New Rules and Game Ideas (Feb 14 2025)

Yesterday, Donald X. announced some new changes to the rules for Dominion’s duration cards. The main thing is, if they are no longer in play, their effects on future turns no longer happen. This was all argued about in private during January because an expansion was getting reprinted. A bunch of ideas were considered and everyone was happiest with this one. One funny thing is that I originally suggested some wording changes, and Donald X. at first they didn't want them and wanted to preserve the original wordings. But after a few days, when I had lost all hope, they went for my changes anyway.

Since I’ve cut down my usage of social media, I have no idea what other people are thinking about the new changes. If I had to guess, there are a bunch of people complaining about oddly specific combos being removed, which I’m happy not reading. I’ve already spent years doing that, it’s just repetitive at this point.

Originally for the PvZ Heroes game, I had one deck controlled by the host player, and whenever another player needed to draw cards, they’d ask the host client to get the cards, and then those cards would get sent over the server, This logic was to mimic real life, where there would only be one deck. But this game in particular is strictly a computer game, with no intention to be played as a board game, which means I don’t have to do any of this. Instead I can just have both players generate a deck for themselves that they draw from, and this makes things much easier (especially with undos).

Midway through the week I was thinking about Plants vs Zombies, and that there are actually 2 game modes that I could make my own version of. I always had fond memories of the Survival Endless mode, especially when you force yourself to play with very weird strategies. Really the main issues I have are that many of the plants and zombies are meaningless in that mode in particular, and also it starts off really slow. Another mode I liked a lot was I, Zombie Endless. It was fun as an endless puzzle game, but some issues there are that it’s also slow, and as the game gets harder you just don’t have enough sun. It’s not great to keep restarting until you get lucky enough that you’ll have enough sun. If I do go for either of these games, I’m not sure if it will be a tower defense game, but probably yes.

I was also thinking about Randomly Generated RPG again and I realized I have a new idea. The idea is that emotions can have a 2nd stage (like in Omori), where the 2nd stage just means the emotion can’t be changed by anything else. When it’s your turn again, the 2nd stage emotion downgrades and now it can be changed again. The idea is to make emotions slightly more permanent than before. Then I realized, this can just be a status effect that lasts a certain amount of time, and it can also prevent the character’s position (grounded/airborne) from changing as well. Which means now I want to update the game to add this status effect (called Locked) to some abilities, which should take about a week.

Another thing I was thinking about is that the speed stat is the least useful. Buffing/nerfing speed is not as noticeable of an advantage compared to power or defense. I figured out an overhaul to the system that would make the speed stat matter a lot more. Each character has a number, and each turn that number would be increased by their speed. Once that number exceeds 10, the character loses 10 of that number, and they can use an ability. Since characters will increase that number by different amounts each time, that means faster characters will take turns more often than slower characters.

This idea sounds great to me, except for a few problems. First, this is fairly complex and I don’t know if I want to change the tutorial to fit this information in. Second, it’s a pretty big change to an already existing game that I’m still happy with. Third, it sounds like something that would be better as the central mechanic of a game instead of a background system. All this means, I’m not going to go for it in this game.

Also it’s Valentine’s day. I don’t have any interest in this day; if you know you know.