Where to jump in on board games, anime, books, and movies as a Nerd
Black Friday has struck again with a vengeance, and there is an amazing sale that people should checkout from Greater Than Games. They have stuff from 15% off to over 80% off, and if, like me, you don’t have enough Sentinels of the Multiverse, there …
Will you be able to outmaneuver your rival gods and get your worshippers in this area influence game? Pros Looks amazing with the minis and the map Elements make sense in what they do Price Established company Solo Play Cons Abstract in nature Confrontational The …
Alright, let’s start getting into the details of this game. I’m not going to build everything out in front of people, but I do want to start and give some idea of what characters and levels are going to look like in practice. Eventually there will be a lot more to pull from than what I show here, and I’m sure a lot of iterations. But for now, I want to move onto the details.
Building a Character
So, this really should have more of a graphical component to it than it will. I would love to show some art, but I don’t have that, to give a sense of the design, or a layout of how I think the board is going to work, but we are in the super early phases of this design. What’s really going to happen is that I’m going to move this over to a spreadsheet and create a number of different characters based off of that so that everything is formatted the same.
The Real World Character
Male – Age 26 – Office Drone
A recent graduate with high hopes and now nothing more than an office drone. Changing the world was the dream, and now it’s changing numbers in the spread sheet. Friends moved away and not enough energy after working overtime to make that many more. At least the people he works with are nice enough, and the coffee isn’t bad.
“I’ve been waiting for this game for months, I know some old friends have too, it’ll be just like old times.”
Keywords: Gamer, Business
In Game Character
Stats:
Strength: 5
Agility: 5
Vitality: 5
Allure: 5
Guile: 5
Currency: 100 Gold
Oddly enough, that’s about it for a character when you pull them out of the box. The real nuances to a character are going to come with how you allocate your 10 extra points for the stats.
The Other Stuff
I think it’s important to talk about what else you’ll have right away, even though it might not be pure character creation stuff. Such as what sort of weapons will you be able to find, and what sort of skills can you pick up. You will be dropped into the world without any gear, just normal commoners clothes, and no skills, just basic attacks that you can do, so that’s why you get 100 gold to start. You can save it up, because there is better stuff you can get on level 2, but you might not live that long.
For armor, and this could have really been it’s own section, you’re looking at two types of armor.
Leather – No movement penalty, +2 defense
Chainmail – Minus 1 movement, +4 defense
Something along those lines. the advantage with chainmail is that you are going to be taking considerably less damage. When an attack might only get through on leather armor at 2 to 4 damage, that means chain might mean that you take no damage. But it does mean that the enemy is going to be more apt to focus on you, because you are going to be the closest with that slower speed, so it’s a trade off. Numbers are not final at this point obviously, but for an example.
Weapons then, you’re going to have much more of a choice. You will have two handed swords, short swords, daggers, bow and arrow, axe, crossbow, and maul at least all available at the start of the game to buy.
As for skills, we’re looking at pretty simple ones that would be available. Something like sweeping attack, bash, counter attack, rush, disengage.
Plus there will be items as well, health potions probably being the biggest of those items that the players might want to buy.
Now, with getting items, I could be really nice, I could be really mean, or I could do something between that. What do I mean? If I was really nice, you’d have a catalog of items that you could pick from and purchase without it costing a turn. If I was really mean, I could make those places four separate shops and make players almost have to decide to shop at least 3 times in a row before doing anything else. I’m going to be less mean than that, I don’t want to hand out gear, and players can do other things on their first turn, but on the first level, there is just going to be a bazaar that’s the shopping area, so you can go and shop once and be done with it, unless you decide that you need more and then you can come back again. The first level is going to play a bit differently than others, I think, and I will delve into what I’m thinking when I start building a level, though I probably won’t build the first level.
Character creation, pretty simple, basically all a player would need to do is allocate those points and fill in the player name and the character name. The character boards, for the stats, might be more like a character sheet, and then a side board. Or I might go with dials that keep track of stats, that’s too be determined, with a save sheet so if the dials get bumped it isn’t the end of the world. Or with a save sheet, maybe I’d do a dry erase player board, that’d be pretty cool and useful.
What do you think of character creation, it should be extremely simple. Obviously, the keywords I handed out this time were pretty generic, but I want to create more unique real world people than just what I wrote for this one, someone might run a greenhouse so they’d know about plants, or maybe a chef, give people a ton of different backgrounds.
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It’s been a while since I’ve done a board game review. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of Point of Order articles come up and go in that time because I can buy games, but I can’t play all that many of them. But one …
So I talked a bit about the boss mechanics before, but let’s talk about the boss battle itself, how is that going to work, how will that kick off, things like that. This is probably one of the last things to do before I’m going …
So this is a new series of posts that is going to happen when I sell off a game, or get rid of a game. It is hard to get rid of games, if a game has stuck on my shelf to now, that means that I probably like it quite well, or I haven’t gotten to it, so let’s look at the three games I traded in recently.
Scythe
Probably the most shocking on the list is Stonemaiers game Scythe. This is one of the most popular board games out there, and I actually never played my copy, so why did I get rid of it. The answer is because I’ll probably never play my copy. I have friends who have it and who know how to play it. So I’m going to be much more apt to play their copy with them teaching me. And because it is a bigger euro game, with amazing artwork I’ll give it that, I don’t have as much of a group to play it with as with some other games. So because this is a bigger game, more to know about and teach, I am getting rid of it, freeing up space in my shelf, and hopefully once I can game in person again, I’ll get a chance to play it with the person who has basically everything for the game and some of the bling for it as well.
Pandemic: On the Brink
I like Pandemic, in fact there are three different versions of Pandemic in my top 100, and 4 different versions of Pandemic on my shelf, so why am I getting rid of this expansion to the base game? If I want to have a fun gaming experience with a more advanced version of Pandemic, I will probably take someone through Pandemic Legacy Season 1. I’ve played it twice, and I’d happily play it again as a game master type of roll, because the game is still challenging. If I want to just teach someone the game, adding in stuff from On The Brink is going to add to the complexity of the game, so I won’t put it in. That means that it would have to be a very rare and special situation where I wouldn’t be taking someone through Pandemic Legacy Season 1, and I wouldn’t be teaching someone the base game to need On The Brink. It just was too rare a scenario for me to ever be likely to play it.
Stuffed Fables
When this game cam out, I was really really excited for it. It was a game about stuffed animals who were going on adventures and fighting off the scary animals under the bed while their human, a little girl was asleep, the figures are adorable in the game, book maps are adorable and really everything about it is great component wise, so why am I selling it? There’s one main reason, the theme of this game is for kids, and for younger kids, but with four adults playing it, there were rules questions and things we weren’t sure on. I could eventually take my kid through that game, but by the time he would be able to grasp the strategy and the complexities of the game, I have a whole lot of other games that we can play as well. This isn’t kind of an in between game between kids games and games for adults, it’s just that way in theme. And I think that the theme definitely targets a younger audience than the mechanics do. So as much as I wanted to keep this one on the shelf, there are just too many other good games out there that I’ll be able to play with my toddler eventually to keep one with sometimes confusing rules around.
Which one shocks you the most, probably me getting rid of Scythe. I really want to play that game, and the campaign expansion box, Rise of Fenris looks amazing, but I just know getting my copy to my table wasn’t likely to happen.
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So it’s that time of year again when everything goes on sale for Black Friday. This year, though, that looks different because with Covid, you don’t want hundreds of people rushing madly into your store, standing in long lines next to others and breathing the …
Become those who songs are sung about in the epic dungeon crawler from Steamforged Games. Pros Quick to set-up Non-standard fantasy races/classes Dungeon crawl Session Length Campaign Game Price Cons Dungeon Crawl D20 based Very much D&D inspired Price The Page I think that they …
So two last things that you can do on the level to talk about. Obviously there is a whole lot more work to do in terms of balancing these things, but I want to get the framework down on two last things. The first is Level Events followed up by Monsters.
Level Events and Monsters
Level Events
So I’ve talked about these a little bit before, as they are one of the timing elements for a floor. Let’s go over that again, with how it’ll work. There will be a deck of 10 cards for each floor. The top 7 cards will be specific to that floor, quests, one time events, stuff like that. I’ll get into those more coming up here, but after that you will have 3 cards that you are told to shuffle and put at the bottom. Depending on the floor these cards will change, but they will be pulled from a general deck. These cards are basically a timer before you start to lose a lot of guild members. Guild members will leave generally on the previous cards, but the bottom, printed on the level itself, will be a harsher penalty, like basically a cost of money, morale, and loss of guild members to stay there longer.
But let’s assume that you won’t spend all your time there frittering away the guild members and morale, what can you do with these events?
The fun thing about these events, at least to me, is that these evens will only happen at a certain time. The level events are going to be in a specific order, not shuffled, so that we can have the NPC’s provide information about them, but you have the choice the day turn of the event to do that event, after that, it’s gone. So you might decide to abandon a quest in the middle of it, if the event is something that looks/seems important. I want skipping an event also to have some negative. While skipping a quest might not be that big of a deal, a floor event is something specific to that place, and should be important to it, and while not all of them will be that negative, maybe a slight drop in morale or someone leaves the guild, that sort of thing, some of them might be fairly big dings to player reputations, guilds, money, etc, but it should be pretty obvious when that is the case.
So what sort of things might there be?
I’m going to go stuff as basic as a good sale at a shop that you have to commit to, this might be why you end up at a shop again. There might be some epic quest that is brought out that you can do. This is kind of like the Christmas quest in Sword Art Online type of thing, it gives you something awesome and rare. There will also be bigger level events that might require multiple people or a hero and guild members to do. Going back to the quest section, I talked about having Trolls attack, well, that event is going to come up sometime and if you’ve done the other quest, you get a benefit, but it’s going to happen, and that wouldn’t be a required event to take part in, but something like a troll attack would definitely ding morale, guild size, etc. a lot.
Beyond that though, there are going to be some floor events that aren’t actually related to the programming of the MMORPG, they are going to be related to the PC’s. Let me lay this out very clearly, these will always be a big deal. The reason I say that is going off of the premise that you are stuck in the game and it’s life or death, player conflicts could easily lead to death. There is going to be some that happens in the game, you will have guild members die, you will see the population track lower in the game no matter what you do, because you aren’t the only group who is fighting through, but when it’s a floor event, it’s going to be public, noisy, and will set conditions that could come back to haunt you later.
All of these will follow the standard flow of things, the quests inside the quest will behave like a quest. When dealing with an NPC or a shop, it’ll be similar to that. When dealing with a PC, it’s going to be the same as that. The only thing that might be different would be something like the troll attack example, that’s not really a quest, that’s just something you can commit some people to. There might be multiple ways that you can help deal with that, but that will be an event that is there that day and probably the next.
Monsters
Monsters, on the other hand are going to be simpler. They are going to be a pretty straight forward battle, but they don’t take place in town, hence not using them in the last game design post.
Fighting a monster will have you going out, and there will be up to three areas to fight monsters. Monsters for a level will fall into three categories, easy, medium, and hard. Easy will give you a little bit of XP and gold, medium will give you more, and hard will give you a lot. You won’t know what monster will be coming up though, so you can flip from any of the decks, and it might be that you hit a harder monster than you were hoping for, but you’ll have an idea of the range.
Monster combat is going to be quite simple, you will flip the monster and compare your attack skill to it’s defense, and if you do enough to kill it you do, if not, it can hit you back. The advantage you have is that once you flip it you can certainly modify your attack to do more damage. Most of the time you won’t be tracking hit points on these monsters, it’ll just be, do you hit them, if you hit them you kill them sort of thing. There will be some monsters that will, for sure, hit you back, because you’ll need to hit them twice.
So what do you get from killing monsters, the two big things are XP and gold. Some of them might drop an item, but these are going to be things like health potions or trinkets stuff like that. Maybe in the hard deck will there be one especially hard monster that would drop a skill or something along those lines. When a player character is out fighting monsters you are going to get more XP and less currency versus the guild out there fighting monsters.
They are going to get more currency simply because they are going to have “killed” more things. The guild will have a fourth option to pick from and that is basically a “farming” option. By that I mean that they’ll go out and kill a lot of really really low level things, things that wouldn’t bump up XP really much at all for a player, but those will be the way to get a good chunk of currency for the guild.
So that was a bunch of digest there. Monsters are going to be very straight forward but the floor events, I think there is an opportunity for a lot of story there. And I really like that about them, I think they are going to be something people will want to do, though sometimes might feel like they have to do them, but I never want it to seem like there isn’t a choice.
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So, we’re moving on from board games at this point in time for the holiday lists. That isn’t to say that there might not be board games in this list, but that’s not what this list is about. Instead, I want to give you some …