Man, keep going! I really like the theme for this one. The mechanics sound rather hard to balance, but play testing will tease this out.
If anyone is ever lucky enough to play this creation of Jason’s, keep one thing in mind:
When you happily traipse into one of Alan Au’s plotlines, remember there’s a reason everyone calls him IT’S A TRAP!
Seriously though, even though the game may have been in ‘beta’ form, it was a blast and it left me wishing I could have devoted a full day to giving it a complete beginning-to-end playthrough. Jason’s right about the plot-building mechanic being the biggest hook of the game.
Snazzy!
Finish this one; I want to play it. :>
For anyone who cares, the game is coming along and I’ve started to record its development over at Boardgamegeek. It’s called Thrilling Tales of Adventure!
Nice! Did you do all the components yourself by hand? I love the look of the Marvel Heroes cards and such!
I looked at your site on BGG. Impressive!!
Sounds and looks like something I’d easily pay for. Where do I preorder? :)
Great stuff, looks like an interesting game! Are you over on the BGDF? It’s a handy resource for at-home designers. Oh, there better be a bit of cthulhu mythos in there too!
Somehow missed this thread before.
Jason that looks really fascinating and I want to go back and read it more slowly later.
On a different subject, anybody familiar with FFGs Descent? Saw this in the FLGS yesterday and wondered what it was like. Looked fairly involved and time consuming.
Edit: Thoughts, musings, and nitpicks on Jason’s TToA game
Bear in mind I obviously don’t have a complete picture of the game.
The game looks really cool so far. Color me impressed!
I really like the plot-building idea (reminiscent in a way to the Grave Robbers from Outer Space/Cannibal Pygmies in the Jungle of Doom games)
and the idea of playing the hero then the arch-villain is brilliant.
Jason, it seems like the cards/plots are the real stars of the game. What does the board add to the game other than a conveyance to the plotlines?
Can a hero abandon a plot? Fail during a plot? What happens?
Have you considered allowing plot building to be cooperative? That is to say, allowing plotlines to be put into play as just a hook, with all players having the ability to add onto them rather than the plots having ownership? If something like that were possible, perhaps you could flip things around so the goal in the first part of the game was actually to finish a plot, with other players adding to the plotline in an effort to stop you from completing it. Waiting and hoping that your plot isn’t uncovered in time so that you can advance to the next stage of the game just sounds…passive. A balancing mechanic here would be that a longer, more convoluted plotline would have more value when successfully completed, so another valid tactic might be to truncate a plotline quickly, thereby reducing the value.
I see references on cards to a Test mechanic. How does this work? I see that the attributes like Wit are involved, but is this a dice roll or something else?
I’m not clear on what plot points are used for. Is playing through plotlines the only way to get them? Heroism points are used to get plot points in the latter stage of the game. yes? Anything else they do?
I have it, and really dislike it. It contains scripted missions. Fantasy Flight Games usual overblown large bits and pieces game, with relatively poor play mechanisms underlying it. Take far too long for what it accomplishes, and feels very stale while playing it.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Fantasy Flight Games. It’s just that sometimes they hit and sometimes they miss. I would put it another way as well; the armchair psychologist in me believes that if people weren’t so desperate for a dungeon crawl game, Descent would not receive nearly the praise it does. It’s just not a very good game, but people want it to be, because that genre is one of the holy grails of gaming.
P.S. Keep going Jason, that game of yours looks sweet so far!
Just tossing this in because I hadn’t seen it mentioned yet: Arcadia: The Wyld Hunt CCG. Game Rules Another review
This was a PvPish game in that both players had seperate decks for their characters and the challenges the respective characters might face. The world both moved through was generated from a third stack of terrain cards which have a variety of effects. Characters numbered in the dozens with base stats and abilities but they could also be customized with advantage and flaw cards.
So when two players came together they essentially brought their own character, that character’s potential rewards and a deck of challenges for the opposing character to face in his adventures including narrative-type challenges/interrupts that could throw a wrench in the works. The goals of each character also were varied and assigned through goal cards. Each game, theoretically, would play in wildly different ways as both player’s deck sets, and tactical thinking, interacted.
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at my collection or played but I remember being pretty happy with the design. I think it was so far off the reservation of conventional CCGs that it just didn’t have a market.
Edit: Jason, your game sounds like alot of fun. Look forward to seeing more about it.
Jason–very cool! Your game seems to be developing nicely.
In related news, I’m very close to having a playable prototype of my fantasy quest game. Just hashing out a few rules issues and finalizing the components. I also started working on some art–mainly painting the Region tiles that make up the gameboard, which is comprised of 19 modular hexes.
Yeah, I agree with SlyFrog with regard to Descent. It takes too long to play, and reminds me a lot of Runebound in that it mainly delivers uninspired gameplay wrapped in an overly-clunky set of rules. If you want a scenario-based fantasy combat game, get BattleLore. It’s not a dungeon crawl, but it does have some roleplaying elements, and is a far, far better game.
Yes, BattleLore is excellent. In fact I think Borg’s entire C&C line is the epitome of what lite-wargaming is all about. C&C Ancients and Memoir '44 are both really, really, fun games. (I never played his Civil War game)
I hope DoW comes up with some sort of BattleLore campaign system so that we can do a prolonged ‘war’ and not just one-off battles.
Anyway Jason that looks really cool. Keep at it.
I appreciate the way that some games eschew a board in favor of purely card-driven or more streamlined/abstract approach, but the world map board is pretty key to my vision of the game. I don’t know if you’ve seen or played Marvel Heroes, but that’s a game where the board is extraneous to the gameplay. However, I like that it’s there, because for me it helps “ground” the gameplay and adds to the game’s flavor.
Managing your movement to effectively traverse the globe contributes to the sense of an epic story unfolding, and other players can try to foil your Hero’s progress depending on the terrain type of his current location (by throwing an avalanche at you in mountains, for instance). For the first two-thirds of the game, the Heroes are the only pieces on the map, but when the Arch-Villain comes into play he brings with him a number of Agents which are moved around the map in an effort to accomplish various goals. At that stage the map becomes more of a platform for strategic maneuvering.
Also, you know in the Indiana Jones movies when the animated red line connects different red dots on a map to illustrate Indy’s globe-trotting? That’s part of what I’m trying to conjure with the map.
Once you’ve begun a Plotline, other Heroes can join you on it if you invite them to (for a share of the Heroism points). You can both exit and reenter a Plotline (if, for instance, you need to heal up in a City), and abandon it if you choose. When you abandon a Plotline, another hero can step in to pick up where you left off, or the Plotline’s timer will just run out over time.
At this stage in the design, Allies can be outright eliminated, but Heroes can only ever be “K.O.'d.” A K.O. ends your turn immediately and forces you to lose all of your current Plot Points. I have rules for Death Traps that allow Heroes to be eliminated, but I’m holding off on integrating them until I get the basic game running smoothly.
That was part of the original design, actually! The backs of the cards had links on them, so players could add to a plotline based on the links, without knowing exactly what cards the Plotline contained. The game-narrative problem that arose there was that everyone knew some piece of the plotline, which detracted from the sense of discovery. The way it works now, two effective dynamics are at work: as a Hero investigating a Plotline, you have a sense of suspense and discovery as you reveal each successive card; and as Author of a Plotline, you have a sense of ownership and villainous intent as you try to thwart the Heroes uncovering your schemes.
As it is now, each player can have up to three active Plotlines at a time, so it takes a while to get all three on the board, and while you’re building Plotlines you’re also managing your Hero’s adventures and using cards to actively thwart heroes who are exploring your active Plotlines, so it doesn’t feel very passive. Especially with the Plotline timers ticking down every turn.
Longer plotlines are usually (but not always) worth more points for both the Hero and Author. Integrating some way to cut a Plotline short is a great idea that I will definitely consider!
It’s a die roll. The Test mechanic went through several iterations before arriving at the ol’ dice throw. First, each type of Test (based on the character stats of Might, Speed, or Wit) was a separate sort of mini-game, which was flavorful but too fiddly. Then, in the second version of the prototype, all cards had a secondary use as a numeric value, which players would play against one another during a Test or Challenge (the term for combat in the game), ala Dungeon Twister or Dune, but that forced players to burn through cards too quickly. Now it’s been reduced to classic Ameritrash die-rollin’, which I was reluctant to adopt, but in our last playtest actually worked very well. The number of dice is kept very low (never more than 5 per roll), we use Marvel Heroes dice for their limited variability, and the outcome is somehwat flexible because some cards have secondary applications that can affect die rolls or Challenge results.
Plot Points are the “fuel” that powers everything in the game, from moving your hero around the board to throwing hazards in the way of the other Heroes, to activating special villain abilities. You gain PP in your role as Author, each time you add a card to a Plotline, each time a Plotline timer ticks down, and each time a hero reveals a new card in one of your Plotlines. You also gain 1PP each time you discard a card (you can discard 1-2 cards from your hand at the end of every turn). Thus, your actions as Plotline Author generate the points necessary to propel your Hero through his adventures. In the last playtest, the players had a PP cap of 20, and had to convert PP into AP (Action Points) each turn in order to fuel their Heroes. For the next playtest, I’m dropping to cap to 10 and removing the notion of APs entirely.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts and suggestions!
Those look freakin’ awesome, Ben.
I liked Arcadia as well- and still have quite a few of the cards around here somewhere. The game had balance issues, though- the ‘bring your own’ character system could be min/maxed rather easily to create some pretty unstoppable combos. If you instituted some kind of card draft for characters before each game, it would help. Kudos to WW for putting it out in a non-traditional format, though (no rarity, and just two different types of booster packs, no starters). I keep thinking I want to finish off my collection (I’ve got most of the first set and a bit of the second IIRC).
Jason is right- these do look nice.
Yeah, I agree with SlyFrog with regard to Descent. It takes too long to play, and reminds me a lot of Runebound in that it mainly delivers uninspired gameplay wrapped in an overly-clunky set of rules. If you want a scenario-based fantasy combat game, get BattleLore. It’s not a dungeon crawl, but it does have some roleplaying elements, and is a far, far better game.
I’m pretty much in agreement here. They really need to come out with some sort of fully cooperative, random dungeon expansion for it, ala Warhammer Quest. FF has shown that they don’t mind replacing nearly all the cards/components and radically changing gameplay in an expansion (see Warhammer, Runebound, TI3, etc.), so I don’t know why they haven’t done this yet -the demand is certainly there.
I’m not going to go back through this thread to see if I already said this, but my pick for best dungeon crawl-ish game is Hybrid from Rackham. It is a bit more on the ‘Space Hulk’ end of the scale, but that can be easily fixed either through Rackham’s official Dungeon Crawl rules (in Cry Havok #6), or my modification of said rules (on the boargamegeek here).
Hey Jason, thanks for being a good sport, and I’m glad you took my thoughts in the spirit they were intended (as exploratory in nature, not intended to be negative in any fashion). Looks like you’ve got a dynamite concept on your hands. Sounds like the use of the board will be a lot of fun (I just wasn’t getting the complete picture before…there’s a lot to see here!) It sounds as if the two phases of the game will help break up potential board game monotony and create a sense of “ok, this it!” tension.
Once the villain phase of the game begins, does it become one player against the rest?
What do you figure typical game length might be? (or is it too early to tell…in which case what are you shooting for?)
I do hope you’ll continue to keep us posted on your progress.
BTW, I meant to mention earlier that a new edition of Talisman has been announced for publication late this year. maybe it’s time I finally caved and bought a copy…
Yes. The Heroes will still be able to jockey for Heroism points, technically allowing one of them to win with a higher score if the players want to play that way, but none of the Heroes will win if the Arch-Villain successfully executes his Master Plan.
The last playtest clocked in at 5 hours with 5 players, which is too long. However, it’s never going to be a short game, since it depends on the sense of an epic, unfolding adventure, and that requires some passage of time. I’d be happy if I could bring it in at 3 hours. There is some scaling possible with number of players and setting a point goal on the scoring track, so longer games might be optional. 3 hours will probably be the minimum playing time.