A lot has happened since my last newsletter in March: the game has a new name(!!) and I completely changed the set-up of the game. First I’ll describe this journey, and I’ll end with introducing a new Dream Guardian: Resilience.
New Name: Dream Guardians
This was a bit of a setback. I found out ‘Dreamkeepers’ is also the name of a series of graphic novels, which also made into a board game. I don’t want to compete with other brands with the same name, so even though it was a bit painful, I decided quickly cut ties with it.
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For the new name, I found ‘Dream Guardians’ to be pretty apt. It describes exactly what the players are, and ‘guardian’ might even be more recognizable than ‘keeper’.
New Game: Less Chaos, More Excitement!
From back to boring basics to a clean exciting experience
🥱 I ended the last post by explaining how I brought the game back to the basics. The basics worked, but the game become really BORING!
The game was much easier to play now, but I had to bring back the excitement players felt playing earlier versions of the game. By cutting out all the excess, I had also cut out all player’s decisions. There was no feeling of autonomy anymore, which caused the game to become boring.
🕺🏻Slowly, I added more and more new things to this basic setup. One example: Dream Guardians have special abilities. They were able to do these at all times, so they were not that special and not that strong. Now, I have added triggers which activate the special ability, and made them much more impactful. This change really contributed to the fun players experience by giving them a powerful winning feeling.
But also the setup and drawing actions could be further improved.
Why and how I changed the setup and drawing actions
Before I can explain what I changed, I have to explain how the game roughly works now.
Each player plays as a Dream Guardian: Courage, Hope, Resilience or Wisdom. They have to work together to defend Dreamland against Nightmares (previously named ‘Shadowmancers’). Nightmares try to turn Dreamland into a place of darkness.
👀 Super quick gameplay overview
Dream Guardians is played with a standard 54-card deck, including Jokers, and revolves around the collaborative efforts of players to defeat Nightmares by reducing their Dark Health to zero. Players must achieve this before any of the Dream Guardians’ Happiness Health is depleted.
Each player selects a Dream Guardian with unique abilities, and starts with a set of Starting Cards forming their initial deck.
The game progresses through turns, each consisting of drawing a stronger card from the Dream Pool, while doing so encountering a Nightmare, defending against their Dark Thought attacks, and taking actions to heal fellow Dream Guardians, attack the Nightmares with Positive Vibes or heal Dreamland.
Victory is shared when all the Nightmares are defeated, bringing happiness and positivity back to Dreamland. Beware, the introduction of Chaos, an extra scary and strong Nightmare, intensifies the challenge, requiring strategic collaboration to overcome.
Old setup and drawing action
You now know what the latest setup is. What did it look like before? And how is it different? The main difference is in the way the Dream Pool, and thereby the encounters with the Nightmares, work. The Dream used to be one big deck of cards and you would open three cards. The active player would pick one of those three cards, open one card from the big deck and places it in its place. If it was a Nightmare, they’d have to place it in a different spot, and open up another card. As you can imagine, this is much less clear. It was also more random and allowing less tactical decisions. Also, there was a thrash pile for a thrash action which I completely removed, as it was adding to the complexity. These things add nothing to the experience, there are no meaning choices to be made, just extra cards to be placed in other places.
👎🏻 Not great. So I had to simplify it! 👍🏻
Old setup example:
New Dream Guardian: Introducing Resilience
You might have spotted her in the new setup overview: Resilience. She’s an old lady and has gone through a lot during her life. All these experiences have made her resilient and she can bounce back from any setback.
Artwork by the talented Rixt Heerschop.
What do you think her special ability is? You can comment here or on my Instagram post!