Let’s Design a Game
Posted by Rob Herman at June 22nd, 2007
I haven’t played Stratego in some years, but I dreamed about it last night. (I used telepathy to find my opponent’s flag, but lost my Marshal to his Spy. I was planning out how I was going to get a Spy-supported General across the board one move at a time when I woke up in boredom. I swear I am not making this up.) Anyway, thinking about the game, such as it is, gave me the inspiration to design another game.
As you may have noticed, I’m usually a fan of multiplayer games with mostly indirect interaction–Euros, as it were–and the idea of a deeply strategic, confrontational two-player game doesn’t really get me going. But I had some ideas that seemed interesting. So I’ll lay them out here; I have no promises to ever finish or even prototype this game, but we’ll see where it goes.
Codename: Tactego
Players: 2
The Promise: Like Stratego, a skirmish-level confrontation between two equal sets of units. Also like Stratego, there will be an element of hidden unit identity. Unlike Stratego, unit mobility will play a much greater factor, allowing more tactics and less strategy (hence the codename.) Also, because I dislike the memorization aspect of Stratego, units will spend some of the time revealed.
Desired Play Time: 15-25 minutes
Setup: To reduce total time and the learning curve, initial piece locations will be predetermined or mostly predetermined. At least some, perhaps all, will start face-down.
The Board: A grid about the size of Stratego’s–10×10, say. Diagonal movement will be allowed, unlike Stratego. If we get as far as a prototype and hexes seem like a good idea, we’ll try that as an alternative.
The Goal: I like the “capture the flag” idea, but to create a more dynamic game with fewer pieces, we’ll make the flag piece weak but mobile. Since pieces will be more mobile in this game, we may need to give it some kind of resilience, too.
The Pieces: Clearly pieces will need to have some kind of innate combat power that determines who wins a combat. To add flavor and a hook for theme, they will also have some additional abilities, probably either relating to mobility or situational attack power adjustments.
One More Decision With The Pieces: At the risk of adding a small bit of complexity, we’ll divorce the raw combat power from abilities. For instance, in Stratego, all 8’s are miners and all 9’s are scouts. In Tactego, if there’s a piece called, say, a Knight, with the ability to jump like a chess knight, we might have one with a strength of 3 and one with a strength of 1.
Next time we’ll consider, among other things, some ideas for pieces.
You should use the good technique brought to us by Heroclix of incorporating the rules for each piece or a symbol of the piece’s ability into the piece itself. Since this sounds like it’s going to be a one-box game, it should be possible for each unique ability to have a distinct and visually descriptive icon associated with it. That would allow the knights that you described to be represented by a symbol shaped like a chess knight’s movement and a number representing the piece’s strength in combat.
One concern I have is that if both the piece’s combat strength and its special ability are hidden information, then in order to prove that you’re not cheating you need to reveal your knight when it makes its special move. One possible solution is that for some pieces, the icon representing the ability is embossed on both sides of the piece. This seems especially important, in my opinion, for pieces whose only ability is related to mobility.
The idea about having one side indicate a special movement power and the other side also indicate strength is very interesting. If more than one unit ends up having a special movement power, I think I’ll use it.
And I would certainly include helpful icons on the pieces, yes. If there are only 4 or so they should fit on a quick-reference card that would also helpfully remind a player which color he is. (To my shame, I occasionally lose track of this.)