Mechanics Shop: Summoning and Activations

Welcome to Mechaincs Shop! In this series, I’ll take you through one of the core mechanics in Mage Duel, how it works, what decision points it creates for players, and why it’s (hopefully) fun.

First up is one of the defining mechanics of Mage Duel: How summoning minions works. I'll also tackle a distinct but related topic: activation tokens.

Overview

Mage Duel is a game where players have a lot of choices about what to put on the map and when. Hopefully, a variety of options are viable in a given game, depending on the board state. Sometimes, you need a lot of minions on the board, and maybe sometimes you just want your mage to go ham and fire off their most potent spells.

How to create space for these options while at the same time preventing players from abusing this freedom in ways that diminish the play experience presents a design challenge.

Hopefully what you'll see below is a system which emphasizes player choice both formally (players can literally make different choices) and substantively (players have good reasons to consider more than one option).

Summon/Recall/Replenish Rules Review

When a mage starts its activation, before it does anything else, it has the choice to either summon, recall, or replenish one of its minion units. The mage can only do one of these things, but it doesn’t cost them an action.

Darrow summons the Easily Misled Mob by moving one mana token from his pool to their card. Then, each character in the unit appears in an empty tile adjacent to him.

Summoning: the mage allocates an amount of mana to the minion’s dashboard and puts the characters in that unit in empty tiles adjacent to the summoning mage. This means that mana will not be available for the mage to use on spells during the rest of the mage’s activation.

Recalling: the mage removes a unit it has previously summoned. The recalled unit regains all activation tokens and loses all damage, damage over time, and status effect tokens. The recalled unit's mana goes back into the mage's mana pool for use casting spells this activation.

Replenishing: put a character in summoned unit which is in the reserves back onto the map. Basically, if the unit is on the map but one or more of its characters was banished, you can bring a character back

Activation Tokens

Activation tokens are a key element of Mage Duel. At any given point in the game, players may have different amounts of units on the board. Sometimes, a player will only have their mages, and at other times, each mage may have all of its units summoned. 

An Activation Token

How do we ensure that everything on the board has the freedom to activate, but that different player choices about how many units to summon remain balanced? We wouldn’t want a player to be able summon one powerful unit and then simply activate it every turn. 

The answer is activation tokens. Every minion unit starts with two, and every mage unit starts with three. When you decide to spend your turn activating a unit, remove one of its activation tokens. If a unit has no tokens, it cannot activate.

So how do you get activation tokens back? Three ways:

• All the characters in the unit are banished (minion only)

• The unit is recalled (minion only)

• The active player takes a recovery turn (mages and minions)

Recovery Turns

During a recovery turn, you simply get back all your activation tokens, but don’t activate any units. Basically, you skip a turn to refresh all your activation options. 

If none of your units on the map have an activation token, you must take a recovery turn, but you can choose take one before that. Generally, players will want to delay the recovery turn as much as they can, which means activating all their units. However, if you just want to activate the same thing over and over again, you can, but the price is steep.

If you don’t summon anything, you’ll take recovery turns more often. As long as each of your mages summons a minion on two out of its three activations, you’ll be able to delay the recovery turn as long as possible. The maximum delay is seven activations per mage.

Friendly Advice

As you get a feel for the game, bear these suggestions in mind:

When to Summon

• When you need more board presence 

• When your mage is low on activation tokens

• When you need a specific minion unit to accomplish a specific goal

When to recall

• When a minion unit is about to get banished

• When a minion unit has too many debuffs to do anything useful 

• When you really need your mage to have more mana for spells

• When you know you'll need to use a minion unit later in the round and it's currently out of activation tokens

When to replenish 

• When you don’t need to summon or recall.

Final Thoughts

I hope you are enjoying your exploration into Mage Duel even a fraction as much as I have enjoyed creating it. This combination of rules is hopefully simple to follow, but it also presents players a lot of different ways to use their turn.

You can activate the same unit multiple times, but then it becomes a sitting duck. You can use your mage a lot early, but if you use all of its activation tokens, you won't be able to summon or recall until you take a recovery turn. My aim here was to give players freedom, but to create tradeoffs as they pushed the envelope. Please try the game out either with TTS or with print and play and let me know what you think!