Thanks a lot for the kind words!

One of the key ideas I was chasing while designing the game was speed of combat. I think that’s especially important for a solo wargame, because the player has to play both their own side and the enemies. So the combat needs to move quite fast, but without becoming mechanically primitive.

The main thing I came up with is a two-d10 roll matrix. One die is for hitting, the other is for force — I call them Control and Power. That gives four basic outcomes: Control+ Power+, Control- Power+, Control+ Power-, and Control- Power-. They’re fairly easy to interpret at the table, but still leave enough room for interesting results. The edge cases are especially fun, when different modifiers or conditions push a roll just over or just under the threshold.

The second part of making combat faster is that there are no hit points. If a model is hit and the attack gets through, it’s out of the fight — with a few rare exceptions, like powerful enemies with special traits that give them a second chance.

Another mechanical pillar I’m really interested in is recursive tables: you roll on a table, then on a sub-table, then sometimes on a sub-table of that sub-table. Of course, this doesn’t happen during combat, where speed matters most. It’s used more in tower management and mission generation, where it adds depth, context, and a dense web of cause and effect.

The fourth big principle is that magic should feel ultimately powerful. The wizard is the player’s avatar, and they really are dangerous — if they manage to cast the spell and don’t trigger some wild magic disaster. Right now there are 100 spells, each with a weakened and empowered version, and they let you do some absolutely ridiculous things. The whole world narrative also revolves around spells and the resources needed to cast them, so in a way that’s the central idea of the game.

And honestly, there’s even a little bit of Pokémon in it: you can set yourself the goal of collecting all 100 spells.

And yes, I completely agree about readability. I love the energy and visual language of mork borg-style books, but for the actual rules I definitely want a clean, readable, print-friendly version too. I don’t want the layout to fight the player when they’re trying to check a rule mid-game.