I’ve been playtesting Desiderium with my partner this entire time and rarely, if ever, posting about it. At Tentcon, we settled on our core ruleset structure. It’s not 100% done, but we’ve solidly moved into long term playtesting and lateral expansion by thinking up our own factions and building out scenarios that fit the game. This was a playtest for one such scenario: the barrier stones.

The idea is quite simple: there’s a line of five barrier stones along the center line of the board. These demarcate the barrier between nations through magical means. What that means in our lore writ large, I’m unsure, but it means they’re darn important. Mechanically, this is a tug-of-war match for each stone, where the first player to charge and seal three stones wins. You charge by spending an action and rolling 1D6. At 10 accumulated charge, you can spend another action to seal the stone. This isn’t technically necessary, but it stops your opponent from discharging the stone—hence the tug-of-war.

We’ll divide the game into the story of three flanks and how it all came together. On my west flank, I had my ranged units. My opponent charged them with a dragon mounted elven lord.

This was disastrous for the first unit contacted, which the dragon swiftly slew. Unfortunately for the dragon, that left it out of melee combat, and a giant cannon happens to be a pretty good anti-dragon weapon. We drove him off with a hard blow to the ribcage. It wasn’t enough to kill, but he would proceed to fail to rally and ultimately flee the board. Unfortunately, he did take just enough time…

My poor boys were left too far from the nearest objective markers to properly affect them during the game, so while defeating a dragon felt great, they were little help in securing or denying the objectives.

On my east flank, my boys actually did a great job of surging forward and slaying some elves. So great, in fact, that I got cocky. See that stone? I fully charged it. Know what I didn’t do? Seal it. You’re seeing a pattern. I left a unit alive, which proceeded to snatch up a second stone behind me.

The center became a whole scrum, with elite units smashing into elite units and… very little happening while a leader sneakily charged that stone on the right there. By the time my warriors caught up from my east flank, it was too little, too late. My opponent snatched a third objective just as I was concentrating enough force to push him back. Those dastardly elves.

So what did we learn? The game’s in a good spot, honestly. At no point did I feel the rules were in my way or holding me back. My dwarves felt like dwarves and his elves felt like elves. Mostly.

This was the game where we settled on full unique factions, rather than our original plan, which was to allow players to bring their own factions. We still intend to leave the option available, but we’ve come to accept that the game will lack something if we keep it generic. The main issue is a desire to create factions that feel wholly unique thanks to special factional rules that help to settle how they play and enforce their identity.

Take my dwarves: their lore sees them literally singing in battle. Nothing in the game manifests that right now. I could see a variety of ways to do this. Perhaps repeated actions across units get stronger, representing a form of resonance. Or maybe the dwarves get bard units that provide buffs but are required to be in every division. Or maybe each turn each division gets to select a song it sings, which provides a specific buff to that division for the turn.

I’ve been wracking my head trying to establish a constructed system for creating factional rules. Something where you follow a set of rules and it out pops some reasonable customization that represents your lore. Unfortunately, I’ve come up flat. I’d rather allow players to make up something for themselves. I can provide the process to ensure their army units are balanced, but faction rules will just require players to be reasonable.

I’m not sure what this means for the final product. I think at minimum, I’d release a builder that allows you to add or modify units in the existing factions. Think the dwarves should have skirmishers? Go ahead and design a unit. It’ll use their faction rules, which we’ve blessed, and follow our unit building rules, so it should be fine for pick up games. This seems reasonably safe.

I assume we’d also just let you design factions entirely on your own, but the special rules for the faction will just have to be on you.

But why do this? Because the unique rules provide for more varied play and a more appealing package. It allows us to create a more unique set of factions, which I think will provide more interesting gameplay. We felt a touch hamstrung in our design because we didn’t have special faction rules in order to keep everything generic. Now that we’ve stepped beyond that, I’m quite excited for where we go from here.

But as for this match? The elves took the win, but I had a lot of fun. It felt great and genuinely felt like the game I want it to be. That’s really what inspired me to post. I’ve been half and half on the game at times, unsure what special sauce it needs. Today’s game reminded me that the fundamentals are there. It was tense, had dramatic moments, but felt like a reasonable battle. No one got “deleted” or felt utterly useless. My loss feels like it was from my tactics failing to come together, not from the dice or game mechanics biting me.

And more than anything, it left me really wanting to paint up more stuff. That’s a great feeling, and I’m happy to have it.

There’s more to come on the world of Desiderium. That much is for sure.