Rove: What are Ether Fields?

Hello Rovers!

Tyvan Grossi here, lead game designer for Addax Games. Today I’d like to discuss why we have ether fields in Rove. 

Let me quickly discuss where ether fields came from. During the earliest versions of Rove, back when the map was a square grid and before cards flipped, we had status effects in the game.  If you’ve played games like Gloomhaven, Final Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons, and countless other games then you know what I’m talking about with status effects. These are temporary effects that are either a buff or debuff to the character they’re applied too.

We iterated on our status effects for almost two years. We had a few goals to achieve with them. First, we couldn’t have too many of them. Rove is a board game, the more effects we have the more of a memory ask we’re asking of our players. If I recall correctly we had 12 different status effects at one point, but quickly whittled things down to 6. The thing that we got hung up on was tracking.

When you’re playing a video game, you can go pretty crazy with status effects. The computer / game console handles everything for the players, so tracking is easy and if the video game has a good UI, information look up is also real easy. These things become more tricky for tabletop skirmish games. 

I’ve never liked having tokens on player / enemy boards, sheets, status cards or what have you. Having to look at the map then over to the sheet is time consuming and mentally taxing. Always double checking if a token is present. I really pushed to have the tracking tokens somewhere on the map. We explored lots of different standees that would allow us to put tokens on it, from rings around the standee, slots for tokens, and tokens that could clip onto a standee. I couldn’t get a tracking method to stick.

I really dug my heals in on this one. I felt status effects were necessary for skirmish games, especially a fantasy game like Rove. Players are accustomed to the mechanic and the tactical depth of a game is less when they’re missing. We just couldn’t agree on what the right solution was.

I went to a protospiel on the east coast and play tested a pretty late in development version of the game, quite confident the game was nearing completion. I was left a little bewildered by the experience. The play testers generally like the game well enough, but the status effect tokens and tracking them stuck out like a sore thumb for many. It was to finicky. It was to easy to bump the table and lose tracking. When you moved a standee you had to move all of its status tokens with it. I realized that something needed to change. 

That’s when it dawned on me. I’ve only known status effects as something that affects a character or unit in a game. What if the status affected a space on the map instead of a unit?

I finally stumbled on the idea of the ether field. Like most of these ideas go, everything just kind of fell into place. We would have six ether fields, one for each of our six elements. It would limit the number of effects that players have to memorize. Ether fields would be placed into a space on the map. If a unit is standing in an ether field, they’re affected by its modifier. If the unit moves, the modifier stays behind. It was simple and easy to track.

It was pretty easy from there to determine the effects of those ether fields. I wanted an equal number of positive and negative effects; three ether fields you want to stand in and three you didn’t. Fire was the easy one, it would be a damage over time effect. Earth became its counter part, a healing over time effect. Morph would hamper your attacks while crux emboldens them. Lastly, I wanted water and air to be temporary but powerful effects. Water became ice and slows down your movement, while wind blocks damage which the ignore defense effect doesn’t negate. Simple yet effective. 

Now, to keep things simple I choose to include the rule that there can only be one tile in a space. I didn’t want ether tiles to stack, because then some game components would hide other components, making it easy to forget all of the effects that are in a space. Fortunately, I feel this created more tactical opportunities. One of my favorite things to do is replace in ice ether field that I’m occupying with a crux field, perform a powerful attack, and then dash away.

I think back to the protospiel often. If I hadn’t gone, I would have never gotten the push I needed to create ether fields and develop Rove into a more unique game space.

Thanks for reading the blog post. It’s a unique privilege getting to write one of these. I really enjoy reading / watching behind the scenes stories of my favorite movies, video games, and board games, when I can find those. Now I get to write a sort of behind the scenes article myself. There’s something very humbling about this.

- Ty

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