Saturday 4 August 2012

Dog Game

Dog Game Biogrphy
There has been some good discussion on the game recently. One of the tribe mentioned it may be necessary to layout some history of the game's development.

Evade was the first move card in Dog Fight. The original game had a very limited number of cards and a totally different sized map; the map was much bigger; the hexagons were bigger. Moving two spaces was a lot.

The problem was the original game was very slow moving. In order to speed things up we invented Rocket Boosters and Accelerate: both giving a 50% speed boost making it much easier to get into the fray. Then along came the alternate rule Drift, for the same reasons.

Side Bar: Rocket Boosters, Long Range Guns and Weapons Upgrade were all basic, early game development upgrades. All of these were incredibly powerful at the time.

Then along came the first game-changing card: Heavy Guns. This card gives the ability to shoot twice with one card. Combined with Weapons Upgrade it was nearly a game-breaking card. At the time there were no armor cards. A single Intrepid-class ship equipped with Heavy Guns and Weapons Upgrade could nearly obliterate a Brutus Magnus-class or Achilles-class ship in a single turn. In fact Brutus-Magnus and Achilles were developed as a result of Heavy Guns, a lighter class of ship that basically incorporated Heavy Gun's effect.

Instead of restricting or watering down Heavy Guns we decided to make other cards that would put the smaller ships on par with the bigger ships. Thus Overdrive and Double Burst were invented. The big ships were slow. The small ships could now out run the big ships. Overdrive gave the option of adding an energy counter if used with Evade, thus bringing up to date the original and seemingly obsolete Evade card.

That's the story of Evade, and every card in the game was invented for a reason: usually to counter something, or true up deficiencies, or invent some crazy new idea to get us off our lazy butts and continue to push the limits of the game.

As it turns out, though Dog Fight: Starship Edition is a customizable card game, with the awesome meta game aspect, it's still a different animal altogether. Cards in this game are not intended to be compared 1 to 1 with other cards. For the most part, cards in this game are meant to be used in combination with others. It's the synergy of the cards, not an uber card by itself, which makes the game work.

In Dog Fight, players have to think more about how to accomplish something. The card effects don't in themselves accomplish much, unlike the uber cards in other games. In DFSE there is more emphasis on putting the pieces together (setting up your actions for the turn) to do what you want to do. Making that work requires more than just good planning for your game actions: it also requires hand management and energy management - neither of which replenish themselves automatically in the basic rules.

There is no automatic draw in the rules, no automatic energy production. All this requires planning before hand, with choices of using your tiers and setting up your ship build.
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
Dog Game
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