Weapons Testing | Mid-April 2025

Soul Duel is the working title for a 1v1 Deck Building predictive strategy game wherein two players try to build a deck of attack and defense cards to intimidate, bluff, and predict their opponents moves. You attack, Riposte!, and build COMBO to deal damage and win in a best-of-5 round game.

Third Playtest

This was the third "outside" playtest of the game, taking opinions from people outside of Surprising Snake Games. In its initial stage, the game functioned quite well, but it just featured the 7 standard cards. Both players had exactly the same options at their disposal and, while it was enjoyable, it wasn't very interesting. The first outside playtest showed me that the game needed to have some more variance in each combatant's options, but I didn't want to sacrifice too much of the simplicity of the game design. I have a tendency to lean toward complex mechanics because I find them to allow for a lot more interesting interaction, but Soul Duel is simple by design. My goal for this game is to keep it approachable and quick in both moment-to-moment engagement and in overall play time. 

Weapon Cards

The solution I found was weapon cards. These allow for slight variations to how one player might focus their strategy and give a bit more agency, while also always being visible to the other player so it's not too much to keep track of. For example, one weapon is a Rapier, which makes your Thrust attacks do more damage and your Slice attacks do less. This gives the player using the Rapier incentive to build more toward Thrusts, but is balanced by the fact that the other player can now focus of drafting more Dodges when they want to draft more defensive cards.

Each weapon also has a special ability to allow for a little bit more variety in how you decide what card to play when.

How it went

This playtest was the most successful so far. My guest and I had a great report back and forth and interacted in the ways I'm going for. We each did our best to learn each other's bluffs and tricks, and found it to be incredibly satisfying when we correctly predicted that the other player was trying to set up a devastating Riposte! or COMBO.

Weapon cards proved to be a great addition, keeping strategies changing and fresh while allowing the opponent a little bit of clarity about what might be planned when a specific weapon was equipped (this was also a great opportunity for bluffing).

Lessons from this playtest:

There are too many rounds

It was pointed out to me "I'd rather finish the game possibly sooner than I'd like and want to play it again than for it to go on too long and want it to be over before it is." This is a really helpful comment because it counteracts a change I'd previously made for a different reason. During in-house playtesting I felt that the game was ending too quickly and that the players were not really able to customize the deck in a meaningful way. Because of this I added on more rounds, but this raised another issue, the game lasting too long. It was also compounded by another problem:

The decks got too big

By the end of the game, each player has too many cards to be able to effectively predict what their opponent has, so it entirely becomes about reading your opponent's intention and patterns. This isn't inherently bad, but it does reduce one of the core goals which is for you to at least somewhat pay attention to what your opponent drafts and use that knowledge to influence your decisions. 

This may be resolved by having fewer rounds alone, or it may need to be addressed directly.

Color-coding will be very important in the final product

In the final production version I'll make sure that the 2 attack and defense cards are color coded to match one another for simple recognition. For example, you Dodge a Thrust, so I'll make the Dodge and Thrust cards both a shade of blue.

Things I'm trying next time:

I'm going to start with a draft at the beginning with at least two weapons. This will let the players start the game immediately with a deck that is already leaning toward their prefences. This could solve both of the above problems at one time. Fewer rounds means a smaller deck, while a first-round draft means more variance and opportunities for customization. 

I'll have a "beginner rule" that suggests the first round be played pre-draft if you've never played before so that you can get a feel for how the cards interact, but for people who have played before, they can jump right in with the weapons and special abilities from round one.

Unknowns

• I'm still not entirely sure of some of the specific weapon effects. For example, the Greatsword and Halberd both require you to announce that you are going to attack and give your opponent the opportunity to change their strategy. This made me too scared to actually use those weapons, instead relying on their special abilities. I need to just suck it up next time and use the attacks as they are so I can decide if their power is worth that risk.
• I also haven't settled on the proper number of cards to have available in each draft. Initially there were 8 cards, so each player would add 4 to their deck each turn, but that got cumbersome. Maybe this will also be resolved since there are now fewer rounds. I am open to the idea of having fewer picks but I still want there to be a lot of options available for the players to pick. I want you to feel forced into a choice as little as possible
• I want to add a way to remove cards from your deck that you don't want. Maybe you can elect to remove a card in leu of drafting one? 

Leave a comment if you have any thoughts about what you've read here today or ideas for improvements!