The Valiant: a History

I have been developing The Valiant for a very long time.  In my mind I thought I'd been on it for a couple of years... but after talking to some of the folks who helped me playtest in the VERY early stages, it turns out I've been at it (off and on) for about 6 years.

With a development cycle that long, it's interesting to see how much it has changed over the years.

If you have any familiarity with The Valiant, you probably picture it as a card game.  But in its earliest infancy, it was actually a square grid, move-and-attack game.  This version of the game essentially had 4 effect types: Attacks, Reactions (defenses), Passives, and Fortune's Favor. While Reactions and Attacks have been folded into the broader "Abilities" category, you can see that the basic structure of the classes had already begun to form up.

In truth, that game was pretty fun, and I may revive it sometime soon -
albeit with some refinements and much needed beautification.

After a while, though, I got to thinking about using the same characters (most of them at least), to do more of a "dueling" style of game play.  I was familiar with Magic: the Gathering from my high school days, and had really enjoyed playing it... with a few exceptions.

Firstly, I didn't like the collectable side of M:tG.  Simply put, I never had the money to have good cards.  The never sat well with me - that people with more disposable cash could buy their way to advantage... and that skill alone wasn't enough to be competitive at high levels.

The other thing that bugged me was the devastation that a bad shuffle can cause.  It's possible to lose a game because you simply NEVER DREW resource cards (lands)... or you drew ALMOST ENTIRELY resource cards.  Does it happen a lot?  Not in my experience, but it was very frustrating the few times that it did.

So, I wanted to develop a game where your resource wasn't something you draw from a deck.  I wanted it to be something common to all players and dependable.  Something like Time or Speed.

That made a certain kind of sense.  Video games had been using a system like that for decades: Fast and weak attacks balanced against slow and hard attacks.  Street Fighter used it.  Mega Man used it. Every First-Person-Shooter uses it.  It's just intuitive.

But how do you translate that to the table top?

Notice the scratched out "11" and the
hand-written numbers on the edges.

My first draft (development name: "Nalpha") was an abysmal failure.  I had envisioned that a player would equip a few abilities  and that each would have a Cooldown.  So far so good - that part of the system has survived more or less intact all the way to today.  What wasn't so good was my initial plan to have a 12-position accounting for abilities.  Cards would nest in a custom built rotating dial that would point at the number ticks left before the skill could be used again.  After all, that would feel "clock-y" right?  And there would be lots of fine-grain tuning of ability costs with a scale of 0-11.

So, assuming that the clock ticks once each turn... that means you're much more likely to spend your turn just ticking forward abilities than actually USING them.  It was like 85% upkeep, 2% strategy and 13% eye-gouging.

Back to the drawing board...

Then it occurred to me: a card has 4 natural orientations.  Why not just use a scale of 0-3?  This made balancing card values much easier, and greatly opened up the possibility that you'd have multiple abilities "ready" on a single turn - thus giving you an actual choice of what to do, rather than just playing ability whack-a-mole.

All of a sudden, the abysmal failure became a playable game.  Imperfect, of course... and not as fun as it would become, but playable.  What came next was a series of revisions and refinements to balance and improve the game, but the overall mechanics were pretty well established.

For the most part, it was a fairly satisfying system... but still not quite complete.  As it turned out (and this should have been obvious from the beginning), the most optimal play is a character who can keep all of their abilities on Cooldown.  Anything other than that translates into wasted "Speed" (your per-turn resource budget).  But if you are playing optimally, then there is again no choice what to do... you should just activate whatever abilities you have ready.

Paradoxically, for slow Heroes this wasn't a factor.  It was simply a given that they couldn't keep everything on cooldown... which means on any given turn they would generally have MORE CHOICES than a fast Hero.

What to do? I could standardize Speed, and just make everyone slow... but that didn't feel like a good solution.

Enter: "The Flip."

The Flip is a face-down ability card.. and it can be swapped with any ready face-up card.  To put it a different way: You only ever have access to 4 of your 5 abilities at a time.

It sounds limiting (and technically it is), but the result is that Whack-a-Mole is no longer optimal.  The player is forced to keep something in reserve - that is, to have an option at hand.

An overall rebalance, a few new abilities to incorporate flipping, and a bit of spit and polish resulted in the latest edition of The Valiant.

"Game in Progress," indeed!