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.

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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.