Anatomy of a Card (Part 1)

Hot on the heels of the card reveals, we can now start breaking down each card into its component parts. Let’s start with Sabrien Reed, one of the four Heroes that will appear in the first adventure created with the Quantum Rift Adventure System (QRAS).

Since this is a developer blog, as opposed to a rulebook, we’ll skip over some parts and focus on what should hopefully be the most interesting to hear about!

Let’s start with Quanta! Every playable card in the QRAS has one or more Quanta symbols shown under its Type. In Sabrien’s case, you can see he has 1 Red, 1 Green and 2 Yellow. What each colour means is actually beyond the scope of this post, but we can confirm that the group of Quanta symbols shown under the Type almost always represent the cost that must be paid to play the card. (If you’re wondering how you might pay this cost, I’m afraid that’s also the subject of a future post!)

Next up, we have Attack and Defence, which are used during the Combat Phase to determine which of the characters involved should become damaged or destroyed. Unlike some other games you might be familiar with, this goes beyond simple comparison of values and involves rolling some dice! Specifically, you will roll a number of six-sided dice equal to the Attack value, aiming to have more successes than the defender’s Defence value. (At the default difficulty setting, rolling 1-3 is considered a failure and 4-6 means a success.)

The final part of Sabrien’s card we wish to talk about today is the Game Text. As you can see, he has an ongoing effect that references a Quanta symbol for reducing the cost of some Action cards when you play them and another effect that can boost Sabrien’s Defence value if you can get at least one success when performing a Quanta Test. Again, it’s a bit early to go into full details of what this means, but you can rest assured there will be dice involved!

Hopefully our reluctance to go into lots of details has not been too frustrating for today, and your curiosity to find out more will bring you back in the near future. Whether you are a fan of dice in your card games or not, you will definitely want to read our next post, which will cover the innovative ways we have integrated dice into our card game to maximise excitement without compromising strategy and skill.

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