So it has been a few days or so since my last posting. 2020 has turned out to be quite busy, both worldwide and in my own little microcosm. I’m hard at work finishing up the second Red Sabre novel: Cinderborn. This has been a very arduous journey and I feel like I’m nowhere near finishing it yet. Though no one comes here to read my work woes.

I’ve also had a lot of personal changes going on in my life. I’m trying to get things finished for a large move to another country that has eaten up more of my attention and time. It feels like I’m starting a new chapter of my life: filled as it is with the typical apprehension and anxiety that such changes bear with them. So this blog post is hardly a sign that I’ll be getting back to my old posting habits. Mostly, it’s a brief oasis in a turbulent sea of uncertainty.

But, more than anything, I have returned with the news that Plaid Hat Games has turned independent again. There is word that Summoner Wars 2.0 is in the works which got me pretty excited! There’s been no details – naturally – of what that will entail. Will it be a reboot? Will it be compatible with the old decks? Will it be so overhauled as to be entirely unrecognizable?

Who knows? But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about it!

In honour of this announcement, I wanted to make a list of things that I would like to see changed or returned whenever this game comes to the market (assuming, of course, it does). These are presented in no real order as this post is entirely my first impressions and enthusiasm for one of my classic games getting a very unexpected breath of fresh air!

So let’s begin on my Things I want to see in a Summoner Wars sequel!

1. Better Theme

We’ll begin with the easiest. I wrote at length how bland and generic I found the original Summoner Wars. It’s artistic design was… well… functional at best. If you want to see why I found the Jungle Elves and Swamp Orcs so creatively distracting, you can search through my archives. But it wasn’t just bland flavouring. I also spoke to a great degree how the drab art detracted from the game as well. The original Mountain Vargath look rather indistinguishable which can lead to moments in a game where units blend undesirably together.

However, I also feel like this wish is almost all but guaranteed. I doubt anyone is particularly wedded to the old designs because they were so basic so changes are doubtful to cause outcry. Furthermore, Crystal Clans and Ashes demonstrated Plaid Hats’ evolution in far more distinct art direction. Regardless of whether you like the art in either of those, it at least stands out and I think it pretty much all but guarantees that this is a field in which Plaid Hat will have a one hundred percent improvement. And I hope they push more into their weirder design ideas while keeping a wide pool of wacky factions. Despite having bland names, the clans of Crystal Clans had some nice fantastical variety.

2. Keep the Dice

Here might be my most controversial request. I would really like to see the attack dice return! I know this is often the most maligned aspect of Summoner Wars but hear me out.

I think the dice in Summoner Wars is rather integral to its game. I’ve read numerous articles and design documents from developers explaining how randomness improves complexity and strategy rather than diminishes it. Which runs counter typically to how players and fans respond. But the one thing that randomness does is create dynamism. Summoner Wars is a rather simple game by design and I think its simplicity is an important part to making it popular (it’s certainly useful in teaching it to new players). Removing the dice shifts it to a far more predictable game that both reduces the excitement of turn by turn decisions (since attack actions would be assured) but also decreases design space. We’d lose abilities like Precision, Toughness or even interesting ones like Infernal Preaching (ignore the higher result of your attack rolls). The final second summoners managed to find plenty of additional interesting design space in a system that doesn’t have a whole lot in the first place.

So I’d like to see the dice remain but I would prefer if the system was expanded to give it more support. Having played a bunch of Arkham Horror LCG, I wouldn’t mind something like its “card commitment” system or another one analogous to it added to Summoner Wars.

Finally, Crystal Clans departed from the dice while still adding some element of uncertainty with its hidden card play. And while it was cute, I found it mostly highlighted that I preferred dice. Crystal Clans combat was basically a straightforward game of addition and the hidden card mechanic made it impossible to really play the game by yourself.

And I must shamefully admit that I’ve played a bunch of Summoner Wars on my own. Particularly when I was designing my custom content. I found this unworkable with Crystal Clans even though my games against people hardly took into account what card they played in their defence. It was all but impossible to not consider that information on your own.

3. New Economy

For me, this is the portion of the game which I would really like Plaid Hat to consider and experiment. The issues with Summoner Wars mechanics has been debated simply to death. Everyone has their own answer for what went wrong. For me, the problem lays here. It was clever to have your events and units also double up as your economy. But in the end, I feel that it was also the greatest handicap to the game’s desired flow.

Particularly, killing your own units controversially awarded you with magic. I’ve heard a number of people comment on how unintuitive this is. Furthermore, it led to a particularly bleak period of the game’s lifecycle wherein the most popular mode of playing was to kill all your commons for magic, build all your drawn commons for magic, then hide behind your walls hoping your opponent would come to you so that your saved champions could wallop them and secure you a victory. I’ve been rather critical of the argument that this style of playing was the “best” and that its proliferation was more due to the delicacy Plaid Hat applied to aggressive faction and unit design.

But this system also pushed the game into a rather tight design corner that made certain units and mechanics far less desirable than they should have been. For example, single attack cards were almost all but useless. Two attack was far more guaranteed to wound your opponent with a decent chance to give two wounds. This made 2 attack 1 health units far and above more valuable than 1 attack 2 health units. Failing to secure a kill had a compounding problem. First, you didn’t get the expected magic from the death of your enemy. Second, it gave your opponent a good chance to claim your unit for theirs. A unit for unit trade at least is an equal exchange. But summoning a unit only to have it fail to generate magic and then die the next turn was far too punishing, especially if your opponent killed it with the unit you failed to eliminate! It set you back the resources on your failed summon, gave them the resource of your failed summon and (in all likelihood) resulted in them claiming their own unit as a small refund! It also made it so 1 attack 1 health units were essentially non-existent outside of very niche decks as they accomplished nothing and gave too much resources to your opponent.

What could they do differently? I’m not certain because changing the nature of the game’s economy will have a massive fundamental change on all aspects of the game. Crystal Clans had an interesting push and pull economy with the crystal tracker. I’m not certain it was successful. Partly because I didn’t play enough to really understand the game. Partly because I think it led to a different issue of evaluating better exchanges and value.

Had I a good suggestion for this, though, I wouldn’t be sharing it here. I would be designing my own game. So I wish the best of luck to Plaid Hat on this front.

4. Maintain the Board Size

So, I know I’m referencing Crystal Clans a lot but that’s partly because of my disappointment with it being a spiritual Summoner Wars 2.0. It is largely its own beast and the similarities between the two are more superficial than they are worth highlighting. However, the nice thing about Crystal Clans being so different is it allowed me to hone in on what I really liked about Summoner Wars.

There’s a really fascinating spatial puzzle aspect to Summoner Wars. You have to manoeuvre your units around your opponent’s forces and open up corridors of attack. Or you have to funnel an invader into death alleys while protecting your wounded leader from surprise flanking measures. Crystal Clans lacked all this because its board was so small. You had no sense of actually outmanoeuvring your opponent. But that’s what the difference of 48 squares to 9 squares will bring. I want to have to plan crazy sprints of swift units around enemy bodyguards or using guile to shift units to open valuable columns to rush my assassins through. I don’t know if I would want to see the board shrunk, I’d be happy to see it grow but at the very least it should remain substantial.

5. Balance Defence and Offence

Summoner Wars matches can really grind to a halt, especially against some of the earliest designed decks. There are two reasons for this: the board is large enough that you can put your opponent’s summoner on the retreat (this is good). The other problem was that invading your opponent’s board was far too difficult because of the power of summoning walls. Walls were too strong to reliably address in a timely manner if your opponent’s summoner slipped behind them. And assaulting the walls or trying to work around them left you far too vulnerable to your opponent summoning off those walls and stealing momentum and advantage.

Yes, the summoning wall mechanic was the other great contributor to the stagnant turtle strategy. But I don’t want it abolished. I want a nice balance between defensive strategies and offensive strategies. Playing defensive shouldn’t be an inherent advantage (due to the awkward economy of the cards combined with the positional advantage of defending walls). Instead, it should be strong for factions designed around them. The Deep Dwarves losing offensive value to gain an economic edge is a great design. It puts pressure on the attacker to come and get their opponent otherwise they’ll sit and meditate their way to victory. But it also means that, to truly capitalize on the meditating advantage, the Deep Dwarf player has fewer units to defend herself from an assault.

On the flip side, you had Tacullu who was only strong on defence but did not apply any pressure for doing so. His abilities triggered if the enemy was on his side of the battlefield but there wasn’t anything to encourage the enemy to come to him. So it was often advantageous for his opponent to sit across from him, passing and twiddling their thumbs since Tacullu’s defensive style applied no pressure – it merely punished his opponent if they tried to play the game.

I think Plaid Hat was slowly arriving at a good balance near the life cycle of Summoner Wars between offence and defence. But more than that, I want there to be some mechanic to encourage offensive play. Crystal Clans had its crystals which armies fought over. I think Summoner Wars 2.0 would benefit from some manner of map objectives that allowed an aggressive player to seize momentum or an advantage by claiming territory on the board. I think this could open up greater design space too but having defensive factions built around the idea of reinforcing a space on the battlefield instead of just taking advantage of inherent defensive perks. A theoretical faction could then be geared towards claiming a map objective and sitting on it, making it very difficult to reclaim by their opponent instead of being designed around hiding in a corner behind unbreakable walls.

6. Take Time to Future Proof

I will always sing the praises of the final releases for Summoner Wars. Alliances and the last second summoners were, overall, really interesting from a complexity and creativity standpoint. It really stretched the game’s system and made for some really fantastic abilities.

But goodness was Farrah and her deck a novel. Moyra had her own collection of awkward wording and overall the writing on the cards got smaller and smaller as more text was squeezed into unchanging boxes. A large part of this was trying to come up with ways to write really narrow gameplay fixes to prior cards or strange interactions. I think the game would benefit from having a more fleshed out toolbox. Having things like keywords, generic abilities and unit traits can hopefully avoid needing to remember who has the word Light in their ability name and whether Flight counts for that trigger.

I’m hopeful that this is almost a guarantee as well. Crystal Clans and Ashes had these necessary core elements. Crystal Clans hardly tapped into its trait system as it died on the vine a little early. But I’d rather the system in place than the questionable grammar we got from Summoner Wars.

Also, consistent wording and formatting on cards would be a lovely little bonus cherry.

7. The Filth

I want to see the Filth return. That’s it. I just liked the weird demon cult and how their basic unit was body horror’d into all those delightfully weird mutations. But please leave the pink demon clutches in the past, if you would be so kind.