I’ve been working on Crystal Quest for a long time now, so I wanted to post an update with the latest developments.

Quick recap: Villages: Crystal Quest is a new expansion for Villages that includes two new decks: monsters and treasures. You can send entire villages to fight multiple monsters at a time, which gives a lot of new life to the same cards you’ve already got. It feels a little bit like a puzzle, deciding which units to use on which monsters to make sure they all get defeated. Once they are, you can draw treasures, which give you extra gold at the end of the game. And there’s a new objective in this expansion, beyond emptying your hand. You’ve got to find a certain number of Crystal cards in the dungeon before the round will end, which gives you a little more time to set up your villages and really see them grow.

As for what’s new, we’ve got two new types of treasures: Pottery and Gold Ore. There will be 4 copies of Pottery in the deck, so they’ll be worth up to 16 gold total if you can catch ’em all.

Crystal Quest is also gonna come with new reference cards, one side for the base game and the other for the Crystal Quest rules. I got some feedback that the color wheel is not as intuitive of a concept as I had hoped for some players, so I put that on there, too.

And then we got this bad boy. Guys, I’m designing an Actually-Big-Enough-To-Hold-Everything Box. Including the new stuff, plus card sleeves. It won’t actually be called that (probably), but I’m planning on including this as part of the Kickstarter for Crystal Quest. If you’re a new backer, you can just get everything in one box. Start to finish, it’s all there.

This prototype from The Game Crafter just came in the other day and it looks awesome in real life. I’m very happy with it so far. I still want to make a few changes to the design (that empty field around the bottom half of the box could use some dudes in it), and I also need to add in some divider cards. With these, you can choose how you want to organize your cards–one side will let you sort by expansion, and the other will let you sort by color.

And that’s the state of things! I don’t have a specific timeframe for launch, but I am making baby steps of progress on something every day. The divider cards, for instance, are already halfway to being ready for a printed prototype. I’ll be sure to show those off when they get closer. And as always, if you have any feedback, feel free to let me know!

Thanks for your patience, everyone!