I’m really enjoying this game as it gives me the ‘go’ (Asian board game) feel as you need to strategically place down lands to either expand or deny your opponent. I love it when I’m able to block my opponent from expanding because I placed two blank lands in their path or forced them to build another element land because I have a trash mob sitting on one of their existing ones.
However, I feel like the map is a bit small and you end up winning a bit too quick at times. A slightly larger board would offer more strategies on how much you should be spending on expanding or denying.
On a similar note, I like how having your land in your enemy’s territory forces them to think about what you could possibly summon there, which may force them to hold big minions back or just have a spare siting there.
At one point, many years ago, the board for Faeria was one tile wider. It did prove indeed to prolong games longer - so much longer in fact that it became a major problem in keeping game times within a reasonable length. A lot of effort has been spent in refining the fundamentals of the game to where they are today in order to keep the game strategically interesting without asking players to routinely play “30 minutes to an hour” long games, and reducing the board size was part of that.
We probably won’t ever be going back to that increased board size, but we are very focused on staying on the right side of the fine line between complex strategy and games that last so long you need a shave afterward. It’s a delicate dance to do, and we think we’re in a significantly better spot than we used to be.
Maybe to compensate having a larger board, you can summon more lands per turn, which also makes land summoning spells/minions much more valuable. More wells could be on the map as well to emphasize positioning.
If that’s still too much of a risk to lengthy games, could you implement a way to convert enemy land to yours? I think it would definitely shake up strategies where people just build plains directly to you before building an elemental land.
For very different reasons, however, they’ve been removed. Conquest, for example, used to be a keyword that allowed certain units to take over enemy land just by moving on them. It sounds really cool on paper, but in reality it was simply too much of a negative and often irrecoverable experience for the person on the receiving end of these spells and abilities. It was decided to be something that was not a good idea to have in the Core set of cards on initial release, which is saying there may be room to introduce such a mechanic in new and different ways in future expansions. Recently, for example, a Pandora treasure has been added to the game which allows just such a thing (Ring of Dominion).
We’re getting into the fundamental game design territory of Faeria here, so I don’t want to put any words in our designers mouths, but I should say that at this point - if you can think of it, it’s probably already been tested or considered at some point by the design team. The core set’s goal is to be a solid foundation to build upon - like a carefully primed canvas that can have all sorts of different color paint added as time goes on.
