Designer Journal 4: More Challenge
By the time Clan of Two releases, our biggest fans will have had the base game for more than half a year! This means certain players will feel they have “solved” the game and will be looking for new challenges. Don’t worry, we’ll deliver it.
New Enemy Abilities
We wanted the new enemies in this expansion to have new tricks for you to deal with. It took some trial and error, but we eventually landed on 4 unique abilities that can appear on enemies:
Fast – This enemy moves 1 extra space. This helps the enemy get right into the action.
Parting Blow – When this enemy is defeated, it deals 1 damage to a character in its space. This has a huge impact, especially for melee enemies that tend to run into your space, or characters that get too close (I’m sorry, Ahsoka).
Vigilant – This enemy cannot be disrupted and its abilities cannot be ignored. No shenanigans. All Duel enemies have this by default, but it can be nasty on other enemies as well. For example, the new “Mobilize” planning card usually allows you to avoid being damaged by sentries; this doesn’t work against vigilant sentries!
Duel – Explained below.
Duel
When rewatching Season 2 of the show, I noted that there were a few pivotal scenes in which heroes had a dramatic close-quarters duel with a villain. This included Ahsoka’s duel with Morgan Elsbeth as well as The Mandalorian’s climactic fight against Moff Gideon and the Darksaber.
These moments felt important enough that they needed their own sub-system to recreate these scenes. To do this, we gave some enemies the Duel ability which has the following effects:
They can only be dealt damage by characters in their space.
When you deal this enemy damage, you must draw a Duel card and resolve its effect.
Most Duel cards block at least 1 damage, and then have a cinematic effect. Maybe the enemy makes a reckless assault, or perhaps they attempt to dodge your attack entirely!
It was important to me that these effects didn’t just feel random and unfair. Some of these cards have a choice that players can make to mitigate their effects.
In addition, the back of (most) Duel cards have a value on them. This tells you how much damage is most effective against this card. For example “3+” encourages you to try and deal at least 3 damage to overcome this card’s effects.
With the duel mechanic you’ll be able to relive the iconic scenes of Asohka vs. Morgan Elsbeth or The Mandalorian vs. Moff Gideon on your tabletop.
Tough (revised)
I almost forgot to mention that there’s a secret bonus enemy ability in this expansion: tough. You might recognize tough from expert mode in the base game, but in the expansion it can show up at any difficulty level.
With the addition of the duel deck to the game, I took this opportunity to slightly revise how the tough ability works. Now, when you attack a tough enemy you discard the top card of the Duel deck. Each duel card has a value in the lower right corner which shows how much damage tough will block (between 0 and 2).
This also allowed us to make tough block damage slightly more frequently (50% of the time), and even block 2 damage (1 out of 12 cards).
Tough is one of my favorite abilities because it adds a small “push your luck” mechanic to the game. Do I deal the enemy exactly the damage needed to defeat it, or attack for more just in case it blocks? There is a lot of open information in the game, so this provides just a smidge of uncertainty.
Dangerous Events
During playtesting, some of our most seasoned veterans informed me that they were winning every single game, even on the highest difficulty setting. You might be in this camp, so late in development we decided to design an even higher difficulty level. The end result was Dangerous Events.
These optional cards can be added to your event deck, replacing 7 of the weakest event cards in the game. You will no longer breathe a sigh of relief when the “Draw Attention” card comes up.
The best part is that Dangerous Event cards can be used to make any difficulty harder. You can make standard difficulty more challenging if you enjoy playing with 4 cards in your hand, or you can try dangerous expert difficulty for the ultimate challenge.
Regardless of how you like to play the game, the Clan of Two expansion has your back. Exciting new missions, characters, mechanics, and challenges await!
The Clan of Two expansion arrives this summer! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and our website to stay up to date with the most recent news.
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