The New Eve

For this year’s print run of RDI1 and RDI2, we changed the wording on most of the cards.  In the vast majority of cases, the reason for this was simply to make all the cards have consistent wording and to more clearly express each card’s original intended function.  However, you diehard Slug Fans out there may have noticed that for the new printing of RDI2, we made functional changes to Eve.  It’s true; we decided that Eve was badly underpowered and needed some tweaking.

First, the changes.  For those of you who have an original printing of RDI2, feel free to hand-edit your copy of Eve!

1) “Ha! That’s just an illusion. I’m actually over here!” now reads:

So, it is now somewhat stronger, since the original version could only Ignore cards affecting your Fortitude.

2) “Look into my eyes… you are getting… drunker!”

This card now adds 2 Alcohol Content instead of 1.

3) “Woah! Careful! That’s real fire!”

Now hits for 3 instead of 2.

So, why did we make these changes?  Well, there are two main reasons we decided to do this: a new RDI testing methodology, and Phrenk.

During the development of RDI3, we became huge fans of testing the character decks through one-on-one play.  This has two big advantages. First, the games are fast.  We Slugs can blaze through a heads-up RDI game in about 10 minutes.  This means more games, which means a lower likelihood that a problem will go unnoticed.  The second advantage is that two-player games nicely control for the vagaries of multiplayer political play.  As much as we like the political aspect of RDI, it severely hinders the character deck testing process.  Honestly, it is nearly impossible to get character balance right when trying to determine which wins and losses are due to character strength and which are due to political effects.

So, there we were doing two-player testing of the RDI3 characters, and I expressed some concerns about Phrenk’s power level.  To make my case, I told SlugFest President Cliff Bohm that I thought Phrenk was basically Eve but way stronger.  So we decided to play 5 or 6 games, Phrenk vs. Eve.

Eve didn’t stand a chance.  Phrenk won all the games easily.

“See?” I said.  “Phrenk’s broken!”

Cliff replied that he wasn’t sure that Phrenk was the problem.  So he put away Phrenk and took out Deirdre.  Again, we played 5 or 6 games, this time Deirdre vs. Eve.

The match was almost as lopsided as the first match had been.  Eve won exactly one game against Deirdre, and it was because Deirdre got a 9-ish-point drink that she couldn’t deal with.

At this point, we decided that yes, in fact, the problem was Eve.  A few tweaks later, we now think she’s competitive with the Big Boys (and Girls).

So…give the New Eve a try and tell us what you think!

– Jeff Morrow