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.