Monday, April 9, 2012

Azrael - The Angel Of Death

There are 7 archangel cards in Battle For Souls. Right now the plan is to have a player start with a single angel or devil card chosen at random. From there, players can earn another angel card by guiding a soul to sainthood.

This is the preliminary prototype card for Azrael, the angel of death (click to enlarge). Each angel card is worth 3 victory points and can add 1 holy point each turn to any soul that shares the same heavenly virtue color - in this case yellow as shown in the +1 circle in the top left of the card.

In addition, each angel has some special power they bring to the table. In some cases, the power is limited to certain amount of uses per game, as is the case with Azrael. If a card has limited uses a marker track is provided on the card to ensure no confusion about how many times a power has been used.

Angel and devil cards offer decent advantages, but where they can tip the balance of power too far, we limit them. I'm sure the power and number of uses for each will change as we playtest in order to get the balance just right.

In Azrael's case, the angel can reap a soul in play without a reap card. This will allow the player to score victory points by reaping souls that are neutral to holy, or Azrael can deny the devil a soul that he has been working on bringing to hell.

This is a pretty powerful card that is essentially worth 9 points. But even more, those who play the devil will hate this card as it will force them to spread unholy points evenly across souls as spending too many unholy points on one soul will just be lost to Azrael. If we find this is too powerful, we can reduce the purgatory power to only souls with a single unholy point, reduce the total number of uses, or remove the purgatory power all together.