Complete Cyvasse Rules

[Jonas Platte]

Jonas, nice to hear from you!

I've a quick question in regards to the dragon's movement when it's being drawn in the middle of a game. Looking at the rules, it states that-

On this special move, does the same logic apply for stepping over pieces? As in, if the fortress is occupied by a same-player piece, and is surrounded by same-player pieces, the dragon has no-where to come into and cannot be brought out? Or instead, is the whole area (every hex within 4 steps of the fortress) available to be landed on?

The first scenario makes more sense if you're assuming the dragon is hiding beneath the fortress. The second, if the dragon is high above the fortress and is going to fall like a comet on its prey. >.>

My main concern here is that in the midst of the carnage, I don't think the dragon would be able to "come out" very quickly if the first scenario is true, while the dragon could land almost anywhere on the board in the second scenario.

What do you think?

I think the second variant is better gameplay-wise, because the first one could leave some of your pieces trapped by the opponents dragon while yours isn't brought out.

In Cyvasse Online, I initially had the first one because that's just how I interpreted the rule set, though I changed it now after Mike told me that it's not how he intended it to be.

[MikeL]

This is excellent work and I just have a couple of questions that I could not find the reasoning for in the thread.

1) Why did you decide that the 3 colored tiles were fixed in position? It was my interpretation of the wording in the text that the carnelian, jade and lapis tiles were also arranged. I felt that this was why it was stressed that "the board would change from game to game, depending on how the players arranged their home squares."

If the board looked the same from game to game but the pieces changed that would hardly be remarkable and I think it would be stated that way not how it is.

2) Why did you decide to add a fortress as an 11th piece? It seems clear that there are 10 pieces and that each side has one dragon as well as one king. If there was an 11th piece that consisted of one I imagine it would still be included in the total count. My interpretation of the fortress was that it was an accepted factor of game play that each side would set up a fortress structure out of existing tiles to protect the king not that it was a separate piece.

3) I concur with the inclusion of mountains as fixed pieces and the trebuchet being the same as a catapult as it is a sort of catapult but I find then the tiles being associated with topography to be redundant and the colors to be applied in a different manner than they are used in the text.

In the text, Red seems to be associated with mountains, deserts, and even a river and lake. Green describes streams, a sea, and land formations. Blue has far less reference to any topography, I can only find the Sapphire Isle and two rivers.

It would seem that the colors are more likely to be related to elemental forces or some other characteristic of the piece than topography. It could even be that for example Black pieces get a larger bonus on red squares and White pieces get larger bonus from blue squares.

There is reference for a Jade set of pieces, which is being sold alongside ivory so I am not sure about how that would work if the squares remain red, blue and green.

I am interested in the colors and their use so my research led me here to see how those tiles are being applied to the game. Interesting to see all the interpretations! :)

Wow. I don't check the thread for a month and I get way behind :) Thanks for the interest and thoughtful questions.

Just to be clear, I'll do a quick explanation because I think the terms we're using might be getting confused. I have a physical Cyvasse set, which consists of a board (91-space hex grid), 4 grassland tiles (2 per player), 4 hill tiles (2 per player) 4 forest tiles (2 per player), 2 fortress "tiles" (1 per player - they are bigger and more detailed than the other terrain tiles, but still tiles), plus a set of 26 pieces per side (including 6 mountains which are placed by each player in the setup stage). I'm defining a tile as anything which is placed on the board, that can have a piece placed on top of it. So you have a fortress tile and terrain tiles, whereas the mountain pieces are counted as pieces separate from terrain tiles because no two pieces can occupy the same space - no other piece can sit "on top of" a mountain. It's semantics I know, that's how I'm defining it in my head.

1) We actually changed the rules regarding this several times in an effort to find the most playable version, so I'm not quite sure which post it was that you have read about fixing the terrain tiles. We did try having each square of the checker grid as a fixed terrain tile at one stage, but that was horrible gameplay-wise. Suffice to say Jonas got the online version to work the way I intended, which is that the tiles are moveable from game to game, just like the pieces are moveable game to game. What we did do for the sake of reducing complication is to make the tile position fixed to the starting positions of tier 2 pieces. So Light Horses always start on Grassland tiles, Crossbows always start on Hill tiles and Spears always start on Forest tiles.

With regard to the Carnelian, Jade, Lapis Lazuli colour scheme, we haven't used it for the online game, (or the 3D printed version) simply because if you don't actually use real gemstones it's pretty garish, so I'm going to assume that was just the 3-way checkered colouring of the specific Cyvasse board Trystane and Myrcella were actually playing on, and not anything to do with the terrain colours themselves. I think it's implied from the different games we see in ASOIAF that Cyvasse boards are made out of a wide range of different materials/colours, the same way Chess boards are in our world, so I'm not too worried that we haven't used those specific colours, but this is why we justify having a hexagonal grid.

2) As hopefully is clear above, I'm not thinking of the fortress as a separate piece (although I may have written something in error somewhere?), it's a tile. Just as the tier 2 pieces start on various terrain tiles, the King starts on the Fortress tile.

3) Hopefully I also cleared this up above. The board is checkered just for visual reference, and then the coloured terrain tiles are placed on top of the board at the start of each game. Again I'm not sure whether you were reading the part in this thread where we were fixing the topography to the board, and I agree this was a horrible idea :D

As far as having each side get different advantages from different squares and associating each side with elemental forces, I think it's an interesting idea, but would make it into a different style of game. It might work by itself, but I am not in favour of adding it to the rules we already have since I think that adds quite some complication to the game play when it is already complex enough.

I'm going to use the cyvasse-online Facebook page to see if I can play some games with people to walk them through the rules. So definitely like that page if you want to see the game development. :)

[MikeL]

This is a brilliant project!

Thanks!

Mike,

Quick question. Are there any anti-cheese rules for the mountains? Like preventing a player from encircling their king with a wall of them, or cornering off a section of the map?

I didn't see a mention of this, but was just curious. Thanks!

Ah weird, I've been playing that elephants/spears can't go move if its path is flanked on both sides by mountains.

Yes well this is one of the smaller points I like in my interpretation: I've said that Elephants/Spears can move between two adjacent mountains because it is a "mountain pass" as mentioned in the book (i.e. it wasn't bad strategy for Trystane to put Elephants in the passes, only that he was so predictable).

Completely surrounding your king/fortress (remember they start in the same spot) by mountains can be a dubious proposition - you can't promote any pieces because you can't get rabble to your fortress, and it's still vulnerable to Spears/Elephant, Dragon. I'm not entirely sure yet that it's always bad strategy to do this, but it's coming to be one of those things that you might do as an inexperienced player, but learn better later on.

Another interesting aspect Jonas and I have found is that since Dragons can jump mountains (but not other pieces) putting mountain pieces directly adjacent to your fortress can give the opponent's dragon a path into the fortress which cannot be defended, whereas it's better to keep rabble/other pieces next to the fortress where they can both flank any piece that might temporarily capture the fortress, as well as block the dragon from coming in. Mountains are best used to block the path of tier 3 pieces (heavy horse, trebuchet, elephant) from the opponent's side of the board straight into your fortress.

[MikeL]

I think the second variant is better gameplay-wise, because the first one could leave some of your pieces trapped by the opponents dragon while yours isn't brought out.

In Cyvasse Online, I initially had the first one because that's just how I interpreted the rule set, though I changed it now after Mike told me that it's not how he intended it to be.

Yeah I understand the first version, but there were specific circumstances where an opponent's dragon could effectively pin the dragon "under the fortress". It made for some unnecessarily frustrating gameplay.