I have been working on a tactics boardgame/card game lately, where you control a small army of creatures, and try to destroy the enemys towers.
In the game that I am working on, I have tried to squeeze as much information as possible into game piece as possible. I wanted each creature to have attack, defense, speed, special abilities, position on the board, move points, and hit points. I managed to get things that are constant for a monster such as its stats written on cards (Kind of like a CCG like Magic:The Gathering). Problem was how would I keep track of the other stuff in such a way that wouldn't be a hassle (My previous game didn't work out to well because of this). I eventually cam up with a system that I am pretty proud of.
The way my system works is that a six sided dice is used as the marker on the board. The dice behaves like a marker in that it represents where something is. Each face has a number 0 - 5, this represents the hit points. I also will have a smaller number from 0 - 3 on every edge on each face, this represents the move points. Then I have a color that represents who it belongs to, and a symbol to show which card it is linked with (most likely a creature).
I like this, because when you move something you rotate it. When it gets damaged you change the face on top. And the color and symbol makes it easy to tell what it is.
Do any of you have any comments?
So my idea isn't as original as I thought it was. Oh well I still have plenty of other ideas to try out.
I was thinking of using only 6 sided dice, since that would make some things simpler. Instead of having a maximum health be different for different creatures, I change the defense of the creature. The defense subtracts damage equal to its strength. The attack is how much damage is delt before the defense subtracts from it.
The only information I was going to put on the dice was health, move points (which I could make dependant on health), and a colored symbol to link it with a playing card.