Lines of Fire prototypes are progressing nicely. I have improved the graphics and created some better-looking tokens -- the wall tokens even have a fitting physical texture on one side because I glued them on some rough packaging cardboard.
Besides improving the looks and layout, I'm mostly focusing on polishing and modularising the rules. Some of the things that I added after the first prototype will now be in a separate game variant. In the end, there will probably be 3 or 4 game variants that are composable i.e. you can play with several variants at the same time. I hope that won't turn out to be very confusing, and will feel natural. The variants I'm thinking of are:
- no elimination -- play for points (which in this case are bomb power-ups). Although this seems to eliminate the desire to blow up other players when free bombs are available on the board. So I might have to think of another scoring mechanism
- 1983 -- Bombardment is divided into mini-phases where everyone takes one step at a time
- Wrath of the gods -- Perhaps a more thematic game, also gives some extra abilities to players and a possibility to spend power-up tokens. Each player plays an Aztec priest (by selecting/drawing a Priest card)
- ??? -- ability to buy cards during the game. The cards give various extra abilities. I have already tested this, but the cards didn't seem that great an addition to me. A couple of players liked it, though. Maybe I'll leave that for an expansion :)
The core rules will then be for a short game with player elimination, and not very thematic since the Priest abilities will not be used. It should be quite simple to learn and will be what's recommended as the first play. In addition to combining the variants, players can also choose to play on a square or hex board. I am thinking of adding other boards with square spaces, but don't have concrete plans. A couple of players have asked for a much larger board, but I don't think its such a good idea for most players.
Besides the polishing work, I have a few design issues that I'd like to solve somehow, but find really difficult to solve elegantly.
1. Speed power-ups are too good.
The bomb power-ups are pretty much useless in the core game, beyond 2-3. Maybe some players would use 4 but that's rare. So you do want some bombs, but not a lot.
The range power-ups are both good and bad: they allow you to bomb someone from further away, but it will be harder for you to get away from your own bombs. You may want them, or may not.
The speed power-ups are always good: more steps is always better, giving a good chance of surrounding someone with bombs. You always want more speed power-ups!
Range power-ups seem the most balanced: they give an advantage but perhaps a disadvantage as well. Bomb power-ups are not ideal in the core game as you can't use more than a few. In the "Wrath of the Gods" variant you can use them (and all others as well) to pay the cost of using abilities. But if one player ends up picking up a lot of speed power-ups, and the others get almost none, that gives him a big advantage.
I guess ideally the other players would co-operate somewhat against the speediest one, but it doesn't seem to happen. What could be an elegant disadvantage to having lots of speed power-ups?
- you must always move as many steps as you have: no -- you'll just move back and forth between two spaces
- if you moved beyond lets say, 8 steps, you "ran" and are "tired" and unable to Escape and maybe you can't place a bomb past your 8th step. This requires more keeping track of stuff and seems somewhat arbitrary. Then again, The whole Escape phase seems somewhat arbitrary, but works quite well.
- if you have X (8?) or more steps, then you are always "running" and might "slip". This sounds promising if I can think of a good meaning and mechanics for "slipping".
What do you think? What could be the downside of having lots of movement steps?
2. Turn order is quite important some times I'd like to make the turn order more balanced. Currently the first player token moves clockwise each round, but with 4+ players that's quite a few rounds of your neighbour going before you. The only way I've thought of solving it so far is to have a concept of "odd" and "even" players where odds go first if the first player is odd and so on. This sounds too clumsy to even try at a playtest.
Hmm.. wait a minute. What if the player with the least amount of speed tokens always goes first?
Comments
Taffer wrote:What if the
Just tested this by myself. It's hard to fully realize how much this changes without testing with others, but it seems like a good rule so far; the actual details are:
Move the first player token clockwise, to the closest player who has the least movement speed, or is tied for the least. If the current first player is the only one with the least movement speed, he keeps the first player token.
This ensures that the player with the most movement can never go first. Of course, he may still go before someone who has less movement. But I think this rule is quite elegant and keeps the turn order within the round simple. And I like that it alleviates both of the issues I mentioned, with one small rule change.
No-elimination improvement
I found a way to improve the no-elimination variant: as an alternative of having X number of rounds after the center space is cleared (as it was so far), a player collecting Y bombs also ends the game.
A good number for both X and Y seems to be 8 (or X=7, Y=8)
I hope that this change will also cause players to feel more pressure to blow others up.