How does Wormwood compare to Magic and Netrunner?

hey I'm Damon I'm the designer of wormwood uh if you stumbled into this video you have probably got some questions about what exactly wormwood is and if it's a collectible card game or if it's something else it's a sort of mishmash of the best parts of every 90 ccg that ever was but it's not a collectible game and it doesn't really play like any of those games I'm going to talk right now about how it differs specifically from Magic and Netrunner um these are the two big games that this is going to be compar compared to a lot of people talk about wormwood being like multiplayer Netrunner it's a very different game and it is its own Beast so here we're going to learn about the differences between wormwood and the two major peers that it's going to be compared to in your mind magic is the biggest ccg on the planet it's unlikely to be dethroned anytime soon I guarantee nearly everybody watching this has played magic and a lot of times magic players will trym would he'll attempt a strategy that they expect to work from Magic or similar ccgs and just get trounced by somebody who has never played a card game before because there are such different ideas about how to win or how to stay under the radar in wormwood that just don't exist in Magic um so let's talk about a few of those and where this game really really differs from how magic is structured number one uh land so both magic and wormwood have a similar structure in your hand where you also have some functional cards a mixture of units facilities augments and reflexes but you'll also have a bunch of echo right Echo are all the same card they're roughly similar to the distribution of lands in a magic deck and so you are going to end up in situations where you feel like you're going to get Mana screwed in one way or other you're going to get Echo screwed either too many Echoes or too few Echoes now when this happens in Magic you are pretty much ruined um if you are Mana screwed and you don't get enough Mana or you get no Mana um you can't do anything you are crippled and if you get too much Mana uh you also don't have any functional cards to play with a Mana you're equally crippled your game ends and you're going to have to try and just start again wormwood doesn't work this way wormwood uh its resources are people and time so your citizens here you get two of these talents every turn this is your primary resource in the game and you're always going to get two every turn even if somebody manages to wipe out every card you have you're still going to be getting just as many resources as you did to be rebuilding everything you need so Echoes are they're not like land because they're not actually your economy uh Echo are the points in the game you're not in situations where you are sacrificing life to get Tempo because you don't have life you can't get kicked out of the game you can't get uh destroyed and and lose life and then you're out um it's a race to the top and so it's far more useful to maintain a constant and consistent Pace getting one or two Echoes a turn rather than building up a huge force that he might in Magic and then smashing through an opponent hoping to get I don't know five or six or seven or eight Echoes all at one time remember you need 10 Echoes to win the game uh but you're never going to find 10 Echoes In One turn really important to understand compared to a game like magic where one of the differences between a novice player and a seasoned player is understanding that 19 lost health is meaningless and that final one point of lost health is the only thing that actually matters uh in wormwood you need to have a consistent way to get Echoes somehow because you're never going to get them all in one at one time and by the midpoint of the game it's going to be harder and harder to pinpoint where they are and it's going to be taking more of your efforts to find them than it is to take them than to actually fight somebody and steal them out of their stuff creatures in Magic versus units in warmwood so a unit in warmwood has similar stats to a creature in Magic but they work quite a bit differently they both have attack and attack works very similarly in both games but there are two different sort of toughness stats for a unit in warmwood they have this armor stat here and then they have health down at the bottom here the health is slowly depleted as units fight each other and deal damage so you might have start with three Health here and then end up with two and then end up with one it's only when that final health is destroyed that your unit is actually lost but your armor here is going to deplete similarly to toughness in a magic game it depletes every time a source hits it so this armor of one is going to subtract one from the attack of every unit that fights this thing now what's important with that is that in a game of wormwood you can't choose not to block during your turn you're setting up these Lanes of units between one and three to defend your hand or Forge where you might be hiding points but you can't choose not to block when somebody comes for one of those Lanes you're choosing who's going to be defending you and where they're going to be but once that happens those things are locked in stone and when people come for you uh they're going to know where the Defenders are and they're going to send the things that are appropriate to destroy them right um because of this Defenders have a serious advantage in a large combat uh your Defenders can hit everything coming in but your attackers can only deal their damage once so attackers were quite a bit like creatures in Magic but your defenders in wormwood can do their damage again and again and again to every unit that's coming in to fight them another big difference between the units in wormwood and the creatures in Magic is that nothing ever TAPS in wormwood once you uh put a creature out it also doesn't have summoning sickness so it can attack immediately the first turn it's revealed from the forge and this can be a huge deal later on in the game when someone might reveal two three maybe even four four units all at the same time all on the same turn that can then attack immediately this is balanced by two things number one is that you can only ever attack from one lane to another which means you can attack with a maximum of three and you can only ever attack one lane of one player so if there are three players in the game you're going to have to be very selective about who you're attacking when and why the other thing is that other players are able to attack your Forge and look inside so they're able to see units you have under construction and prepare for them before they come out that's up to them to remember what they've seen or trade that information but units aren't nearly as hidden as they are in a game like magic you're not keeping your stuff a secret you're trying to but people are constantly looking at your your hand and things that are face down um you're attempting to keep secrets at Bay but uh everyone is constantly aware vaguely of what you have and can give that information to other players and tell them what they've seen as well so reflexes work very similarly to instance in Magic but a reflex can stick around for an entire round sometimes so reflexes are only discarded during your upkeep so if you play them at the right time a reflex can affect the turn of three other players before it gets back around to you sometimes they have an instant effect and that just occurs and then the effect stops but a lot of times that effect can last for a while um the other thing is that reflexes don't cost Mana or time or anything they cost a number of citizens from your Citadel that just sit on the reflex working it until your next upkeep and then you get all of that back and that makes reflexes remarkably cheap for how incredibly powerful they are this is only balanced out by the fact that every player only has six reflexes in their deck that they can play so you know that if somebody has played three four or five reflexes you can start to determine okay what do they have left potentially you can also hit somebody take some Echoes from their hand and look into their hand and see what reflexes they have to play and that's also very different for magic where you don't know what instance they're coming at you or what is possible to be played uh later on in the game but in in wormwood a lot of time you'll know half the cards your opponent has because you've already seen them so if you can remember what reflexes they have then you're going to be able to prepare for when they finally trigger you also draw back up to eight cards at the end of every turn and this is really important to understand the difference between Magic and wormwood in that you're not running out of options there's also no way to to cause another player to Mill out their deck now before I talk about Netrunner I'm going to talk about two things that affect both games that warmwood was designed to correct that multiplayer is its primary focus number one is player elimination wormwood has no player elimination it's a race to the top no one is eliminated nobody can get kicked out of the game uh this makes it so that everybody at the table has an equal chance of success uh over time and that it's not like you have an incentive to kick one player out to make sure that they don't get stronger and then kick another player out and then kick a final player out and finally win the game um a player that has one point to your nine still has a very good chance of pulling back in if other players decide that they're going to rail on the first one um in order to keep them down while you get a little stronger in response the other really important thing to understand is that every card in wormwood is unique you're never going to see the same card twice so both Netrunner and Magic rely a lot on repeated cards so that you can predict what's coming to a certain extent those combos are somewhat predictable based on what cards you draw at the beginning of the game which is why mulliganing in um magic is such an important part of starting out and getting strong boost to your beginning because if you can't get that combo going for whatever your deck is built to do your deck's just going to stall and maybe fail woro doesn't work that way you have 30 unique cards mixed into that deck and once one's gone you're never going to see it again unless you find a way to dig it back out of your scrap so you can't rely on any specific specific combos that you haven't made in that game ITS Tactical play is specific to the momentto moment gameplay and the board state which everybody has built in that game specifically because it's a Singleton format you're never going to see the same board twice even if you and I don't know two other players play the same faction again and again and again and again with only 30 different cards you are going to see completely different board States most of the time for hundreds of games so don't rely on any given card in your deck and just decide that it's going to come up it probably won't you need to be relying on the cards that you got uh you can't just Mulligan and hope that you're going to get what you need because none of these combos are built to be gamebreaking they're just built for tactical play and uh positioning is far more important than getting exactly the right two cards all right next up the elephant in the room net Runner you might be surprised to find out that I actually played Netrunner years after making most of the rule decisions for how War mode was constructed um the only real thing I changed after I played Netrunner was adding the ability to discard a card that you find in the hand if you don't find any Echoes that is the only rule that actually we change so everything else sort of looks like Netrunner because the system is amazing and it turns out that there are multiple ways to arrive at that conclusion um but the actual gameplay underneath was built without me ever even knowing that game existed so here are some of the major differences in a game that looks very similar so in Netrunner you can have as many remote servers as you want but in wormwood you can only have two lanes in front of you one lane is Defending Your Hand that's in front of your leader card and the other lane is Defending Your Forge that's in front of your Citadel card and those are the only two places where you can be hiding Echoes people can't attack your deck and search through that and find points they they can't search through your scrap and find points you can't make like traps to lead them astray you're going to have to be playing this shell game between these two lanes to just try and keep their eye on wherever your Echoes aren't now Echoes are roughly similar to agendas but there are some pretty big differences number one every Echo is the same Echoes are all identical unlike agendas which are all different Echo don't have any particular abilities that they Grant you once you have scored them they are simply points that are moving you to the front of uh ring so you can't baby your Echo you have 20 of them um they're not like agendas where if you have an agenda in front of you that losing it is an absolute disaster and many times I might want a player to take one Echo off in the corner so that I can save two Echoes where they didn't look right I might want them to hit my hand and take a couple of eeko over here because I'm building three over in my Forge and I need to keep them away from it Echo are more like a shell game than they are like agendas and if you are freaking out every time you lose one this is going to be a very stressful game don't worry too much when people start taking Echoes at the beginning of the game particularly in a multiplayer game you don't want to be the person with twice as many points as everybody else because they are going to smash you to dust right in Netrunner you're always the Target right if you're the corporation or the runner you're always the target of the other player but many times in wormwood a big part of your gameplay is going to be staying under the radar stay away from the fight don't get hit don't hit people who will hit you harder that's pretty particular to Wormwood because it's a multiplayer game and Netrunner is a two-player game where it's always aggression all the time and just doing nothing is probably never the advantageous uh choice so another thing Netrunner players will sometimes say to me on their first game is that they feel like The Echoes should be worth variable amounts of points like agendas in Netrunner um in Netrunner uh I really don't have enough experience with Netrunner to say if there are things worth more than three agenda points because I've never seen one but maybe there are but that's a huge amount right three agenda points is 50% of what you need to win that game uh and that could come out of nowhere that could come from you randomly hitting the deck without any other information uh this cannot happen in warmwood warmwood is designed as a tactical game rather than a strategic game because I want to make sure that the game is always in flux and that anybody could potentially win at any time you are never at a total loss in warmwood there's always an opportunity for a massive major comeback because you always draw back up to eight cards and because the variability of how many Echoes could be in hand uh is only unpredictable if nobody's actually attacking you the more you attack a player the less Echoes are available to you from that player and the more likely you need to attack another player even in a two-player game the game is self-balancing so if you hit somebody really hard and take a bunch of EOS out of their hand the likelihood of the second turn you hit them really hard providing you with the same Echo Boon is very unlikely the units that are Defending Your lanes are not like Ice uh they are predictable in that you can see what's coming and when you attack them you're going to know what's defending that lane but there's not a whole lot of hidden information in those units most of the hidden information when it comes to combat comes from reflexes hidden in players hands they have six of those reflexes in their deck and reflex powers are incredibly powerful they can be annihilating okay they're far more like instance in Magic and they can be played out of turn so can abilities uh on the leader card as well as facilities those abilities can be played out of turn and that's where you're going to get trapped that's where you're going to make a mistake when you think that you have the upper hand because you can see everything in front of you but all of their out of turn plays are where they're going to start destroying all of your units they're going to be moving citizens in ways you don't necessarily predict um if you see them have a couple of extra drones or a couple of extra talents sitting on the Citadel that means that there's a very good possibility they have a reflex in their hand that they're waiting to play when you come after them or if they're attacking you they're waiting to see what you do so that they can play reflex and take out your units as well your economy in Netrunner is driven by clicks and credits if you don't have enough clicks well you can't do anything you don't have enough clicks to get what you need done but same thing happens if you don't have enough credits right if you are out of credits then you're using all your clicks to try and get more money as fast as you can to rebuild yourself to get more cards out there to make runs or whatever you need to do in Netrunner in wormwood everyone is getting two talents every turn and a talent is almost like a combination of a click and a credit a talent is a person it's not money so it's not spent a talent moves between your Citadel and every other card in the game citadels act as these holding spaces uh for idle citizens but if I want to use one let's say I want to use the citizen to uh activate this ability on my leader card I move the citizen to my leader card it activates the ability and on my next upkeep I'm going to get that citizen back you also need to be managing the health of your units and they use the exact same tokens so when I put a card into my Forge like so uh if I reveal an echo then it stays a talent and I get to use it again and my economy ramps up and I got a point but if I reveal something that isn't an echo let's say I have a different card in Forge the forge card moves up and I'm able to reveal it in this case it's a unit I flip over the token and then I put it on that unit and it acts as its heal so there's this constant cycling system of talents being utilized to create cards then flipping then becoming health for your military units then defending you and attacking it's all about tactical movement of cards and resources not about stockpiling those resources and then spending them all at the right time in Netrunner there's a little bit of this economy scaling when you install more Hardware or you maybe put down a job for the runner or assets or something for the corporation but these tend to evaporate when they're used right put down a card it generates 10 credits you use up the 10 credits the card goes away facilities in wormwood don't work that way facilities stick around usually forever and they tend to provide benefits for the rest of the game so getting a facility out early can often be a much bigger deal than getting a unit out and one of the final ways that wormwood really differs from both magic and Netrunner is that it isn't really a tournament game it's designed to be played casually it's designed to be played usually out of the box uh by people who want to tell stories and it's made so that every matchup of factions and every unique interaction of cards creates a story that you can can tell your friends and you can tell each other about what happened and the like awful situation that these people got into if you're obsessed with Min maxing the fun out of your games this is going to be a hard one for you because warmwood is specifically designed at every possible turn to stop you from doing that this was never designed to replace two-player tournament games I would consider it a much more interesting adjunct in the places where it shines in places like multiplayer this is going to be an awesome game if you are really interested in two-player games that last a little bit longer or have much higher variability um where you want to see weirder things happen rather than just test your deck against somebody else but where your Tactical strategy becomes really important this is going to be the game for you if you want a game where every card tells a story this is the game and you can tell the story about when you shot a monk out of a cannon onto a giant nightmare crab and and it can be told in as dark or as comedic a way as you want because that all depends on exactly the situation that you shot the monk out of the cannon and this is the kind of game that allows you to do that and those kind of combinations pop off every game those kind of stories pop off every game you're getting 400 different cards none of which are commons imagine that every card is rare if you have more questions and you definitely will because there's a lot of complexity in the game you can always go on our Discord and uh ask questions there where I will respond or cassandre will respond or anyone of our fans who are so dedicated to tearing this game apart we'll respond and explain to you how some of these cards work or interact take a look at our PR and play you can check out our tabletop simulator module sign up for our mailing list and find out exactly when our Kickstarter happens and when you can get the game on your table where you can play with your friends

Channel: Damon Stea

Views: 1,399

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Id: XjNeffUt_rc

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024