Fun Project: My Miniature board game? – Part 1

Another delay on my Attackix article.. not sure if it’ll be worth the wait but oh well (I need to do some sorting out of stuff to be able to really GET to my attackix figures to take photographs etc.. might be a bit of a delay ¬_¬). So lets talk about this:

Slowly for a number of reasons, I’ve been working on my idea for a miniature board game. Do I plan to do anything with it? mm.. no clue. I’m not an idiot to think I could do a release so people can buy.. I mean, it’s possible.. I probably wouldn’t be TOO pricey and I could probably get some help with things but.. Aim high and be disappointed. I’m aiming that I’ll probably do a free to download release if it gets that far. Maybe a cheap POD release.. I heard there are a couple of good affordable companies for that for prototyping etc.. anyway.. Lets get onto this post.

The Current ‘working’ name is ‘Thieves‘. It’s a miniatures board game where the players are thieves who have to steal stuff. Simple eh? it’s a stealth based game. It can be played with 1 – 4 players (atleast, I’m aiming for 1 – 4.. trying to balance it for 4… Needs looking info later). But fine for Solo play. The ‘enemy’ uses a basic system for controlling it. Anyway.. Get to that later.

The Game has single game or campaign mode. Basically you can play missions completely stand alone, or carry your character from mission to mission where loot you steal gives you gold to buy more equipment. pretty simple eh?

Well.. I’ll quote from my ‘Rules’ document which has notes and the game brief:

The objective of the game is to travel the map, avoid the enemy and grab as much loot as possible before exiting. Each mission will give a list of ‘requirements’ in order to complete that mission. There will also be listed ‘Campaign Bonuses‘ which are gained if you complete the mission with the requirements stated. You do not fail the mission if these are not met.

Still simple, eh? So far, after going through a number of things, I have played a game ^_^ and it kinda works pretty well. Maybe a bit easy though (though it’s a training mission really). I used Tabletopia in order to basically simulate the stuff cause.. I don’t really want to print out a lot of stuff which then I need to throw away when I update with a new version. It kinda also allows people in different places to test but I don’t know how to code rules and stuff into the engine and not really interested in finding out ^_^; cause it’s just for a basic testing.

The boards are tile based. I like tile based systems. They allow really customisable board lay out with the lease amount of space/parts. Tiles are basically rooms and corridors. I think the first game I played with that system was the original Space Hulk. That had the fun locking ‘jigsaw like’ pieces but that limits some options. So most things which used tiles don’t do that. Kinda loses some of the fun but it’s 100% understandable.

There are then some tokens, but I’m trying to keep such things low. There are also cards. Lets go through these both:

Tokens are health counters which just help keep track of your health and NPC (enemy) health. Could probably replace with some paper really but tokens are fine. There are then loot tokens, these are items of loot which you can steal. When you are adjacent to a loot token, you use an action to take the token and draw a loot card which will tell you what you got. Sometimes it can be good, sometimes it might be worthless junk. There are light source tokens and this is part of a system that has under gone a bit of backwards and forwards. At first, I was going to do the shadow/light system (which was a core feature for this game to have) with the light ‘baked’ into the tiles.. which sounded like a stupid nightmare. I then tried having ‘shadow’ pieces you put to show the shadows but that was also awful.. So ended up with Light tokens which are the light sources which you are told how far they project the light (basically 2 tiles around them right now). Lights come in one of three types, Fire based, which can be easily turned off really, Always on, which are lights sources which are always on, and Electric. There isn’t much electric as it’s a medieval theming, but there are the odd ones and this can’t be turned off as easy as fire based BUT there maybe a switch someplace, or somewhere else you can flip to turn them out.

There may also be special loot tokens. This is because a mission will often have a special loot that you are after. I was wondering and debating methods of having the mission not fully revealed at the start of the game, so you need to explore but this started to become very annoying and messy. Having a solo-play game like that just didn’t worked out well. The best system I’ve seen for doing that, is very limiting and the cons out-weigh the pros. So had to go with board laid out at start. At the moment, I’ve just had the special loot marked on the map but the board uses a loot token, but I’ll replace that with a special loot token. There might be more then one as there will probably be missions which require more then one special loot item, or the items to be one of a few places, and you won’t know which until you check.

The only other token I have at the start is the alert token. When an NPC spots a thief, or hears a noise, they will go on alert and depending on the type of NPC, they will react in different ways and there needs to be some way to note which NPCs are on alert.

Cards are also a bit simple. Equipment cards to show you what you have and what each piece of equipment does, but I’m not 100% sure on recording amounts. For example, a basic arrow is an item you can have 10 of. when you use an arrow, it’s gone. But how to record this? a token you put on the arrow card to show the number is possible. It’s working with Health. OR it could be a case of scraping the health tokens for the player and use a stat sheet of paper you write it on. That hasn’t been decided yet. There are also the loot cards which, as said earlier, are different items of loot which you draw a card when you pick up a loot token. There are also reference cards for the NPC types.

What other elements? Doors which can be open or closed. In fact, some doors are locked and require lockpicking or a key to get though. Cause lockpicking was another key feature. This is done, right now, by the door being marked with a value. This is pretty much the sign of how hard the door is to unlock. A normal lockpick gives you 1 D6 die (yep, I have dice) which you roll. you then remove the dice roll results from the lock value. If its 0 or less, the door has been picked and now can be opened and closed as a normal door. Problem with lock picking is noise. When you pick a lock, you create noise. I’ll talk about that in a moment but first carry on with elements. I said a D6 die, but also a ‘combat’ die. this has 3 possible values and for testing I’m just using D6 mapped value. 3 of the faces would be a ‘miss’ (1-3), 2 of the faces is a hit (4-5) and 1 face is the strong hit (6). This is basically a double hit, so you luck out and do 2 wounds instead of one. Though for things like Lock-picking, the hits are just the same.

Then there are the miniatures. A thief for each player, and a few types of NPCs. Right now I’m not thinking about custom miniatures or anything. I guess for a download and print mode I’ll have some card standees for some of the different types of NPC. While I want to have some theming for a few types of NPC there is basically 2 types of Guards, Civilians and creatures. They are pretty much as they sound. Guards are the main threat as they are guarding places. They are either Melee ones or Ranged ones. Civilians are the average person who isn’t gonna start attacking you or anything but they do run and alert guards which can be a problem. Creatures are some creatures of the world which may be a thread if you bother them. I haven’t done much with planning out the missions and doing things like the different creatures but you can imagine something like a pet dog which is gonna have much better senses then a human, so when you are trying to sneak around in the shadow, the dog is still gonna see you and alert his masters.

I said about noise. Noise is important. When you move around, you can either go slowly, which makes no noise so you can creep around, OR you can sprint. this doubles your walk speed, but you make noise while you do it. When making noise, every NPC on the same tile as the source of noise goes into alert. This will mean that when they can (their turn) they will start to search for you. If you are running from one tile to another, both tiles NPCS go on the alert because they can hear you. This noise can be useful as well as an enemy. IF you are playing with more then 1 player, you can use noise to distract or bring attention to others. Currently, the enemies will always moves towards the nearest thief when on alert. this doesn’t mean they automatically see you, there is a tiny bit more for this, but it does mean if you are going to leave a tile while you know rival thief is on that tile, create a noise. If the NPCs are closer to your rival, they will be the one getting it, not you. There are also other ways to make a noise to create a distraction which can be helpful at times.

Anyway, there is alot more to it then this. I’m trying to keep the rules pretty streamlined but I have a list of core features I want the game to have and matching up the two lists isn’t easy. My first play through seamed okay and I did some adjustments based on it. There are still a few things I’m not 100% sure on though. While I didn’t get too much loot on my test, it kinda was a bit easy.. sure, it’s the first ‘training’ mission, mostly to try out the game and features, but maybe too easy and this is something I can adjust. I also give the player 3 actions points per turn. an Action point can be spent doing something from a list of actions with no real limit on what actions to do. You can spend all 3 on movement if you want. Problem with this is.. if you sprint, that’s 6 D6 you move. that’s quite a bit. It isn’t always gonna be a great idea to sprint but still. I also wasn’t sure about the doors. If you can open and close a door for free, the game moves fairly quickly, but if you have to spend a action point in order to open or close a door, it does make closing more of a feature BUT slows the speed of the game down a fair bit. While NPCS can generally open doors normally, closing a door does block line of sight and it can be very useful at times. you don’t want to be sneaking around, have to cross some light, only to find out you pass the line of sight of a guard because you didn’t bother to shut a door.

My test map was made from 3 types of tiles.. a 3×3 room, a 5×5 room and a 1×5 corridor. with the arrangement, the total board size was something like 18 squares by 14, so depending on dice rolls, it would take 4 or 5 turns to cross it.

Another issues I had was the NPC reactions. Currently, the player has their turn, then all the NPCs do. But this gave a fair amount of space between an NPC possibly seeing a player, and being able to do anything about it, so I was debating on a ‘out of turn’ rule where the moment a guard goes on alert, they get a free turn right there and then, interrupting the players turn, which then carries on afterwards. this would make the NPCS like guards more of a threat then I felt they were, but not too sure. I think not only do I need some testing, But I need to test it with others to get some feedback.

So… is a totally amateur development diary of sorts of interest? people have any interest in a stealth based miniatures game? currently, the ultimate goal is just something I’m happy with but… that isn’t something that is easy.