Blood and Salt: Siege
Par Blood and Salt Studios
Statut actuel
À venir
Fin de campagne : 23/03/2027
En bref · fiche BoardGameGeek traduite
Un {jeu de cartes à 2 joueurs}, {centré sur les personnages} et axé sur la {recherche et la destruction}, conçu pour ceux qui recherchent une {expérience tactique} hautement interactive, où chaque seconde compte pour le {contrôle des voies}, la {destruction de la carte} et une {synergie d'équipe bien calculée}. Dans Blood and Salt: Siege, les joueurs doivent {constituer une équipe} de {mercenaires (« Mercs »)} parmi {6 rôles spécialisés} pour mener {des combats asymétriques de type « recherche et destruction »} afin d’atteindre un {site de bombe}, y poser une bombe, la désamorcer ou éliminer les Mercs adverses pour remporter la partie. Vous choisirez des {atouts} et des {options d’équipement} pour créer votre main de départ et votre réserve, franchirez des {dispositions de murs} variables sur {3 couloirs} issus de {1 des 5 cartes destructibles}, et utiliserez des {capacités uniques de mercenaires} tandis que vous vous battrez pour le contrôle des laboratoires clandestins Salt Labs. Il s’agit d’un {jeu de cartes inspiré des jeux de tir tactiques}, qui reprend des mécanismes tels que le temps limité commun (« ticks »), les échanges de tirs, les décisions nécessitant de passer de la connaissance à l’action, les jeux d’esprit basés sur la déduction pour désamorcer des bombes, les tirs rapides et les tirs à la tête en un seul coup, pour les transposer dans des expériences thématiques de jeu de cartes. —description du concepteur
Présentation de la campagne
How to Win
Gameplay Overview and Rulebook
Formats of Play
The Future of Siege
We know how important a game’s lifespan is to choosing to purchase and partake in a game. So we wanted to really emphasize how much care and effort we have devoted to sorting out Blood and Salt: Siege’s future, goals, and plans to enact those goals.
First and foremost, it is imperative to set the right expectations for a game, being crystal clear on how we believe this game can succeed and who it is made for. This is especially true with a product like ours that is positioned to speak a slightly new industry language. See below:
The Current “Language” of Card Games
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When attempting to describe why this game might fulfill a niche in the crowded card game market it’s important to understand how current collectible card games are realized. Card games and the infrastructure as its stands currently are built around the ecosystem Magic: The Gathering created:
- Design: Designers idealize a product.
- Manufacturing: Idealized assets are sent to a manufacturer to print, often overseas, where the current capabilities to print are largely hosted due to the immense upfront costs it would take to acquire or build that printing capability elsewhere.
- Delivery: Those assets are packaged into packs and then further placed into booster boxes that ship to distributors who have mass ordered product and disperse that product to stores. In some cases, distributors may leverage what is known as allocation, giving limited product to stores, and often more of that product to larger spenders.
- Arrival: What limited amount may have arrived to your local game store is then found by players at their local game store or at an online storefront where they buy, open, and then play with what was within the contents of the packs.
Frankly, there are massive issues and instability at every stage of this process, none more hated by caring stores and studios than allocation of who has access to play a game. Our ultimate goal is to fix allocation for this game, amongst creating a top tier game and community.
Our Goal for Siege
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We want Blood and Salt Siege to break away from the issues presented, so we are attempting to create a more accessible product. To do this we will split the core game experience from the collectible experience. This way player’s who simply want to play the base game can more easily do so while also allowing players who wish to further support the game to partake in the positive collecting and trading experiences that will come with our purely cosmetic-upgrade based collectible product lines. We also want to bypass distribution and will be seeking partnerships with stores directly who we can better trust to champion our game in the right ways. This is more work for us, but allows us to fight the good fight.
Who Is This Game Made For?
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Here are the players and play groups where we believe our grassroots organized play is uniquely suited to excel for:
- TCG Players: As a secondary game to your main game. Want a break from your main game but still want to enjoy a card-based experience? That is where we reside.
- Board Gamers: As a kitchen table game for your 2-4 player group who doesn't want to have to intensely play and follow a card game but still wants to enjoy a meaningful card game experience. Since this game splits the base game and cosmetic upgrades into different products, we are happy to be able to provide an experience that can better resonate with board game adjacent communities.
- Tactical Shooter Fans: As a uniquely themed card game for fans of tactical shooter video games but without all the digital requirements and with all of the in-person social benefits!
- Retail Stores: As a weekday meetup game of 1 or 2 games for your local playgroups who have room in their weekday schedules. For the stores we think this will provide an avenue to bring in additional revenue on slower days.
- Retail Stores: As a bridge game to your main product lines. Specifically as a game that can bring in a massive untapped audience to stores that you might not otherwise have: fans of tactical shooter games who haven’t yet tasted the amazing experiences card games can provide.
- Collectors: Some people just want to own cool products and show them off. We like that too! Our innovation here is to provide a more approachable collector product, lowering the price of entry to that experience while maintaining all of the excitement and potentials of high-end trading products. Additionally, we plan to enact "Trade Events" as part of our organized play, bringing an innovative collecting event to the forefront of prerelease weekends. More to come there in the future.
Organized Play
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We believe organized play needs to occur for any game to survive, even if that organized play is small or looks different than what you might think of.
What our goals and target audience of a kitchen table group mean for organized play, weekly play, and local play, is that this type of game is highly unlikely to ever reach the level of support players are accustomed to from a traditional competitive card game, both from retailer support and weekly play availability. This is what we mean when we say we as a studio and community must learn to speak a different language in the card game space as to appropriately inform our players of expectations of who, how, and where it is likely to play our fixed model card game. Our organized play will start small, with a grassroots approach to growth, with the future possibilities to build towards a larger organized play structure.
Here are our goals for organized play:
- Provide avenues for players to play games at the same intensity levels.
- Promote a fun-first mentality where players play to compete, not to win.
- Support smaller scale, meaningful events.
- Provide multiple ways to engage with our game.
- Provide long-form communication panels for players to engage with the how’s and why’s of Siege.
Here are our plans to enact the above:
- Trade Events: Collector-based pre-release events designed around a point system of creating poker-style hands a week prior to new set releases. You'll see unrevealed cards in real time here.
- Conventions: Yearly events that serve as game, art, and collaborator celebrations for our team and the community for games, meetups, live studio Q&A‘s, and more!
- Metal Promos: Event specific metal cards to give as a reward to players who perform best with characters at events.
- Event-Based Map and Character Rotation: Specific maps and characters will rotate day of at events to bring about new metas and unique play experiences.
Game and Meta Support
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We are fully committed to supporting the meta of this game during the entirety of the game’s life. This means we will be deeply involved in open communication with our community about troublesome cards in the meta and constantly in analysis of our design and development set-to-set to ensure we understand our game at its most fundamental levels.
By keeping unique card functions the same across all products and combining understood statistical metrics during development, such as wins above replacement (WAR) for Mercenaries, we can create a playtest ecosystem tailored to our game and then suggest balance changes based on proven reasonings to players for them to choose to abide by or not.
After all, it’s your game and we want you to do what you want with it! Our imparted wisdom can be as large or small of an influence on your experiences as you wish.
Yearly Events
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In an effort to serve our community and celebrate the game as it grows, we are planning to schedule 1 conventional-style meeting each year. Here's why we think fewer, select events are the best choice for this game:
- Less events equate to players who want to join us in celebrating our game having less traveling decisions to make during the year. Making clear that this is the big event and everyone will be planning for it helps direct our community.
- It allows a long-form communication style I feel our game would really benefit from.
- A singular event allows us as a small indie publisher to make the even truly special, not needing to spread our more limited resources over a multitude of events, being able to give it our full attention and the care it needs.
- We believe that fewer, more meaningful events each year, similar to fewer set releases each year, help to build a different type of excitement that we feel should be the player experience for new releases and gatherings.
It is worth noting that as demand allows and the game grows, we would love to support as many events as we can so long as we can maintain the integrity of the benefits stated above. We look forward to meeting all our players, shaking their hands, and becoming a part of each other’s lives as we build a community worth being a part of!
Future Product Releases
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Lastly, and importantly, we should cover product releases.
We plan to have {2} release dates each year, 6 months apart, with each release date co-debuting a base game expansion and new deluxe booster boxes of those expansion cards. As releases continue, we will enact rotation of products and characters, keeping the last year of releases available for any competitive legality. Additionally, the Gamefound Signature Series Alternate Art of Medic and all Signature Infamous rarity cards will never be reprinted as to maintain their value over the years to come as we want those seeking deluxe editions of cards to truly feel the gravity of finding and owning one.
Putting It All Together
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History shows that this type of fixed game model isn’t the typical product that would be the primary game a local game store carries and survives on. It can be but there are big fish in the waters. Thankfully, it doesn't have to be and for stores that don't see this as a primary game for them, we want to supplement the games that do that for you! For players that seek a smaller, tight community, and for local game stores that are attempting to reach a brand new audience during less busy business days, this game might in fact be perfectly suited for you. Of course that comes with the understanding that a game like this will naturally have less players and therefore it is unlikely to expect that you can walk into any LGS and have groups to play with. That superpower is typically reserved for large market games but we wouldn't be surprised if this type of game breaks out in the coming years.
Of course, we are open to all ideas in pursuit of the best play experience as we attempt to pioneer a new way to succeed as a fixed card game experience in a trading card game world, together!
Product and Character Rotation
Keeping Experiences Fresh
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Be certain that we understand that new sets need to feel impactful and push the game forwards when there aren’t decks to do the heavy lifting, especially in fixed games. Our first step to achieving this is to create and monitor a release schedule that matches our game’s natural set lifecycle, making sure to give each release enough time to be fully digested while keeping metas fresh and decisions impactful to the game. So sit tight, this section is a long one, but it‘s importance in a fixed game can’t be understated.
Our Goals and Plans for Product Rotation
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For a product with fewer game pieces per release than typical card games are accustomed to, testing has given us confidence that there is immense depth and variety of gameplay within the current team composition building structure of our game. So much so in fact that we have to actually limit the multiplicative nature of our game’s system depth or else it would cause immense analysis paralysis. The remaining good variance is largely attributed to our game’s laser focus on a few core principals:
- Lane-based card positioning mechanics
- Pick-and-ban as a marquee limited, roster-centric format
- Maps heavily alter character prominence
- Creating an accessible product that won’t hurt your wallet
This level of set entropy informs us that it is likely optimal for our game to start with a 6 month, bi-yearly release schedule, with the newest 2 sets remaining in print at any given time.
Our Goals and Plans for Mercenary Rotation
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We hope that at this point it is evident that this game is not designed to be a short lived game. Particularly for fixed games, longevity of enjoyment will be impacted most by our ability to shake up the game in a purposeful and meaningfully way during releases. First let’s understand our goals:
- Provide stores supporting our game a clear list of “live products" to help them stay up-to-date and move product quicker
- Continuously keep players in a multifaceted meta
- Present this solution in a flavorful way to build upon our unique theme as a tactical shooter card game
- Give players every reason to come back to formats with innovative and exciting ideas
Enter The Contract System: our version of a a character-centric rotation system designed to lean into our unique position as a fixed game with unique Mercenaries per set release, and a large roster of them used to create team compositions.
In this system, each set will have some amount of newly released Mercenaries and returning Mercenaries, with the first time a Mercenary appears, starting an in-world “contract” with a crime organization or government body. This contract represents payment for services in controlling salt production, with clauses that, if a Mercenary becomes too unwieldy, will be deemed as having gone ”rogue”, terminating their contract and becoming the subject of a bounty hunt.
In production terms, these “contracts” will last for 2 sets, or 1-year initially. Here would be the breakdown for a bi-yearly release schedule:
Year 1 - Set 1
24 new Mercenaries : 0 returning Mercenaries
Year 1 - Set 2
24 new Mercenaries : 0 returning Mercenaries (new art)
Year 2+ - Set 3
12 new + returning Mercenaries (new art) : 12 Mercenaries rotate
Year 2+ - Set 4+
12 new + returning Mercenaries (new art) : 12 Mercenaries rotate
Using this method, there will always be 36 unique Mercenaries in any available meta, basically the last 2 sets worth of Mercs. There will always be 18 Attackers and 18 Defenders, further broken down into 6x Mercenaries for each of the 6 Mercenary Roles.
This allows us to keep certain metas together or liquidate them and make them fluid again as needed at any given time. A really powerful balancing lever to ensure quality gameplay and avoid stale metas!
Why We Love These Systems
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Rotation for our game holds a lot of promise and we want to make sure we do it right. Here’s a few more reasons why we love the ideas above:
- If a card is reprinted in a following set, all functionally matching previous versions of cards start over a new “contract”. We anticipate this will create a unique collectability experience over time, even for base set purchasers, as a set 1 card reprinted in set 10 becomes active in the meta again giving an individual the opportunity to flex their longstanding loyalty with our game as we grow together.
- These systems are highly robust at achieving our goals and measurably can create an accessible, evolving experience tailored to players and stores for decades to come.
- An early injection of new Mercenaries allows us to build a base of characters to build from without needing ”vanilla” cards, helping skip the “limited card pool” phase most early card games have to navigate since our system entropy is so high.
- The built-in capability to thematically change Mercs during their time out in the world when they rotate, to then return with new art displaying their changes in full circle, builds special connections to the Mercenaries as you watch them age and change in real time.
- We believe these systems will provide an endless stream of roster stability and variable team composition metas while providing an emergency button to help rotate problematic Mercs that control the meta for too long.
- These systems can help us love the game even more than we already do. We can pour into our game, share purpose-based solutions openly with our community to solve problems we will incur, and let our game take shape organically with a steady, grassroots approach to growth that allows us to scale as our game does.
We are so excited to share in the experiences that these systems will create and are excited to see what shape our game takes going forward!
Mission Statement
Blood and Salt Studios creates card games with a single intention — to create games that stick with the player long after they stop playing. By focusing on deeply engaging systems and excelling at the basics — we demand quality and player-centric practices from manufacturing to fulfillment. Through intimate design and proper transparency, we believe we may not only innovate but earn your respect, and enrich our industry, together.
Creative Team
Blood and Salt Studios
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Gage Bacon 🇺🇸 // Creative Lead
10+ years of card game experience, clinical research and microbiology background, with self taught skills in graphic design, game systems design, and ludonarrative design. Having first started work on Blood and Salt as a novel in 2021, I recognized the unique medium card games could leverage to tell unique stories and social benefits. Not only to read the game but feel, interact, and connect with it in deep and meaningful ways. It is the phenomenon of social experiences that stick with people long term that motivates me each and every day to make the game I love. I also love the idea of badass SWAT Mercenaries that control an underground salt market. That helps.
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Caden Bacon 🇺🇸 // Developer and Playtest Lead, Badass
7+ years of card game experience, logistics and fulfillment background, his first love for card games started with collecting Pokémon cards, particularly Gengar cards. We all know Dragonite is better though.
Credited Artists
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Valentyn Fedorenko 🇺🇦 // Artist, Badass
2+ years of digital design experience, also known as Kurti Art in media and other works. Valentyn has been a critical talent for Blood and Salt Studios, having created all the initial concept art. To Valentyn, art is not just decoration - it's storytelling - and we love that about him.
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Dhabitah Kamarudin 🇸🇬 // Artist, Badass
7+ years of digital design experience, also known as Dhabitah Punk in media and other works. Dhabitah has been instrumental in creating our painted world alternate artwork concept, wielding an oil painting-like style that truly brings color to life on cards.
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Noé // Artist, Badass
1+ year of laser engraving experience, also known as Tezzeret_the_engraver in media and other works. Noé is a key collaborator in creating our metal best-of cards for each of our Mercs. The final products are truly astonishing to hold.
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