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Lines of Fire: Fixing the Hex Board

Lines of Fire: Dead End

Lines of Fire is my first board game design done as an adult. I used to make some simple board games as a kid, but haven't done it for almost 20 years. I've posted about the game on the forums:

I've had quite a few play tests so far, some by myself, some with other local players. Only in a very recent play tests did a big problem with one of the board layouts come out. There's a hex board and a square board. The square one is the most tested and seems to be fine, but the hex board has a big problem: with at least 4 players, there seems to be an almost certain way to always trap and eliminate another player at the start of the game.

The hex board is 6 hexes for each side, and the whole board also forms a hex. Players start from corners of the big hex, and have only 2 start moves that make sense -- put a bomb to the left or to the right. If two adjacent players put bombs towards each other (and one of them can obviously force the situation), they will have a clear path between each other's corners. And getting there is easy with 5 (or more) steps available on each turn.

Now, the starting player token moves each round. With enough payers, between at least one such pair of players described above, Player 1 can move before Player 2 for several rounds. 3 rounds of moving before the other one seems to do the trick.

Some info about the board (see image) and rules (PDF on Dropbox):

  • black spaces are walls
  • light/dark gray spaces have wall tokens which flip to power-ups when they blow up
  • bombs blow up walls, and have a minimum range of 1
  • players can't move through walls, each other or bombs
  • if a player is killed, he is eliminated (in the main game variant)

Round 1. The way between the players has cleared (Bomb1 and Bomb2 spaces have bombs that explode)

Round 2. Player 1 uses 5 steps to move from his corner onto the Bomb2 space, so that Player 2 will be locked into a dead end where he can only move between the spaces P2 and DeadEnd. If Player 2 moves to DeadEnd, they die next round; if they move to P2, they die after 2 rounds. Lets assume they pick P2.

Round 3. Player 1 still goes before Player 2, places a bomb on Bomb2 and moves away (2 steps, out of bomb range) -- the other player is now still blocked between P2 and DeadEnd and is forced to move to DeadEnd to escape the bomb's range.

Round 4. Player 1 still goes before Player 2, he now moves to P2 and can put the bomb there. Player 2 is now totally locked in and can't do anything. They blow up when the bombs explode.

So basically, Player 2 is locked into doing pretty much nothing for 3 rounds early in the game, and is then eliminated! What a fine experience, eh? And with 5 or 6 players, this is pretty much guaranteed (unless the players who have this opportunity don't see it or use it)

This situation actually happened, very similarly. The game has cards with additional powers, though, and Player 2 was saved by them (lucky draw!). What's worse is that Player 1 could place a landmine instead of a bomb (with a card -- ok, maybe the card is too powerful and needs to go). Landmine doesn't go off until it is stepped on, and that basically locks the other player in until someone else saves him from the other side (or not at all). Landmine can also be countered with some other cards -- so it's all down to luck.

But nevermind about the Landmine (I'll probably get rid of it) -- what can I do about the main issue here? I've thought about some solutions, and why they are not elegant enough:

  • make the hex board bigger -- I think it's already quite big, and having 6 small hexes for each side of the big hex seems elegant. I would have to make it 8 hexes for each side to make it as nice and symmetric as I want it and to get rid of this problem. That would be a damn huge board, though.
  • reduce the number of steps the players have -- I tested it. 4 steps instead of 5 is enough to eliminate the immediate threat, but then Player 2 still has only one move (of 4 or so choices) which saves them on Round 2. So this just makes for a boring game play puzzle at the start of the game where the player must know that one right choice, and not everybody will! And even if they do pick the right move, they still seem to have a big disadvantage and will probably die the next couple of rounds.
  • make sure there are no movement power-ups on the edgemost rows! (this is needed in combination with reducing the # of steps)
  • reduce the number of steps to 3 (but only for first 3 rounds). This should make the problem go away, but would probably create more problems
  • put walls between two of the hexes in the middle of each edge of the big hex, so the players can't go through to the other corners! This unnecessarily limits the game at later stages so the edges would have to be removed at some point. This seems artificial especially since i never had walls on the edges of spaces before.
  • just say in the rules that the corners and the spaces immediately around them are sanctuaries (for a few rounds)
  • give players cards that can save them from this. the problem is that the other players who don't end up in the situation of Player 2 now have a powerful card that they can use later. Ok, maybe make the card playable on first 3 rounds only, but now I have to start counting rounds just for this.

All of these solutions seem artificial, inelegant, complicated.

Ideally, I would keep the movement at 5 steps -- it's the same as on the square board then, and it works fine for most of the game on the hex board, just this one situation is bad. 5 is not totally arbitrarily chosen: on both the square and the hex boards, it's enough to go around a corner two rows away from you, place a bomb there and then step back around the corner (or forward around another corner), out of harms way. 4 might work, but then I'd need to do a lot more tests again and I suspect the game will turn quite a bit longer.

No speed power-ups on the edges seems like it should be done anyway, but that only reduces an even worse version of the same problem to the one I just described.

Any ideas? I know this is probably a lot to take in, especially if you don't already have an idea about how the game plays. Perhaps I should just drop the hex board, but I like it except for this one big problem.

Comments

Solution by rearranging the order of turns?

I thought of another solution: interleave players' turns. With 6 players the turn order would be:

Round 1. 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6

Round 2. 2, 4, 6, 3, 5, 1

Round 3. 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2

Round 4. 4, 6, 2, 5, 1, 3

In this case adjacent players do not have several rounds where one goes before the other. I think it would be quite hairy to keep track of this, though. I guess I could make players have 2 secondary colors, or some other visual indicators that show whether they are odd or even. Then I can say the odd and even players must be interleaved in turn order. And then if the first player is odd, the odds go before the evens; if first player is even, the evens go before odds. Still sounds inelegant and doesn't work quite as well with an odd number of players...

A few options

Make the board a square, hex-based board.
Add an additional 1-2 more rows of hexes.

Something like that might

Something like that might work. However, I like the hex shape of the board as it has symmetrical starting positions for 6 players. Actually the problem I have makes me think whether 6 players is not too much -- with 4 players the issue that somebody repeatedly has their turn before you is much lesser.

Another possibility is making the hex-shaped board larger (8 spaces per side) with keeping the number of wall tokens small so it's just extra movement that's required, but doesn't slow the game too much by having more walls to blow up.

Solved it! But haven't tested yet

I think I've solved it! The 8-space per side hex was totally too big, but the 7-spaces per side hex doesn't seem that bad, and I'm going to try it. It isn't quite as regular a pattern as the original, but maybe I'm too obsessed with that anyway. Alternative and more regular placements of walls didn't work very well -- they would leave lots of free spaces that are connected by corners instead of edges and it won't feel natural because the explosions won't spread towards corners of a space (at least with the current rules).

Check out the image here: larger hex with 7 spaces per side

Tested

I tested this for a few times. The exact problem seems to be solved, which is good.

But there may still be other moves that start the same way and can achieve an early elimination in a similar manner (circling around the target's corner and blocking them). They are certainly less obvious, though, and require

  • quite an aggressive player -- there's no reward for killing a player very early (other than having one less opponent to deal with), and it might mean neglecting collecting power-ups for pursuit of the opponent
  • luck for that player -- speed tokens on the edgemost row of power-ups and/or the next row

This should be possible to alleviate with the idea I had before that edgemost walls should never reveal speed tokens. I could force some boulders there, which could make this situation even rarer (but possibly worse, since boulders can be pushed to try to block the opponent).

If I add those changes, I think I've done enough to make this class of issues rarely available and non-obvious enough -- this is still meant as a short filler game, and the hex board is meant as a more aggressive, hectic variant of the game. With the solution I came up with, I'm not seeing this type of problem being that big of a deal, but further play tests will show if I'm right.

However, I'm still seeing more and more that one player having their turn before a neighbour for more than a couple of rounds is perhaps not the best for a fair game -- especially as they can plan several moves ahead, goading the opponent this way and that. So I'm still considering having some kind of change in turn order e.g. odd players go first in one round, even players the next round -- or something like that.

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blog | by Dr. Radut