Fantasy Civ Solo – the Exploration and Discovery

First, some news – Fantasy Civ Solo: Discovery and Doom is confirmed with a release date of Tuesday, June 17th! See below for the progress update.

In this article I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the exploration and discovery mechanics of Fantasy Civ Solo, why it’s an important part of the game, and what you can find.

Discovery in Fantasy Civ Solo

Discovery is the first word in the tagline for Fantasy Civ Solo for a reason – it’s what drives the gameplay forward.

A game of Fantasy Civ Solo starts with an unexplored map. On your turn (called the Civilization Turn), you can send a scouting expedition out to an unexplored hex, and explore it. To do this, you’ll pay gold equal to the number of hexes away from your starting city you want to explore, and then roll two dice – a Discovery Die, and a Monster Die. I’ll talk more about monsters in next week’s blog post – but it’s through the Discovery Die that you’ll determine what you find on that particular hex.

Discovery is important to your civilization for a few reasons.

For starters, each aspiration (the win condition for your civilization) requires you to explore to achieve it! 

Additionally, exploration can lead to resources of different kinds. These may add unit types to your barracks, give your civilization resources, add new locations to the map, or even allow you to find something epic!

As you explore the game map, the discoveries you make will allow your civilization to grow. These discoveries then enable you to better deal with the monsters you uncover, and the eventual coming of your civilization’s doom.

What You Can Find

There are 60 unique discovery entries that you can find when exploring in Fantasy Civ Solo. Here are some teasers:

Discoveries you make while exploring can increase your barracks options when creating a new military unit, give additional resources, add important locations to the game map, and more. My philosophy for these discoveries was to either enable your civilization, add cool interactions to your map, or give you more choices on what to do during your civilization turn.

Fantasy Civ Solo Progress

Like I mentioned at the start of the post, I am confirming Tuesday June 17th as the release date for Fantasy Civ Solo: Discovery and Doom.

Progress has gone very well so far. Despite the challenges of learning a new publishing software (which isn’t a big deal, but some small things are irksome), I’ve made incredible progress this week.

All but 8 of the content entries are done. These are saved because a final round of playtesting is occurring as of today. The content will be updated to help smooth over weak areas in the results.

Once the last round of playtesting is done, I’ll also need to adjust values. This will be a process that continues post release, because (hopefully) way more people will play this game after release, than playtest it before release. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I like it when games are unbalanced (it often leads to fun player discovery and mastery moments), but I want the balance (or lack thereof) to be intentional. Right now, despite the playtesting that has occurred, I still feel a bit in the dark around this game’s balance between combat, economy, monsters, doom, and aspirations.

Once playtesting is done, I’ll finish the entire game. Then I go into “pre-publishing” which does things like double check I have credits correct, create internal links for the folks that want to play with the digital PDF, and then the dreaded PROOFREADING. Lots of that goes on.

Finally, on Monday June 16th, I’ll start adding game pages to marketplaces, and the release occurs on Tuesday June 17th.

Connect

Next week’s blog post will outline more about Monster design, and give another update on progress (hopefully the only thing left will be proofreading). 

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Thank you for being a fan of games! I’m looking forward to exploring with you!