ONIROS - Second Playtest Preview

 The earliest ideas for ONIROS started taking shape in January 2022, at which point it was pretty much just "a card game where you manifest your dreams into reality, and that's what the cards represent". About a month later, I shelved all that because the ideas weren't really getting more coherent. 

In October 2023, I revisited my old notes after checking out a board game group local to the area where I was living at the time. This culminated in my first playtest version of the game, which was pretty close to functional mechanically, but nowhere near balanced. 

This June, after moving back to my hometown a couple months earlier, I joined a different board game group, where I've been playing several different games every week. This has been super helpful to my thoughts as a designer who was previously much more versed in RPGs than board games (and it's also where I heard about the protospiel happening this weekend. 

 I started working on the current, second playtest version of ONIROS at the end of July following up on my feedback from last October, and it's been more or less ready for a few weeks now, barring the layout and physical assembly. Here are a few cards of each different type to give you a taste of what it's going to look like.

Dream Cards

The tools with which players fight the Regime, and each other. Dream cards have a number of other abilities that help you, hinder your opponents, or just cause chaos. For the prototype, I hand-drew and scanned in art for these to represent the abstract and surreal nature many of them share.

Regime Cards

The bad guys - at least in the Revolution Phase, before the players turn on each other. Regime cards typically either hinder players or assert Control, which can eventually cause all players to lose the game before they even reach the Iconoclasm Phase if left unchecked. For the prototype, I used stock photos to represent the more grounded nature of these cards.

Vision Cards

These double as players' hit points and their victory conditions in the Iconoclasm Phase. As you take damage, you will have to pick and choose which Vision cards to hang onto and later play in order to win the game. For the prototype, I represented these with abstract symbols taken from the wonderful game-icons.net, which is also where the Hit Points, Breaking Points, and Victory Points icons come from.

Catalyst Cards

Though by far the most complex cards, only one Catalyst card is used per game, and it alters the rules for all players. They have no art because I had to fit a lot of text on them.