Fun Project: My Miniature board game? – Part 3
Well, It’s going a bit slow for a lot of reasons (not like I don’t have other things to do ^_^) but I got a test game of my Miniature board game project with someone else. so while It’s designed for Solo, I played the NPCS, which is something I said in my last update last year as being a focus at the moment) and it went really well. Game balanced seamed pretty good for the test map where it needed some thinking to successfully complete the objective. There were far less tweaks needed then I expected but this is just one first playthrough with someone else and also, it’s a test map which doesn’t 100% feature everything.
For my testing, I did remove one room (cause I discovered I didn’t have enough titles when I thought I had) but that was about it (it did have 2 loot tokens in it but that didn’t greatly matter). I also gave a very simple mission goal, steal the key loot item. Which is gonna be one of the points anyway. All I didn’t include was that I was planning to have some campaign Bonus objectives, so if you steal more then a set amount of loot, you get a bonus but I’m still debating this as you get more gold when you steal that loot, so it would kinda give you double stuff if you get a reward for both. So what I might do is more the campaign bonus are more campaign objectives. If you are playing campaign mode, you have extra things to do.. maybe.. that can come later ^_^
I also tweaked the starting equipment to remove the arrows. Arrows are very powerful right now. Normally, as you are a thief, you want to avoid combat as much as possible, even though you have a blackjack (a type of sap used to knock people out) by default. Arrows come in a few types but both can be pretty powerful. normal arrows let you attack someone at a range. Current rules say you roll a combat die when using them to see if you hit. If you do, you do 1 point of damage, and most enemies like guards will have more then 1 point of health, so you do some damage to them and they go on alert knowing someone has hit them, but not from where (unless you are standing right next to them or in bright light, then they can easily see you.. though they will get a clue as to direction). In a way, it IS balanced that that don’t do much damage (and cause noise), but at the same time, right now they have infinite range and a combat die gives something like a 4 in 6 chance of hitting I think (for testing, I’m using a HQ combat die so.. maybe it’s 3 hits, 2 hero defend (which would be a mis) and 1 enemy defend (also a miss).
Another arrow is a water one which lets you dose fire sources, which are a major source of light. removing these do make it much easier to move around but I think that is fairly balanced right now.
by removing the arrows from initial starting gear, you can only get them via searching for loot which is fair a enough.
While I liked how it turned out, one bit which might need some tweaking is rotation. A static guard (compared to one that is patrolling a set route). Right now, each turn you roll a dice for each one. 1-2, they turn 90 degrees one way, 3-4 they do nothing, 5-6 they turn 90 degrees the other way. that’s fine and it can mean you are stuck just having to wait for them to turn to face another direction, while making sure you don’t have a guard come up behind you. I think the main problem was it did lead to some guards just facing the wall for a little bit.. that might need a bit of tweaking and I need to think about it cause.. that is ONE dumb guard.
Other then that, I think the core system and idea for the game is pretty good and works well. Of course, more play testing with people would be nice and I might have a couple of idea but I think I should work one some more prototype map layouts. Depending on how long you want a game to take, the maps shouldn’t be TOO big, and I though this test one balanced well, but then it might need to be a bit bigger if the player tried to run around fast.
I might have to see about a few people online if they wanna give the game a bit of a test. I do have a rough online edition (in that I’m using Tabletopia which I don’t quite understand how to do somethings but it gives a good enough sim that I can play through with someone without much problems so that’s good for testing remotely). Have to see how that goes ^_^
