Now that I’ve run another Warmahordes league, I wanted to take a step back and evaluate how this one went. There were definitely some things that worked well – better than last year even – and some things that didn’t quite go as well as I had hoped.
The goal of this league was to design a custom character warjack or warbeast to play during the league. Similarly to last year, this would be something to play during the league, but also something that would be only somewhat unbalanced and could be played in other casual matches. The mechanic I used to power this was upgrade cards – you picked an existing warjack or warbeast and “upgraded” it to a character by swapping out weapons and adding special rules. As I was prototyping and talking this over with my group, this really worked. A lot of people were excited by the kind of dynamic choices these might represent, trading cards to get the upgrade they wanted, and, of course, building a character warjack or warbeast from the results.
Unfortunately, the cards ended up not working as well as I had hoped. Though the weapon swaps were front-loaded in the league, there were still opportunities for weapon changes late in the league, which I think deterred people from modeling their characters. While not a problem, per se, it made for a slightly less engaging experience.
The other main thing that I’m guessing happened was people not getting the chance to build precisely the character they wanted – maybe they didn’t get the cards, or maybe the cards didn’t exist with the ability set they were looking for. I feel like this may have manifested early even, and people believed they wouldn’t be able to build something cool. In thinking about this, I may have been able to mitigate this with something like a draft, but I was never able to get enough people in the same place at the same time to get this to work either. I’ll be keeping an eye on other options in future games.
The other challenge with cards (and, in this case, any physical item) was on my end – distribution. I was constantly struggling to get people their cards, especially if one of us missed the meetup right before the tournament (where they needed to lock-in beforehand). I made do with what I could here, sending people the images for their cards, but it remained a difficulty throughout the league.
In the end, I think a more free-form design may have better achieved my ends. While I like the “design with constraints” philosophy, I’m not sure it works as well in this format. The desire to design a character that’s in your mind, and build the resulting model ended up being at odds with the random possible upgrades. This is especially noticeable if I compare this league to the prior one – Everyone had a model for their warcaster or warlock by the end of the league.