Deliverance Expansion Announcement & Details
9 months ago
– Fri, May 31, 2024 at 07:16:17 AM
Greetings, Insiders! Are you ready for the official reveal of the Deliverance expansion? Buckle up and get ready for a serious wall of text absolutely filled with great info. Come scan it now, then read it all when you have time!
Introducing Deliverance: Council of the Fallen
The little town of Fallbrook, once haven of demons and threshold of apocalypse, is doomed.
Despite the victory of the Angelic Host over the great serpentine beast, the cataclysmic earthquakes shook the town to its’ very foundations. A sinkhole opened in the wilderness just beyond the edge the town has revealed a castle old as time, and uncovered a new plot. Demons sworn to a secret rebellious sect: The Council of The Fallen.
Now a saint has returned to Fallbrook. Guided by heavenly visions, and prophesying doom. Walking alone and facing insurmountable opposition against forces both spiritual and corporeal, he has few bulwarks against failure.
Except you. His guardian angels.
Subscribe to the Deliverance: Council of the Fallen BGG Listing:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/422139/deliverance-council-of-the-fallen
Please give our Cover Art a thumbs up:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8234447/deliverance-council-of-the-fallen
Target launch date on Kickstarter: September 24, 2024
What's new in the expansion?
Let's start with the official teaser text, and then expand from there 😉
Deliverance: Council of The Fallen is an expansion to the acclaimed Deliverance board game, featuring 6 new playable angels, new minions and Princes to battle, a challenging Campaign that further explores the mysteries of Fallbrook, an arsenal of new cards and effects that add even greater variety and replayability to the base game, a 5th player mode, and more. Delve deeper into the secrets of the demon infested castle, and determine the fate of Fallbrook through your choices.
In this expansion to Deliverance, experience a branching campaign where your ultimate level of victory depends on your choices and secondary objectives earned throughout the campaign. Will Fallbrook be destroyed? Who will survive its destruction? Or will you triumph and see it granted total deliverance?
1) New Playable Angels!
The angels of the Deliverance expansion each bring something new and fresh to the table for veterans, and will delight newbies, too. My absolute favorite part of Deliverance is the depth of character customization, and how one angel adds so much depth to the game. We're adding 6 more!
You might see a new face in the graphic below, but only 5 of our angels have finished art, so Nezzy gets the star treatment, too (for now)!
2) A Challenging Campaign
The most beautiful thing about this Deliverance expansion, beyond new angels, is a campaign that takes the original Deliverance campaign to the next level!
The first element of the new campaign is that this campaign expects that you know how to play the game. In the previous base game campaign, players were given a 4-mission ramp-up experience that felt interesting, but was more for the purpose of helping you learn game mechanics, rather than to truly challenge you. Now that you're more familiar with how this works, expect the next campaign to ramp up the difficulty more quickly! In addition to this, the Campaign Challenges will feel a bit more... challenging :D
The next element is that we're going to increase the variety of victory conditions present in the earlier missions of the Campaign. We're also planning to add secondary objectives here, too! These considerations will add a new set of tactical choices for players to make -- do they try to go for the secondary objectives? Or do they focus on the mission at hand and return for the secondary objective later?
A third element we're implementing into the Campaign is an increased amount of things to open. While we don't want to make something truly "Legacy" that cannot be re-used (we dub Deliverance a "Legacy Lite" game), we do want to give players a greater impact to choices they make in the Campaign...
The fourth element we are ready to share right now is that we're going to introduce several ways to adjust the Campaign difficulty settings - Novice, Normal, Legendary difficulty. Legendary rules are going to grant the demons more health, and novice is going to give players a special "boost" that we're not quite ready to reveal.
The Fifth Element was an awesome movie. "Leloo Dallas, multipass!" (Sorry I just had to complete this dad joke)
3) New cards and Effects
We're adding 6 new status effects to the game that will affect angels, demons, and even the battlefield. We're going to reveal them over time, but here's a few teasers for you!
In addition to status effects, the expansion is bringing a whole slew of Heavenly Treasure cards, Darkness cards, Minor & Major Demon Talents, Prayer cards, and battle cards for all our new Princes and minion types. The primary goal for these is to expand upon the awesomeness of the base game so that every game you play will feel fresh and interesting, but also familiar. You love Deliverance, so MORE Deliverance is exactly what you need, right?!
4) A 5th Player Ruleset
We're not ready to talk about how we'll be adding in a 5th player yet, but I do want to thank everyone that has contributed to our 5th player thread on BoardGameGeek. We're absolutely including elements from this as well a something else that makes it truly work without taking additional time. In fact, we might allow 4 angel games to use these new rules if players find it takes them a bit too long to finish games. Much more testing is needed, but we finally found a promising way to implement a 5th angel without causing games to feel like they're dragging. I am eager to share more when we test these things further! And what's nice is the base game will be backwards compatible to these rules, which means that you'll be able to play everything with 5 angels (including the remastered Campaign)!
5) Significant Community Involvement
This little point represents a future call to action for the fans. Deliverance was built upon a massive community engagement, from playtesting to feedback and fan suggestions making it into the game in one form or another. We did this over years of time through in-person events Tabletop Simulator plays, and more. We don't have the luxury of taking as much time as we did before, but getting the community involved is a very important aspect we plan to continue in a different form.
How? Well, most folks reading this have a copy of Deliverance now, so you have a strong reference point for crafting new content! Have you considered a Talent card for your favorite angel that you wish was in the game, or maybe an interesting Darkness effect, or potentially a Prince talent that adds extra depth to your favorite Prince battle? You'll get your chance to suggest these when the time comes, so get your thinking caps on, and if you feel so inclined, start some early brainstorming of ideas! 😇
6) Physical Scenarios
The scenario packs are a huge hit with the player base overall, and we have heard on many occasions how you have taken these free PDFs to game night and enjoyed them. Well, what if you had a high-quality physical scenario book? We would love to revamp our free PDF scenarios, craft new never-before-seen scenarios, and give you all a bunch of awesome new content to take to game nights!
For backers of Deliverance 1.0, you'll appreciate this!
Everyone that backed our first Kickstarter campaign made it possible for us to make this game. You all dealt with the risk of supporting a "first timer" that had yet to prove their ability to deliver. You dealt with delays. You walked every step of the way with me, injecting your feedback to improve the game. And now, you have a game that is awesome, and some exclusive stretch goals (like the alternate art Michael and Sardius). But the production was not without its' problems, right?
That's part of the difficulty of the first go when you're taking a risk on a first-time creator -- Their first game might have some errors, the rulebook certainly won't address every edge case, component quality could potentially be a problem, and in some cases, games we back on Kickstarter that once had great promise end up arriving in a rather unplayable state in the end.
Now that you all look back on Deliverance, it ended up pretty great overall, right? The game was playable, the rulebook was pretty good, and the fans were overall very happy. We earned some accolades and super high ratings on BGG. We have people playing dozens and hundreds of games 😲 But it's not perfect!
So, here's what we're planning for returning backers:
1) We're releasing an upgrade pack for Deliverance fans.
This will include cards with typos or that are re-written for increased clarity, the updated Hateful Fiend minion board, and a fully remastered base game Campaign book! 🤯 We're not totally certain at this point if fans will need a new Rulebook for the added information (read: enhanced glossary of terms), or if these will be in the Expansion's rulebook. If the former is true, we will also include a rulebook in the upgrade pack. The upgrade pack is planned to be $20 or less.
2) We're releasing a totally re-mastered base game Campaign!
I can hardly contain my excitement about this. The Campaign was awesome, but it was also the place where Deliverance suffered the most legitimate criticism. We had a lot of missions that boiled down to "destroy all demons," and while the very dynamic Deliverance combat system makes that pretty fun to do, many fans were looking for more tactical decisions to make other than combat-driven choices. In order to accomplish this without totally re-designing all the missions, we're adding Secondary Objectives to some of the missions. Angels that accomplish these secondary objectives will be able to gain specific bonuses that make future games much more interesting.
Players that have completed the campaign will be able to return and enjoy new objectives, but don't let that discourage you if you're still working your way through the Campaign -- the base game campaign in 1.0 is still a lot of fun! Check out how big of an impression the Campaign gameplay left on our player base in the survey we put out a few weeks ago:
3) The Campaign story is being re-written!
Rather than lumping into the above, this point deserves to stand on its own. David Umstattd, author of Pilgrim's Progress Reloaded (a modern sci-fi retelling of the classic Pilgrim's Progress), is at the helm of our writing now. He is highly qualified and very opinionated, and while our revamp of the story isn't going to change critical elements of the story you campaign completionists have come to know and love, it's going to get a makeover. Check out how split those same fans from above were on the quality of the Campaign's story in our survey:
We're listening to our community, and endeavoring to sharpen the story up! David is also the lead writer behind our Expansion Campaign as well as our quarterly Scenario Packs, too!
4) We're Making Some Cards More Awesome!
Looking back, I think we did a great job overall balancing the cards in Deliverance while making them feel really unique and like a ton of fun. We did play several thousand test plays, after all! Despite all that work, as a part of the returning backer pack, we're going to include some re-balanced and adjusted-for-clarity's-sake cards. These include some Angel Talents, confusing Darkness cards (looking at you, Idle Hands), and several other choice cards. The goal isn't to "nerf" (aka reduce in effectiveness) your favorite skills or builds. Rather, it is to boost the intrigue of other cards that we view as slightly underpowered.
Except Azrael's Final Plague skill. That card is a big problem if you get the right setup in later Campaign games 😆 But don't worry! I won't hit it with the nerf bat too hard 😇
So what are we talking about? Let's dive in and check out an example using everyone's favorite Archangel, Michael:
On the left, you have Michael, the Archangel's old talents. On the right, his new talents. These changes immediately place these skills and enable angels to use them in a greater variety of situations. Cleaving Greatsword now adds bonus damage your original target (wooo), while Runic Greatsword causes Michael's sword to absorb shield from his foes!
We have a much greater understanding of the angelic characters and how they like to play now that we have a player base that has played tens of thousands of Deliverance games -- your feedback has been heard, and certain cards feel underutilized in the Campaign mode.
While Board Games cannot typically "patch" like a videogame, we're going to use the opportunity of our September Kickstarter and re-printing of the base game to update cards that we (or you, our Insiders) think could use a boost!
Are there any Angel talent cards you think could use some love? Let us know in the comments below or on the main comments area! We read and treasure every single comment 🤗
Subscribe on BGG & "Thumbs Up" the Cover Art!
If we can trend on BGG's hotness again, more people will discover Deliverance! If you use BGG, please consider subscribing as well as giving the box cover image a thumbs up. If we get a bunch of activity on our page, we could potentially surprise folks with hotness ranking, which will help a ton!
Subscribe to the Deliverance: Council of the Falleb BGG Listing:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/422139/deliverance-council-of-the-fallen
Please give our Cover Art a thumbs up:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8234447/deliverance-council-of-the-fallen
Come Play or Volunteer at Origins 2024!!
We want to meet you at booth #745! We're going to have our artist Dan, our game developer Adam, and myself (Andrew Lowen) playing games with some of the new expansion content!
We're going to schedule playthroughs of a brand new Scenario Pack, and we're going to be giving away physical scenario books for the Q2 Scenario Pack until we run out! Anybody that owns a copy or purchases a copy at Origins will get one of these for free, so come visit and get a game in!
For those that are interested in volunteering, I do have 1-2 spots left to fill for a booth volunteer. I can provide stay at a local housing, an Origins ticket, Deliverance t-shirts, and dinner and games with the Deliverance team one evening! The only thing you would need to cover is your travel to the Origins event.
As a volunteer, you'd be generally sharing about Deliverance and doing Deliverance demos during the day on Friday and Saturday (10am-6pm). We're also running the booth Thursday-Sunday, but it gets a bit crazy Fri/Sat, so that's why we're asking for volunteers!
If you'd like to volunteer for Origins, please send an email to [email protected] and share about your experience with Deliverance and convention booth work! I'll be reaching out early June to confirm volunteers.
Shelfside Covers The Anomaly Scenario Mission!
These guys are extremely entertaining and died a horrible fiery death on Abyssal difficulty of our Seraphic Spelunking Scenario 😱
I can't overstate how entertaining these guys are to watch (in all their playthrough videos). They put a lot of time into Deliverance, and if you don't have time to watch for long, the ending sequence & Daniel's narration is pure comedy 😆
If you didn't know, we release high-quality and free Scenario Pack downloads for Deliverance once per quarter. If you'd like to play them, you can download for free on BGG!
We're going to introduce our Q2 Scenario Pack next month during Origins, and will release it as a PDF shortly thereafter via e-mail and as a file on BGG.
What's next?
This last month has been absolutely bonkers. As I write this, I am suffering from some sort of cold sickness, probably as a result of overworking, but the work must be done!
We have been hard at work with our internal Discord Community Playtesting group, testing and balancing all our content. It's incredible to have so much help from volunteers -- we're able to move so much faster than ever before.
We're getting very close to printing our first Expansion prototype, and we just started printing our booth materials. It's gonna be a bit wild to see it all come together, because we have been working so hard to get everything done.
If you guys wouldn't mind, pray for me and the Deliverance team. I'd love Origins to go well, and I'd love everyone to be healthy and ready for all 4 days.
As always, thank you for your support. Thank you for your positivity, and thank you for your prayers!
Kind regards,
Andrew Lowen & the Deliverance Team
