was the swingy-ness of dice.  Just rolling dice back and forth didn't really provide a lot of opportunity for strategy because players just look at the size of the dice being rolled and weigh their chances according to that probability.  As stated before, this got old real quick.  So we decided to use cards to represent Influence, giving players the ability to actually manipulate the game state after the dice have been rolled.  Giving players the option to draw cards as part of their Scheme phase opened the door to some juicy decisions: Do you Recruit multiple dice into The Fray to intimidate your opponents and improve your chances of winning the next Skirmish?  Or, do you reduce your strength in the Skirmish phase to Fix and draw a card, improving your arsenal of Influence you can exercise as you will?  This decision really started to show us the dials we had to turn up the tactics and strategic thinking, giving players a little more control of their fate that otherwise could have been just a roll of the dice.  

Structure

Rounds are structured through each phase; each player having the ability to make and respond to decisions.   We didn’t use a turn structure at first, giving players the ability to choose when or if they play a card in response to the result in the Skirmish phase.   This led to confusion, missed opportunity, and excessively long turns where players were trying to hold out as long as they could – not preferable when you want the game to create tension through decisive play rather than it be an awkward result of indecision of the players.   This also gives players the ability to respond strategically as the battle unfolds in front of them rather than making gut decisions for fear of missing an opportunity.   

Elimination

We wanted to be sure that all players are engaged the whole time - even when they have lost everything.  Being eliminated from a game sucks; especially if it was quick.  It is very possible in Wards for players to be eliminated quick.  We wanted this game to be punchy and sharp.  In a 2-player, head-to-head, battle, that's what you want.  Quick games that you can run back and try new strategies with relatively quick and decisive feedback.  But with larger player counts, we wanted players to have the ability to turn the tables even when they had run out of dice.  So, this is how we solved for that: when a player runs out of dice in a 3 or 4 player game, they are considered Busted.  In the fiction, the leader of their faction is taken into custody.  But while they may not have their Crew, they do have their wits and their ability to gain Influence from people that are in the clink with them.  When they are Busted, they keep all the Influence cards in their hand, and draw one extra from the deck if possible.  This keeps them engaged, giving them just enough opportunity to break something out of prison and possibly gain another Crew to get back in the game.   

I think this will wrap our first dive into the game.   More to come I’m sure