A Roadmap of Tiny Things

Several months back over on the Cardboard Warriors forum I posted some retro pixel-style models for the N64 video game Jet Force Gemini. The theme for that month's figure compilation was "Supervillains and Birthday Cake Battles", and the company who put our Jet Force was just releasing a 30th anniversary game collection. You can see and download the models over here.

A long running design philosophy I've been working with is to produce a series of different tabletop games that all share similar core mechanics. While I don't want to make a completely universal game system like GURPS or the like, I feel there is something to be said for simplicity and ease of play in games. If you enjoy huge, company level wargames but your buddy wants to play a fantasy skirmish game tonight, the same rules won't fit for both. However, there's no reason they can't both work on the same basic principals, making switching from one system to another easier. With that in mind, I decided to adapt some basic rules from other projects into a simple dungeon crawl With giant, evil, blue space ants!

The first step I took to get things off the ground was to determine what the Minimum Viable Product of something like this game should look like. This project was aimed to be along the lines of simple classics like Space Hulk, Siege of the Citadel and Space Crusade. So I made a list of what my smallest playtest would comprise of:

• Objective: Heroes must get from point A to point B. Bugs must kill them before they do (simple asymmetric game goal)
• Actions: Models have to be able to move, attack and be attacked. For starters, everyone has two actions, moves 3 spaces and rolls 3d8 to attack, with a 6+ being a hit. Bugs get hit, they die. Heroes get hit, subtract 1 because they're tough,  and take that many wounds from a starting pool of 3.
• Reinforcements: Bugs have to get reinforcements every turn to make up for being weaker. Two sets of two bugs was the basic plan.
• Map: Instead of coming up with my own maps for the basic playtest, I used tiles from Siege of the Citadel. The tight corners, twists and turns with a few longer, open halls and rooms seemed like a good variety to test with.

This is what I started off with, quick and dirty. I knew there would be many tweaks needed off the bat, but for a "Test Zero" it was plenty.

Things that were also fairly simple additions but that I decided to wait on till at least the first full test were:

• Aiming shots: re-rolling missed attack dice if you use two actions to fire instead of 1.
• Overwatch/held actions: firing out of turn in reaction to an enemy model.
• Alternate bad guys: red bugs need 5+ to hit and have armor like heroes, normal blue bugs need a 6+ to hit, snipers roll one 5+ die but ignore armor if they hit, and yellow coward drones roll only 2 attack dice unless they can see another friendly bug.
• Hero weapons: machine gun can split fire, rocket launcher does AOE damage, flamer attacks everything in a line.

So, test 0. With the limited number of actions, the Jet Force heroes weren't able to pump out enough firepower or move fast enough to overcome the bugs spawning every turn. So for test #1 I would make heroes hit on 5+ instead of 6+. Basic, simple, core mechanics for moving, firing and doing damage were off to a good start, though. Knowing that, I could move onto the slightly-less-basic variables I listed above and start fine-tuning.

Total time elapsed between grabbing tokens/dice/boards, scribbling out basic test notes, and actually doing a test zero: about 45 minutes. I was able to move dudes around, roll dice, and kill hordes giant blue space ants. End goal is to do all of that with a degree of balance and variety. So, off to a good start.

The MVP of game design is starting small and building up from there.

-Mick