More on "Shooter"

I still haven't been able to test-play "shooter" yet, though I've been busy with tweaking rules, making clarifications and churning out printed materials (new perk cards, buildings and terrain stuff including picking up the junkyard terrain set from worldworks games now that they've put it on a permanent sale) for my testplay. 

I'm hoping to do some test-plays in RL and also on either Roll20 or Tabletop simulator. (If you're interested in doing an online testplay, e-mail me at foolster41(at)GMail.com)

I decided that a hidden action system would be interesting for this game. Now players play one of 3 types of actions: moves, attack and special and then activate a unit one at a time (in alternating turns), activating all the tokens on that unit. Hopefully this will give the game a bit more of depth.







For now I've settled on a single attack per unit per round, but you can spend an additional attack action to "boost" the attack, adding one die. 

  I have about 70 perks now. I have a fair idea of different types of strategies with combinations of perks the units can use, though test-playing will tell me which will be viable and useful.

For example,  one of the roles (a type of perk that each unit can only have one of) for scout is "scavenger". They can go around planting 1" scavenge tokens around the board, as long as they are not within 12" of another of these tokens to gain scavenge tokens to this card that can be turned in for item type perks on the sideboard for them or an ally in 1" range. So I'm picturing as using it as a more support rushing around and possibly being able to pick up medkits, smoke grenades or adrenaline for support. Testing will tell how interesting this is.  My experience with miniatures games, purely support units can very easily be near useless if not properly balanced.

The classes I have from my previous test are Assault (damage dealing),  Heavy (big weapons, takes lots of hits, some defensive abilities), Scout (quick for harassing, blocking off side routes), Support (Medic, Commander/Buffer), Sniper (long range damage), and Hacker (sort of the negative version of support, "debuffing" enemies.)

I realize I never listed out the classes I have, though I used their names in the previous post.  The classes are:
 Assault: Direct damage dealer, is one of the two classes that are more accurate with ranged weapons
 Heavy: Carries big weapons and takes more hits. Has some defensive abilities
Scout: Quick, can be used as a harasser, and/or setting traps to cut out routes among other uses
Support: Used as a healer or general buffer
Hacker: Sort of the anti-support who debuffs enemies and has some control abilities.
Sniper: Long range damage. Is the other class with a ranged attack bonus.



 I've also added a 7th class since my last post, the melee. As the name implies, it cannot carry ranged weapons, but has to get close. This might represent a spy type unit that has abilities to prevent being hit or attacked, or a bezerker who rushes straight into the enemy.

That's what I have for now, I'm really looking forward to test playing this, though I may have to wait until the end of the busy holiday season.

The rules can be found here, and the perks I have so far are here


Let me know what you think.

Small thoughts on Feint Wars, and a new game project

Sorry for the long time of quiet. I haven't had a lot of chances to test play my games. A game day in July when I was planning on playing Feint Wars was canceled. I did get one test play in, though I'm still not sure how to fix the problem of unit positioning.

I want there to be something, ala the feel of Dark souls where you have to carefully position to the right range for your unit (otherwise, unit range doesn't mean much.).
Having the conflict part of the movement itself (using the same token) is just too confusing and hard to balance.

 I think next time I'm going to try to have it where you reveal an extra token as the conflict, but it's not spent. This will do some weird things though because you have only 5 tokens, and if it's the last one you're basically giving away what your only token is.

An idea I was playing around with is what I'm tentatively calling "stamina". Basically, you got 3 tokens to use for all your units, each with one of the suits and when you play a token before you reveal you can also play an energy face down. When you reveal you reveal this energy too, and the suit becomes that suit. So, you could play the same suit as the suit of the token you played, thus adding maybe some more bluffing potential which would make things a little more unpredictable if you have one token left.

--

I'm also playing around with an unnamed modern/science fiction shooter game. I want the focus to be on very few units and have a light arcadey feel to it. Each unit would be like a hero, sort of the vein of something like Overwatch or TF2, so no hordes of nameless units. In fact, it will probably be based on a set number of units on each side, like TF2 and overwatch.

I don't have a lot of details set down yet. I think I'm going to use custom dice with faces that are 0,0,0,1,1,2 because I like the way the spread works. Weapons will have different ranges where they roll a different number of dice for attack and damage (two numbers).  Units have a DF value, which they subtract from that roll (most have a DF of 1, one unit has a DF of 0). 1 more is subtracted for cover (behind a car for example),  2 if the unit is behind large cover (such as a building corner). If there are 1 or more pips, the attack hits and the attacker rolls the dice indicated for damage. If there are 3 or more pips, damage is increased by 1. (though I forgot this).

This works similarly to attack,  but instead the unit's armor (if any) is subtracted and the remainder is done as damage.

I did a test play against my self. This was the setup:


Team A had a big ape, an armored SMG soldier and an unarmored guy with a shotgun.


Team B (the girls) was a support with a SMG, an armored sniper, and a scout.



Team A went first. The Support charged down the center, throwing a smoke bomb. The scout went right (from team A's POV) and the sniper took overwatch.


Team B's turn they charged forward with the APE (who got shot by the sniper's overwatch, taking 5 damage) and SMG down the center, The shotgun guy went behind the buildings on the left and forward.

After trading shots, the support goes down. the Scout hides behind the gas station sign to be out of the enemy SMG's line of sight and shoots at the ape, reducing him down to 1 hit left.

The scout retreats back, and the ape follows, clubbing her.
The sniper, feeling pressure from the approaching shotgunner on the left goes right and takes a shot at the APE, doing an incredible unnecessary 7 damage (nearly the highest possible roll)!

SMG charged forward, and the shotgunner got closer along the back.  I just quit there, since I doubted sniper was going to be abe to take out both of them before shotgun got a close shot.

Some thoughts:

• Decisions might not be interesting right now. Too much static standing still and shooting? (Though the game only lasted about 5-6 turns).
• Too easy for short range units (such as minigun, shotgun) to rush the longer range units? Having more units per side (4v4 or 5v5) would fix this?
• APE has too much health, too easy to just rush in and damage?
• I didn't feel like overwatch was useful very much. Overwatch should get bonus die? would make overwatch more useful. 
• I'm not sure how action pools work. For this game I just used the system of 6 actions, and a max of 3 actions per unit. I'm not sure if allowing a single unit to attack with all 3 actions is a problem. (For this test it was max 2 attacks per unit). Maybe it's max 1 attack and you can use an action to add 1 additional die?)

Hopefully I'll be able to test play these with other people soon. 

Review: Age of War

Sorry for the lack of update. I've been trying to play my game, FeintWars some so I could give thoughts on mechanics, but things haven't quite worked out to play it. 

I didn't get a chance at the game night at the friend's house (though I had a good time), and I got one partial game played at ETX (Evergreen Tabletop Expo, in Tacoma, WA) this weekend. I'm feeling like the game could use some refinement to make the game run smoother, but I'm not sure how to do that. I do really like the core of the game, and I think it has some really fun ideas.

At ETX  one of the games I got a chance to also play was a dice game called Age of War. It looked very promising. I love push your luck dice games like Zombie Dice. It had a samurai theme. It was designed by legendary designer Reigner Keneiza. And most importantly (to me anyway), it was by Fantasy Flight games. the creators of such games like X-wing (something I spent a good time at the expo playing in a tournament), X-Com and Android: Net-runner among other games.

(Image from the Fantasy Flight website)

The objective of the game is to capture as many castles as you can, represented by cards. This goes so very well with the theme. I've been a long time fan of the samurai epics by Akira Kurasawa like "Seven Samurai", "Yojimbo" and "Ran" to name a few.

The core mechanic of the game is on your turn you choose a place to attack and start rolling dice. Dice have four types of symbols:  infantry (the most plentiful, with some sides having up to 3 infantry symbols), cavalry, and Diamyo (king).

If you match a set of dice with a set of symbols you place those dice on the set and keep rolling. You only get one set a time. If you don't get any sets, you loose a die and contenue. If you fill all the slots you capture that castle. You can steal castles from players, but you have to fill an additional Diamyo symbol. This is a great base start for a game, with a bit of a zombie dice type of feel.

The game has problems though. 

One is, there felt like very little in terms of choice or strategy. You'd just go after a castle and keep rolling dice over and over. The only real strategy was choice of which slots you fit in the somewhat rare cases you filled more than one at once, since you can only keep one at a time. But even this feels fairly obvious where you want to first get the rare Diamyos, and secondly pairs such as double cavalry, double archers or cavalry and archers.

There's no mechanic for retreat or penalty really for failing an attack, so there's no real push your luck mechanic, which this game really feels like it needs.

Also, the game only ends when every single castle is captured. This is probibly less a problem with more than two players (I only played with two players), but it becomes a slog with many times failing to gain a castle multiple times in a row, since capturing many of the castles is very difficult.

When you capture all of a set of castles in the same providence, you get a bonus and they are "locked" and can't be captured. There was a point where the only way I could win was by winning back a bunch of castles my opponent had before they could captured the last two or three castles in the center, ending the game, which just made the game drag on all the more.

I know there would be a more political element of choosing who to attack with more than two players, which would add more interest. But there's nothing the defending player really gets to do, he just sits back passively. Some sort of opposed action between players attacking and defending would be really neat. As I said, capturing some castles is very hard, made near impossible with that extra Diamyo symbol.

I thought Age of War was a neat start point for a good game, but it just felt like it's missing just one extra element, like bluffing or push your luck needed to make it more interesting and not a game about rolling dice.

At the same weekend I played a game called Tiny Swords which I ended up buying. It's very much a smaller game in many ways to Age of War. It didn't have the pedigree of a designer or publisher. It was very light in theme (you construct swords and fight with theme).It was lighter in mechanics too; you play cards in a rock-paper-scissors style duels with some neat rules added in for a unique twist.

But I ended up enjoying it far more than Age of War. I'll have to do a review soon for that game too.

Has anyone else played Age of War? What are your thoughts in the game? Was there just something we misunderstood about the rules?  Let me know in the comments.

Make your own heroes (some assembly required)

Sorry there's been not much activity here. I am still working on this game, but I haven't had much chance lately to play too much. I am still working on this game with some new ideas for units and mauvers. Particularly, maneuvers for archers and duel-wielders.

I'm trying to build up my plastic figures, buying them and painting them up, and then adding cards for them. Plastic is much easier to test-play with than the paper ones (though I remembered a good fix to the problem of paper figures falling over - my old foreign coin collection!).

I've been playing some of the overwatch open beta, and it made me think more, that is the sort of feel i'm going to have this: small scale with big, interesting to use powers. Obviously, the fewer units on the board, the more those few units need to be able to do with more choices each.

Though the characters in overwatch are static, and another example of the feel would be TF2 which had various weapons for each class, but it fit well into the role of what that class did.

For example, you might have Onion Knight (22 Points, 12 HP, +0 Speed, 2 Range, 2 Damage) with Knight's Defense (2 points. When an ally in 2 range is attacked, before the attack you may switch places with the ally and become the target) and be purely defensive, using the shield to stop damage and aggro manage.

Or you could use something like Shield Bash (Lets you add attack instead of Defense from a shield). and  Charge!  (which adds attack if you charged at least 6 squares to the target) and slam the shield into enemies faces!

Another example would be the Two-weapon fighter (14 Points, 8 HP, +2 Speed, 2 Range, 2 Damage.)
They get an abillity like shield, except it already can add either attack or defense. With  Dervish (which lets her turn and attack an additional time another target in the same turn) and dervish defense (which lets her once a turn rotate to face an enemy that's attacking, such as from the back) you can spin and attack even when flanked.

Or that same unit might use Second Sword which lets her spend an attack bonus from the off-hand sword and deals a little damage, even if  she misses!

I'm going to have "slots" for a few maneuvers, and likely Dervish and Second Sword will occupy the same slot. I'll want to do this for two reasons, for balance and to make players have to choose between different strategies. I find that in the games I play the right amount of restrictions helps make the game interesting.  (be it "mana types" such as in Magic: the gathering, or the upgrade slots such as in X-Wing miniatures game).

 I'm still trying iron down some basic ideas of factions, and what they will do. One faction I have an idea for is a garden-based faction that primarily does ground-based effects, such as laying traps and obstacles, but as I said, this is something I'm working on but is secondary to the main physics.

 I want the game to be playable and fun as a historicalish (i.e. no magic or monsters) skirmish game. with just  human-sized units (2x2 squares, or ~25mm)  with the different weapon load-out combinations. As I mentioned, this game was partially inspired by foam sword fighting, which, at least in my chapter is non-magical and more historical.

I'm hoping to play it again in a few weeks with friends who hadn't played it yet. so I'm working on double checking the wording of my cards and printing out the new cards I'll need by then.

More ch-ch-changes

I've talked a little more with the person I play tested the game I mentioned in the last post and have been mulling it over.

Tokens

One change that was suggested was switching from a deck of cards to tokens. It felt like such an obvious move actually.

One of my problems in the design was having too few or too many cards. Too few and players were shuffling way too much. Too many and it was impossible to do any sort of prediction with card counting. With 6 of each of 3 suits, if I increased the number of cards evenly I had either 18 cards with one of each suit (which I felt was too few), or 36 with the next jump up. This last version I had 27 cards, with two of each of the 1-3 cards and 1 each of 4-7, though I thought this was a bit clunky with card counting.

Now I have three colors in place of the suits, red white and blue (Easy to remember order for beating them). I used some poker chips I had, with numbers sharpied on.

Having tokens eliminates these problems. There's no shuffling, just a quick shake. We'll see how this works when I do the next test play.

Forgotten Contest

Another suggestion is if someone forgets and reveals the card/token when they should have hidden it because it's a contested move, just make it so they have to stop before it would have been triggered anyway. one thing about that is, if the unit triggered because it moved out of an enemy's range it just means they don't go anywhere, which seems like a big penalty.

The Reserve

Another idea suggested was lost cards/tokens not being recovered at the end of your own turn, so you only get the unspent cards/tokens  to defend with, and then recover at the end of your opponent's turn.
This I'm less sure about simply because you only get 5 tokens/cards, and I don't want to increase this number too much, or else I'd have to increase the total pool. It seems like it'd basicly encourage turtling much more, so players have enough cards.tokens to defend with.
I'm willing to give it a try anyway.

When does it all (token effects) end?

Another aspect I was struggling with in the testplay that I didn't mention is the order of when tokens are removed. I had it simply at the end of your turn, but it makes no sense for a defense token to be placed on your turn and then immediately removed. One solution would be to make it so attack tokens remove at the end of your turn, and defense at the end of your opponent's turn ,but I don't really like the idea of tokens having seperate timings, since it's just one more thing to remember.

Maybe all tokens are removed at the end of your opponent's turn, since attack tokens aren't doing anything anyway.

I was considering just making clean up after both players go, but this would requite some sort of initiative check at the beginning of each round (I know a lot of miniatures games have this, including   Guild ball, a game I' recently discovered and I'm looking forward to playing) which I feel is a bit disruptive and slows the game down, and so I'd rather avoid it.

So those are things I'm looking at being some more changes in the next play. I'll report here on how that game goes, and I'll try to take pictures this time.

Do you have any thoughts on these mechanics? Are there any good examples where these types of mechanics are used well, or poorly?

First Test play for this version

So I got a chance to play feint wars today.

Sadly, I forgot to take pictures. Maybe this is a good sign, because it means I was absorbed in playing the game.

Some thoughts:

The Feinting Mechanic
The feinting mechanic still feels a bit clunky. The person I was playing against said it felt random. I tried to guess what the opponent was playing but I failed badly at it.

I'm not sure how to balance being able to have enough information to make informed decisions on
what cards are still out there. Maybe I need to lower the number of cards (currently it's 27).

A deck has 3 suits, with 2 of each suit of cards 1-3, and 1 of each suit 4-6.

Modified Damage

I'm considering dropping modified damage (that is, doing more damage based on how much you beat the defender by) and making it so you only do damage equal to the unit's damage value.

On the one hand, I like having it, The person I was playing with pointed out it discouraged really playing low cards, since there's no reason not to always play the highest card on your attacks, you're not really wasting anything.

One other solution would be to make a maximum damage, based on your base damage value.

There was a bit of a miscommunication on how I explained the rules and the other player was adding their speed value to their attacks, so they might have felt this way because they were hitting so frequently. I want to do more tests before dropping this.

Contested Movement and memory

Doing contested movement is a little hard to remember. (When you move out of of through the range of an enemy you play the card being used to move face down, and it's used as a defense against an attack of opportunity)

There were times when I played a card face up and then remembered it was contested and had to take it back and play a card face down. Maybe this is just a thing to get used to. I didn't want any special attacks or anything to use extra cards because I felt that slowed the game down, and so I wanted to sort of blend in the movement action with the "attack of opportunity".

I'm not sure i like how the card played is exactly your defense, since in order to move further you have to have a higher defense from the attack of opportunity because you have to play a higher card. Basically it means you always get a sort of bonus for charging. Maybe you subtract squares moved, but I was trying to avoid adding unnecessary math.

Abilities in general seem a bit hard to remember. I kept forgetting to play defense tokens for my shield ability for example on my knights. I also need better explanation on how defense tokens work since they should last during your opponent's turn.

The person I played with said the game is a good start. Now I need to work on refining this game more. I'll try to remember to actually take pictures next time.

Welcome, Explorer!

Hello! My name is Mason, I live in the pacific northwest and for a long while I've been working on designing board games in my spare time. This blog is basically to put stuff on my games that I'm working on for people who are interested, and I might discuss thoughts on the basics of game design concepts, and possibly reviews of board games.

This is definitely from a process of talking about stuff as I discover it and I can point out all the mistakes I found I made and get feedback on some general issues in game design.

 One of the projects I've been working on is a grid-based miniatures game called "Feint Wars".

The Concept
The main idea for the game came from my experience doing foam sword fighting (FSF), and the idea occurred to me of making a game that sort of simulated the interesting different tactics used with the different weapons, and how they sort of interacted in the "meta" in FSF.

For those who aren't familiar with it, foam sword fighting is a sport where people do simulated sword fighting with weapons made out of a core (usually PVC pipe) with foam (thus the name). the rules allow for a wide variety of weapons with some of their own rules how they work, and  tactics.

For example, in  using the longer "red swords", if you hit twice with a good solid hit on a shield with both hands, the shield is counted as "broken", and the person using a shield has to drop it. Another example would be how naturally axes can be used to hook down a shield to allow attacking with an off-hand weapon.

Then in 2011 Dark Souls came out. I hadn't been aware of the previous souls games, and this fit really well into the type of game-play I was thinking of, with energetic movement and feinting and dodging.

Past Versions
Before I say what my current version is, here's some things I tried that didn't work.

My first version I was using a dice pool system where players bid dice to use or keep for defense, but It didn't feel like it was the bluffing feel I was going for. It felt like there was a lot up in the air with the dice rolls yet.

A later verrsion used cards without suits,  with a "high but not too high" thing where you had to beat the card, but not by too many. I found that it was kind of a pain to calculate. Also it made having any sort of attack or defense bonuses really hard.

That brings me to my current version..

The Rules

The game is built on a grid, but instead of a unit being inside 1 square, a medium sized unit covers a 2x2 square space.

A barbarian (Reaper Bone) faces off against a rogue (D&D miniatures) who is 3 squares away.

This gives me the granularity to have ranges for different weapons from daggers (1 range) to swords and other medium sized weapons (2 range) and pole-arms and spears (3 range)

Each player gets a hand of card which are your actions for a turn that you can apply your units to move. attack or do other actions. When you do an action, you must discard a card. When you attack, both players play a card simultaneously and then reveal them. Cards are one of three suits and are numbered 1-6. If a card "trumps" another, it gets a +3 bonus, so while it helps to trump, it's not a guarantee of hitting.

Spade beats Hearts, Hearts beats Diamonds, Diamonds Beat Spades

If the attack hits it does damage equal to the unit's damage power, plus 1 for every nmber it beat the defender's number by.

If the attack misses the defending unit is allowed to move a number of squares equal to the number they beat the attacker by, allowing it to back up, get  closer or shift around the unit for a better position for a counter-attack on the side or even back.

Sadly, I haven't gotten a chance to test-play this version with outer people, I've only played it against myself a few times, but I hope to try a test-play soon, and I'll report on how that goes.

That's a breakdown of the basics of the rules. I want the game to be fairly simple, and not a heavy game like war hammer, or even less heavy than warmachine/hordes. I admit, I don't have a lot of experience with miniatures games, besides x-wing.  I have played some games that were a mix between European style games (which are some of my favorite board games) and miniatures games (Specifically Krossmaster Stadium and another I forget the name of  Super Dungeon Explorer) and I think there's a lot of room in that space.

I've been thinking some about the feel of the world too (which I;ll maybe talk about in a later post, though my main concern right now is getting the physics of the game down). I definitely don't want this to be yet another Tolkien-esque fantasy game.