The first thing I did was create a photoshop template so that the tiles matched up better, and then I somewhat randomly scattered around three colored "power up" dice locations. These associated themselves with the three skills I wanted improved, Energize, Transfer, and Replicate. This was an idea I wrote about in december but forgot about until yesterday's re-read, it seems much more elegant then sacrificing dice to an off-board skill tree, and it allows players to "attack" each others skill trees by taking over their dice which are on an important color power up. To add a bit more strategy to tile placements, I also put in the Star which is the only Energize locations possible, and the "2 pip" locations which make higher value dice when replicated on.
I hastily played one solo 4 player game and then rushed off to game night hoping to get some plays in with other people. Sure enough the first thing I got to do was convince Paul and Ian to try this guy out before jumping into something bigger. Below is a picture of what the game looked like when we decided to end it.
I was red and running away with the lead due to the Purple skill tech bieng overpowered, so we stopped and discussed ways to balance this tech as well as ways to create attacks. The attack idea we ended up with was a hostile Replication where the energy needed is 2 more then the value of the attacked die. So in order to kill a value 1 die, you need to come in with a value 3 replication. This places a value 1 replicant, and the extra energy value is transfered into the closest adjacent opponents die. So the opponent looses a die, but a close one absorbs the extra energy from the conflict.
Much later that night we got in a quick game before Ralph had to run to catch BART. This game had the more ballanced purple skill (replication), and attacks. There was some conflict, but due to the rushed nature of the game there wasn't much discussion at the end of the strategy.
One thing that two people brought up was, "What if they were hexagons instead of squares?". My initial reaction to this was negative, despite my personal love of the shape. I figured it would over-clutter the playing board, not to mention bieng harder to cut out for these prototypes. It was brought up that a hexagon shape could probably scale better from 3 to 4 players then a square would, and because of this I decided to give it a shot.
So this morning I threw some stuff into photoshop and printed out a rough 3x3 hexagon grid with dice locations and a variety of different connecting paths. I "played" a quick three player game with the printed out sheet just to see how cluttered it might seem, as well as to evaluate if the pathing was still as intuitive as it was with squares. Below is the result:
Please please please let me know your personal opinion as to which of the two shapes seems more appealing as well as intuitive to you. I was suprised at how much I liked the look of the hexagon grid, but it already has a completely different "feel" then the square setup. Seems like there will be more wacky networks jumping all over the place instead of clusters of connected dice. This is purely cosmetic of course, both shapes will create similar "clumpings" of dice, but one seems to be more spread out and perhaps harder to take in.
One thing that's weird about the hex grid is that you can jump over a hex completely.
ReplyDeleteWow, that looks interesting, this may put a whole new spin on attacking and how to approach the question of what happens when a lone die is cut from the main group of dice... Did we ever answer that question?
ReplyDeletePaul