View the new Fallen Kingdom and Vanguards factions

Check out the new Fallen Kingdom and Vanguards cards now available in Battleplan for Summoner Wars! It includes all Units, Events, and Starting Setups.

If you haven't pre-ordered your copies of the new faction decks, we highly recommend you do so now at the Plaid Hat Games Store. Shipping day is just around the corner! Or, if you haven't played Summoner Wars yet, now is a great time to join the growing ranks of other Summoner Wars fans. Simply start with one of the two Starter Sets: Cave Goblins vs Tundra Orcs or Guild Dwarves vs Cave Goblins.

Validate your rosters

Today, we rolled out a new feature of Battleplan that automatically validates your army or deck as you change it, according to the ruleset you have selected. If there is an invalid combination of things in your roster—be it duplicate units or exceeding point totals—messages will appear at the bottom explaining what's wrong. Of course, there is the option to turn off these messages entirely by choosing "No Rules" from the list of rulesets.

The new validation system goes further than just telling you what's wrong after you've made the change, it also lets you know before you make the change whether the change will be valid or not. This is done through dynamically changing the style of the add/remove buttons. A solid color button means that adding or removing the item is OK and won't invalidate your roster. A partially gray, partially colored button—paired with a popup message when hovering over the button—lets you know that adding or removing the item will cause your roster to be invalid, which will likely be accompanied with a message saying why it's invalid.

For some game systems—such as Heroscape, which has all of three core army designing constraints—the new validation system will offer a minor benefit, while other game systems—such as Summoner Wars, which has more complex deck designing constraints—will provide a much greater benefit by tracking the details for you. In any case, this means you spend less time on the arduous calculations of ensuring a valid deck or army, and more time strategizing and designing the deck or army you have in mind. (Or you can spend the same amount of time designing more decks and armies. Either way is fine with us.)

While we are quite proud of the new validation system, we also have future plans for extending it that we're excited about working to bring you. The most notable of the planned extensions is to offer fix options along with the validation messages you receive. For example, in Summoner Wars, if you add a Summoner, you'll get a message saying you need to add the Summoner's required cards. With the fix options, you'll be given an option to add all the missing cards in one click. Or, if you somehow end up with multiple factions in your deck, you'll be given options to remove all but the faction of your choice.

We'll be working hard to bring that part to you soon. In the meantime, we trust you'll find the new validation feature quite neat and beneficial.

Better buttons for faster edits

Many of our most recent changes to Battleplan been in the spirit of reducing the time it takes you to create an army or deck, so you spend less time building and more time playing. The first change we made was to increase the clickable area of the add/remove buttons, making them easier to hit. Previously, they were 10x10 pixels, and we increase them by a whopping 2 pixels in both directions, totaling 12x12 pixels. While 2 pixels may not seem like much, think about it this way: a 10x10 pixel image has a total of 100 pixels, where a 12x12 pixel image has a total of 144 pixels. So, the 12x12 pixel image has 44% more area than that of the 10x10 pixel image! Certainly not insignificant.

Another change was to put add/remove buttons next to the items in the browse pane (the list on the left). This comes with several benefits, but most significant is the ability to quickly add (or remove) an item to your roster, where before you would have to click on the item to view it and then move your pointer to the add (or remove) button next to the tabs. This also allows you to actively see how adding or removing an item changes the statistics within the roster's Analysis tab.

The Summoner Wars console in particular has a couple of notable changes. First off, we've put add/remove buttons next to the required cards within a Summoner's Stats tab. Again, this affords less navigation activity and more focus on designing your deck and, even more importantly, playing the game. Secondly, we've added links to quickly load a standard Summoner Wars faction deck. Just click the Clear button at the bottom of the roster pane and you'll see them in the list area. So now, if you just want to tweak one of the standard decks, you no long have to construct it from scratch.

Stats galore and a little more

Yesterday's released came with several changes, some large, some small. The largest and most significant change is the way roster stats are handled. (A roster is what we generically call armies, decks, etc.) First, you'll notice that there is less text at the top of the roster pane, and what remains is simplified, easy-to-read information about the primary constraints for constructing your roster. For example, the primary constraint in building a Summoner Wars deck is the number of cards allowed in the deck. Heroscape, on the other hand, has two primary constraints: the point size of the army and the number of starting spaces allowed on the map you'll be playing. Continuing with Heroscape as the example, the new layout provides instant visibility to your army's point total, the maximum points set for your army, and the number of points you have left to spend; all of which was formerly hidden under a collapsed label. These same changes have also been made to our HeroClix console.

The other roster stats have moved to the new roster details page. You can view this page by selecting the roster "Details" item in the roster pane. (e.g. "Army Details", "Deck Details", etc.) With all this new space available, we were able to significantly expand on the stats that are shown. We've added some fields and sliced the numbers up in different way, making it quicker and easier to calculate the risks in your game. We believe there is more useful information about a roster that isn't in there yet, so we'll keep looking and adding as it comes to us.

In addition to the immediate benefits of these changes, we're also excited about how nicely they set things up for features we have planned for next few months. One among those is the awaited roster validator, which will be especially useful for Summoner Wars.

Battleplan goes mobile

Today we bring Battleplan to the palm of your hand with the new Battleplan Mobile Edition site. It's a beautiful marriage, really, because it makes perfect sense. When gathered around a table full of miniatures or cards, practically everyone has their mobile phone with them, but how many bring their laptop computer? Often there isn't even enough room for it, and when there is, using it can be awkward because it's off to the side or otherwise in the way. But, with the rise of the newer, more powerful smartphones, we'll be able to take greater advantage of the as-you-go style of computing that mobile devices offer verses the stop-and-go of laptops and desktops.

To visit the new Mobile Edition site, simply direct your smartphone to mythacle.com.

Introducing Battleplan for Summoner Wars

A little over a month ago, the startup Plaid Hat Games debuted its first game: Summoner Wars. And it has been duly well received by the gaming community. If Summoner Wars is a sign of things to come, we're anxiously awaiting what other gaming goodness Plaid Hat Games has to turn out!

Upon reading the rules for Summoner Wars, we instantly saw it fitting in perfectly with our growing family of Battleplan consoles. So as our closing efforts for the year 2009, we give you our third and newest console, Battleplan for Summoner Wars.

Have a Mythacle New Year!

Breaking the rules

There is one clear advantage tabletop games have over video games: house rules. House rules are deviations from the standard rules that are (hopefully) agreed upon by those participating in a game session. They might involve large changes, minor tweaks, or simply a particular interpretation of the standard rules. They might aid in simplifying the game, or they may add new types of dynamics and challenges. With tabletop games, and house rules, you can play the game the way you want to play it.

With this in mind, we have adopted a policy of keeping letter-of-the-law restrictions to a minimum in Battleplan. Battleplan will do less of rules enforcing and offer more of rules reminding.

We begin observing this policy in today's release by allowing duplicate Unique units in a Heroscape army or a HeroClix force. For example, in Heroscape it's not uncommon for some players to treat Zettian Guards as a Common Squad and have several of them in their army. Now Battleplan will allow that army to be created.

The half gray/half green "add" button is a visual indication that while adding a duplicate is allowed by Battleplan, it isn't allowed according to the game's rules.

Have fun breaking the rules!