As we said in Report #1 the initial version of the game aimed to empty the hand of cards. That is, each player had to get a beat and it was the beats that determined the game's phases. This means that with each hit of a player, all the others should count points and restart their moves. And that made the game quite boring...

The solution was achieved with the introduction of the game board and the change in the scoring mechanics. With the introduction of the board, we made the game uninterrupted, that is, for each player who got a hit, the game was not stopped, but, on the contrary, proceeded normally. This made matches more dynamic and fun and was a high point in the evolution of Midgard.

However, the point count was still similar to the original, that is, when one player got a hit, everyone else had to count the points that were in their hands and score them on a scoring card. And that wasn't something interesting, because during a match there were several counts of points.

Therefore, a new change was established, after some testing games: the score cards. Point counting has been greatly simplified, as the score is now determined not by the cards remaining in the hands, but by the value of the scoring card of the world in which the player got the hit. Complicated?! On the contrary, quite simple. With the board, we obtained spatial information on the location of each player. That is, a player could be in Midgard, in Nidavellir, in Jotunheim, and so on. Each such location had (and still has in the final game) a drawn troops objective and, in that version, a face-down shuffled scorecard pile. When a player got a hit at that spot, he would draw one of the scoring cards for himself. The harder the objective of each world, the higher the score values there are. With this, each player would accumulate score cards and try to reach the value needed to finish the game. For example, the first player to reach 15 points wins and the game ends.

This made Midgard an interesting, simple and easy game to play. But something was missing. We weren't happy with the idea of players being Järls releasing troops across the nine worlds and felt that the game lacked more typically Viking elements. So we went back to the drawing board and after a lot of re-planning came first the idea of Battle and then the idea of Challenges… and a whole new game! But we’ll talk about that in the next Report…

Cristiano Cuty
Executive Editor – Conclave Editor

PS: Follow more Midgard news on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/conclaveeditora