First off, a massive thank you to everyone who's been playtesting Torque Arena and sending in feedback! Seriously, reading your comments and watching how you play has been incredibly helpful. I've been paying close attention to where things felt a bit off, where players got stuck, or where the rules just weren't clicking quite right.

Based on all that great feedback, I've made quite a few tweaks moving from version 0.12 to 0.15. Let me walk you through the main changes and why I made them...

Summary

• Fixed terminology
• Polished mechanics
• New prototype-first mechanics
• Brand new Hype system

Clearing Up the Lingo

Sometimes during playtests people seemed to pause over certain terms. I want the rules to be as intuitive as possible, so a few game elements have been renamed:

• Clash has become Push - pretty much everyone ended up saying "Push" when they meant "Clash" so this change was simply me surrendering to the manifest status quo :P
• Steal has become Seize - this just makes it easier to intuitively connect the intended play actions with a unique name. Seize is now used to get the torque both from a rival or from the air after a Throw.
• Contact has become Near - it just felt a bit more natural to say and reference, and it made rules summary more compact.
  
• Stable/Unstable have become Static/Mobile - these words better describe how elements behave, especially regarding climbing and sharing space. It's a small change, but I think it helps clarify things.

Making Actions More Dynamic

I noticed how some actions could feel a bit limited or maybe didn't offer the choices players were looking for.

• Push (formerly Clash) - Clash sometimes felt like a one-note action. With Push I wanted to give you more tactical options. Now when you succeed, you can choose: physically Shove the rival out of the way, or Tire them out to increase their Drag. In conjunction with how plates work, this should add a nice layer of decision-making based on the game state.
• Seize (formerly Steal) - A lot of you mentioned wanting more ways to interact with throws defensively. We agreed! So, Seize isn't just for grabbing the torque from someone holding it anymore; you can now use it to try and intercept a throw mid-air. Go make those highlight-reel plays!
• Rush - while the name has not changed, this action procedures have been both streamlined and expanded to include a number of special interactions that previously were scattered here and there across the rules. Now you will find Stand, Help, Pass and Scoop all in one place.

Changing How Totems Unlock

Looking at how games were flowing, especially around sundering, I found that play tended to slow down from ~50 min. to something like ~80 min. The main culprit seemed to be the plate/unlocking mechanic: at the same time a source of engagement (area control baby!), a precious fix preventing "lucky starts" from making the bout too short, but at times they can also feel like a sort of bottleneck.

• I turned the Qwik hex into a third pressure plate.
• Of these, you only need two (or more) to unlock a totem.
• Then I moved the lateral plates further back into their crew side, unclogging the midline and incentivate more mobile play.
• Another big change to speed up gameplay can be found in how Hype now works. More on this in a minute ;-)

The goal here was to make totem unlocking feel more achievable and less dependent on a potentially lengthy tug-of-war over two very specific hexes.

Tuning the Throw

The Throw action has been made (hopefully) clearer and more streamlined, looking both at scoring attempts and how throws interact with rivals.

• Easier Sunders - With all the work that unlocking a totem requires, I felt confident in making sundering a bit easier and less dependent on sheer luck, so the Hits needed to sunder a totem are going from 2 down to just 1.
• Rival Interactions - Still, throwing the torque far away and having it messed with by rivals will reduce its accuracy, imposing -1 Hit for every passed rival. It is now also clear that when a rival Evades and ends up in the hex targeted by the torque, the torque scatters.

More Tactile Experience

Some mechanics worked on paper. Arguably, they also worked in practice. But something was always off, a bit clunky, usually too abstract. One such area of improvement was how the game presented and handled its Seekers, and consequently how they were activated in play. Each player used to have a single sheet of paper with 5 trackers and 5 tokens, and had to flip and slide the tokens around, remembering to do it consistently, and hoping to not knock some token out of place. Functional, but...

Now everything has been made more tactile and modular and, hopefully, better.

• Each seeker is represented by a card with a portrait (corresponding to their miniature) and a vertical Drag track.
• Players now fasten a paperclip to the track, and slide it along it as needed. This makes the process clearer and more "klutz-proof".
• Each seeker is also assigned a token representing their role and position within the crew. This rests on the portrait and is flipped to represent the seeker's activation status for purposes of rallying the crew.

This version of the rules comes with a few pages dedicated to play materials, including 10 seeker cards, 60 role tokens, other needed tokens, a bigger image of the updated arena (I print it as two A3 sheets). The graphics are my own work, while the images portraying seeker miniatures are AI-generated (by me). This is also indicated clearly within the files. I would love to work with human sculptors and illustrators, so spread the word or contact me here or by email!, but for now and for prototyping this is the best I can do.

The Hype Deck!

Okay, this was a major rework based on playtester feedback. The old Hype tracks just weren't hitting the mark for excitement and impact, consistently feeling clunky, with players forgetting to move this or that token.

• Crew Hype and Bout Hype have been merged in a single Hype element.
• I've replaced the 3 separate tracks entirely, with a unique deck of Hype Cards, marked with 🔷 icons.
• The cards are currently 10, shortening the original Bout Hype from 15 to 10 steps, in hopes of making bouts faster.
• Now the awesome moments during the game (like long throws, interfering while fallen, or even helping a rival) trigger you scoring (🟢) or discarding (🟥) cards from this deck.
• Scoring 3🔷 earns you Edge, and certain cards (specifically in position 3, 6 and 10 of the deck) have additional big game-changing effects baked right in!

And a Few Other Things...

• The Rally effect now discards 1 Hype, working as a sort of clock for the whole bout.
• All status effects (scattering, falling, pushing) have been streamlined and updated to take advantage of the Tire mechanic and the clearer Throw procedures.
• As many testers enjoyed the effect of torque scatters, and especially the Unruly Torque mechanic previously introduced by Hype, I decided to adopt it as the baseline scatter rule: now the torque is always unruly!

Phew! That's the gist of it. Again, thank you all so much for playing and sharing your thoughts. Keep the feedback coming – it genuinely helps me make Torque Arena the best game it can be!