WITCHES' REVEL: A Newsletter.

3. THE TRICKLE BECOMES A TORRENT.

(This newsletter is also available on the web.)

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IN THIS ISSUE OF THE WITCHES' REVEL NEWSLETTER: A Quick Word Before We Get To… ~ ✾ ~ The Design Corner #1: All About Passion!

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Hi all, Aura here! Thank you for sticking with the WITCHES' REVEL newsletter. On off issues like these that are light on news, I’m debuting what I want to call a design corner — just a way to show you how I’m thinking about how the fundamentals of the game.

I have a few quick announcements before diving in:

• There are new deckbuilding aids on Screentop.gg and on Tabletop Simulator! You can just drag cards around to create and play decks, and, in Tabletop Simulator’s case, also save them locally for future use! You can find them linked in the resource channel in the Discord…
• … where you can now also find organized playtests every Tuesday evening, Pacific time! Come join to play!​

And, without further ado:

What Passion Does Is Build.

Let’s start by talking about the resource of Passion! It’s an interesting element of the game, because it’s been in the file from game jam to draft to print — the entire duration of the project!

The Passion card was in my final file for the very first game jam! The jam awarded extra points to entries that hinted at how the future of the game would go, and so I felt really pushed to think about how deck construction would work in the game.

So, to make the card count work out, I very quickly decided that the two decks needed to have a way to show how building decks would work — how your witch would give you access to a specific resource, which then determined how much the cards you added to your deck could function — but then they would share the same resource, allowing cards to be shared between the two decks!

Celosia, the fiery, passionate witch, came first — and thus the resource felt very natural to be just… Passion!

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What took longer was to figure out what Passion meant. As the second deck solidified, and it felt interesting to define 💧 spells as caring about +1 counters, it slowly dawned upon me that Passion is tied to a fundamental type of rhythm within this game.

Passion builds. A witch of Passion gives away early plays to accumulate something, so they have the freedom of having much better plays in the late game!

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I knew early on that 🔥 spells and Passion shared a close relationship, so it made sense for those spells to care about accumulating Passion itself!

The 🔥 affinity for strike spells means that you need to be careful — every time you play a spell you are committing to a space being taken potentially for the rest of the game! But if you do, you gain the ability to just point to any lane and say: ‘I’m winning this lane, now’, at least once or twice in the end game — usually enough to push through and win.

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Conversely, as Nymphaea and her troubled relationship to Passion took shape, it made sense for 💧 spells to care more about how many +1 counters you manage to add and keep on your spells. It’s a riskier strategy than accumulating Passion, because your opponent can interact — they can overpower and discard the spells you’re keeping the +1s on! However, a high-▲ Power or high-● Resistance spell becomes harder and harder to overpower, so, by carefully building hard choices, a 💧 player can survive long enough to make the +1s count wherever they need them most.

The latest pass of redesigns for 💧 spells pushed deeper into this space, making ‘Be Quiet!’, the main Nymphaea payoff, not only use the existing +1 counters, but also directly count them as resources to discount its new cost.

Passion gives away ground and may take a long time, but if you keep at it, the results can be extraordinary. That the game is so close to done is testament to that… and so are the two witches of Passion you can play with right now!

And Now, Go All Out!

Thank you for reading! See you soon with more news, hopefully of the more visual variety! ✾