Welcome to the Gauntlet

Late at night, working on the last scenario, idly shuffling a stack of Cyberpunk Legends cards in my hands, I had an epiphany:

It would be incredibly easy to turn Cyberpunk Legends into a roguelike deckbuilder.

The rules are simple:

1. Pull out all the Obstacles from all the decks, shuffle them together.
2. Shuffle all the Upgrade cards together (in a separate pile) with the Trauma Team cards.
3. Roll a d6-3(?) and lay out that many Obstacles.
4. Play as normal.
5. Set aside cleared Obstacles. Every three Obstacles cleared, every player gets to draw one card from the Upgrade Pool (do this only when there are no Obstacles in play).
6. Permanent go into play. Swap any non-permanents with a card in your hand, that card is removed from your deck forever.
7. If you draw any Trauma Team card, heal two, discard that card and draw again from the upgrade deck.
8. When you defeat an Obstacle with an XP symbol on it you get to draw an extra card from the XP pool.
9. Every time you set aside 3 cleared Obstacles, add +1 to all future die rolls.,
10. Permanents with the flip symbol unflip whenever you cash in cards to draw from the XP pool.

Everyone woke to an excited series of Discord messages from me. I had a new mode. Something completely different to do with the decks. I needed people to test. We fired up Tabletop Sim… and got DESTROYED. So we played again. And again. Finally on the third try, with a little luck, with a crew of the core designers on Legends all bringing their A game, we got through.

Now, I’m telling you this story this way for a reason. Because at this moment there becomes a huge design decision to make. We’ve created a new mode. We can’t stop playing it. It gives you something to do with your cards when you're done with the base game and it adds infinite replayability to the set. Do we ever tell you, the fans, about it?

That may seem like a silly question, especially in light of the fact that clearly I have… but conventional wisdom is no. We’re a small team. We’re never going to have time to test this mode as thoroughly as the main game. It creates brand confusion: is the game a narrative-based campaign game or a roguelike obstacle rush? 

The new mode also presents an enormous jump in difficulty. The base set gets tough but it’s balanced to be an introduction: teams are meant to get through. Gauntlet Mode (which is what we’re calling this) is playing Dark Souls with a plastic guitar. It’s actively messy (in a design sense), it turns the Trauma Team cards into proxies for healing and asks you to have a die which we are not including in the box. The mode gets better with every new card we release, so playing it with just the base set is very much the beta experience.

And if we ship with Gauntlet, it also means we have to maintain two modes in the future…

So we should probably just leave it in the bin. 

As a consumer though, I’d want it. More than that I want to run a company that trusts the people who play our games. The conventional wisdom today is that you present only the most streamlined, most polished experience because people can’t handle even the slightest rough edges and if you ever let those show, your Board Game Geek rating will get tanked.

I don’t think that’s true. Rather I refuse to believe that. How many amazing homebrew experiences have you had?  How many times have you modified a rule to better suit your playgroup? 

I want to encourage people to be creative with what we present. I want to give you the tools to play with what you’ve bought from us in as many ways as possible. I think I can pop a note in the box that says “here’s a weird, half baked, beta mode. Go nuts, give us feedback, it’s going to get better with every set” and you’re going to get it rather than write a review or go on twitter saying “The campaign was great, but the Gauntlet Mode was a mess, 6/10”. I think people will see it as a bonus…

But that’s not what every designer I talk to says, so we’ll see.

We'll see because I’m going to put a card at the end of the final scenario saying “You’ve unlocked Gauntlet Mode”, telling you the rules and that it’s going to be messy. I trust that players are going to embrace the messiness, know this isn’t the central mode and enjoy having more things to do with their cards… but it makes me nervous. Even right now, as I write this, I’m thinking of deleting this whole post, and just stuffing Gauntlet Mode in a closet. But the world’s got to be a better place than that.

Because I love the future with this mode.  I love it even more than I love how it plays out now.  But without releasing Gauntlet now, I don’t think that future ever appears. I don’t think this should be a separate expansion. I don’t think we should keep you from playing with your cards until everything is perfect. I don’t think we should charge you for a set of rules I can give you today.

So I’m going to leave you with the vision of the future for Gauntlet Mode, because I’m going to ask you, the people reading this blog, the people who are interested enough to take time out of their day to read a thousand words of my scrawl, to share that vision and explain to the people around you what this could be.

Because as we get more Obstacles and more Upgrades into the game, people can start to “Cube” Gauntlet Mode (in the MTG sense). You can build custom Obstacle decks and reward decks to challenge your friends to get through. You and your crew can customize your player decks with everything you've got to really push deckbuilding to the limit. There’s so much theory crafting it’ll allow for, so much creativity. I want that. I want that in the game…

But I also want it from our side. I am excited to run tournaments. I want to create custom Gauntlet decks full of Obstacles and Upgrades no one’s ever seen, the ones that aren’t fit to print, and I want you to bring you and your crew, bring your custom player decks and see if you can tough-as-nails it through the most dangerous things in Night City.

I want your friendly local game store to be able to make their own cube and give prizes (which hopefully someday we are rich enough to provide) for any team that can get through it. I want teams to enjoy honing their communication to a knife’s edge to talk around whatever may come.

Most of all, I just want people to have more to do with their cards. So is it a good idea?  In a perfect world: yes. And I have to believe in that world. That people still want to explore the wilderness rather than just have a hand-guided tour. So here it is. Here’s this blog post. The flags’ been planted. We’re doing this.

Welcome to The Gauntlet.

-JP