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After weeks of work you can now finally play the Guild Wars 2 card game as a mod for Tabletop Simulator.
No longer will you need to print over 200 cards to play the game, now play from the comfort of your desk with friends across Tyria. I have spent the last few weeks working with Matthew Vogt (SnowBird) to build out this mod. When I first posted the Guild Wars 2 Card Game on Reddit it got so much good feedback, everyone loved it and wanted to play it. You can read the original blog post here about the game.
The only problem with my game was, who is going to print off over 200 cards to play a card game? not me.
I got a lot of people asking for a Tabletop Simulator mod for the card game, I mean its perfect for it. I however didn’t even own Tabletop Simulator at the time and replied to various comments suggesting that if someone out there wants to build a mod please get in touch. Luckily Matthew happened to be reading my post and the comments, he saw the demand for a Tabletop Sim mod and offered to build it. After a few messages back and forth to check if he was really up to the task, he went to work.
Building the Game & Planning for the Future.
Matthew would be more able to speak about the technical side of the project, we came into some interesting issues ourselves when developing. Deck building was an interesting problem, I was overthinking it at first but Matthew’s solution was quite simple. We made a deck building section, with decks of cards split into each rarity and endurance cost. As well as there being 2 of each card in the deck it made for an effective and easy to use solution. We had a lot of debate about how the board and table should be, we ended up going to the simplest solution of just 1 big table, the board itself being a very minimal design so the focus is on the cards nothing else. You might notice the custom skybox in the game, the default Tabletop Sim backgrounds are just awful so I decided I wanted to do it right. Matthew took lots of screenshots turning his camera around trying to get full coverage. I then used a image stitching program to create the big panoramic image, all I had to do then was tidy up the image to remove lots of blurring and deformation.
Matthew has also spent a lot of hard hours building tool to make updating the game super simple, this way card balance and new cards will go in with ease. “managing over 200 cards isn’t that easy”
Overall the goal was to go for MVP (minimum viable product) meaning: “it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work”. There are a lot of quality of life improvements we could have added, but we really wanted to just get the game out there and played by fans. There will be more features in the future, but for now the game is a great laugh and fun to play.
Initial Play Testing Unleashed Phlunts True Power!
When I released the game a few weeks back I never had the opportunity to play it. So once the game was at a minimum working state we played a few test games and straight away we found some massively overpowered cards. There was one game where Matthew managed to spawn all 3 Elder Dragon Champions because he has taken over 60 damage, making their Endurance cost 0. As you can imaging, that was not intended. Another big issue was weirdly, Phlunt, yes… Phlunt. Not only would he steal you card but he would keep it, and he only costs 6 Endurance. Just him alone would in many cases completely turn the game on its head. Guardian was another issue, originally it had so much Aegis boons it basically couldn’t loose. There was also a ton of text clarity issues, where you would not be used if an ability would be every turn or just when summoned.
The biggest issue of all was that originally card damage only went one way. Meaning If I attack a card I do damage to it, I do no receive any damage. This basically meant that as soon as someone got the slightest bit of board control, they won. That’s why I had to change the games mechanics to do damage both ways.
I think 90% of these balance and mechanic issues are gone, but once people get their hands on it who knows!
Time to Step into the Mists
If you don’t know how to play and would love to try the game, Matthew and I made a quick video explaining how to setup the game, build you deck and start playing. Video is below.
You can brush up on the rules and view all the cards by heading on over to the official website.
If you missed the original blog post about the game, you can find read it here.
The mod is now available on the Steam workshop.
Thank you for reading and I cant wait to see you all in the game!