Grid based fantasy battle?

You have just broken my illusions... :) I've been thinking about a similar kind of game for a while now and mostly face the same problems. My ideas werent' related to any particular theme, it was more on the abstract side.

As much as I personally like all the parameter of the game defined at the beginning, I'd strongly discourage presetting the number of cards for skills, moves, special actions etc. I guess there are two approaches for this:

1) Go for the gameplay, set a few simple rules and make a very few cards (about 5 to 10). You can have multiple cards of the same type/action, but don't create 200 actions at the beginning. Then try to play. If you can't manage to get your friends to play, play it alone, it will suffice. Then almost naturally, a need/idea for another action will come to your mind so you can try to add it in the next iteration. Certain skills will prove to be too powerful and some will be rarely used. Balance that by setting some powerful actions constrained by something (either by rarity or the number of times it can play etc.). As iterations go by, you will add more and more of these actions until you come to a place/moment where you have a nice number of balanced action. At certain point, you will feel that adding any more action would make the game too complex or cumbersome. If during testing another player can also feel that complexity, the process should stop. If at any point in the game you are presented with a choice of more than a few (I'd go for at max 5) actions with a discernable outcome, the game has becoming too complex. After you stop adding more features, you are left with some simple tweaking (fine tuning the rules).

2) The other path you can take is to create a whole bunch (even up to 50 different skills of all kinds, species and materials ;) ) and a really complex set of rules and then go to the testing phase. During testing, you will slowly omit the skills/actions that prove to be either useless, too complex or simply boring. This path requires more imagination and time, but can prove benefitial for certain types of games.

For most game types I'd go with the first way of doing things, but there are some games that may be better designed by the second way of reasoning. I guess you have to weight it out and see what you already have.

In my opinion, the games should almost always either be abstract or themed. I guess I am currently talking contradictory to my own designs, since at the moment I too am trying to mix the abstract elements with a theme. However, an abstract game with no theme whatsoever is played simply by rules, and then the goal of the game can be more arbitrary (and remain completely abstract) than when designing a themed game. Since you already have some themed elements in your game (fantasy, warriors, etc), it seems only natural that the goal of the game also have a theme. That being said, the problem is then in the mixing of abstract elements.

Here you need a reasonable analogy. For example, if placing tiles is analogous to the moving of troups - then placing many tiles would represent a journey, a path, a long walk, i.e. "much moving"... Now that I think of it, in our minds usually try to map the abstract things to the real things on a one-to-one relation. Therefore, more precise analogy for movement would be as if the tile represents (for example) a warrior. Then the movement would correspond to the movement of that tile, not to the placing of another tile. Placing another tile (especially if adjacent to a tile already placed) would more correspond to attacking, conquering, colonizating etc. However, you are free to create an analogy that you see fit. This is called the freedom of imagination and abstract/concrete mapping. However, make sure than that the goal of the game in an abstract perspective of the game have at least some correspondence to the goal of the game in a real perspective of the game. Having more tiles at the end would represent having more troops. Having filled most of the board would represent a geographical domination. Removing all opponent pieces from the board would represent the extermination. Et cetera. These are, of course, my examples of analogies, you are encouraged to come up with your own.

The point being - if you have a theme (a real perspective) with all the warriors, rangers, weapons, assaults, charges, defenses etc. and the goal of the game is, for example: "place 3 tiles in first row and 6 tiles in the third column", then the question is: "What exactly are the WARRIORS doing?"

Conclusion: mixing abstract with real (almost always) requires at least a basic level of translation from abstract to real. Keep that in mind.

Keep us posted, I'd like to see how that game of yours went. ;)

Before I reply to some of the issues you have raised, you might wanna check out my blog entry that was inspired by your post. It just made me thinking about how abstraction and reality fit together in a game design.

Unless you are limited by a publisher (or anything else) for a number of components, don't have them preset. The exclusion to this rule would I guess by remakes of other games (video or not) that have specific already defined rules. Then I guess it makes some sense to set the number of cards or other game components to well known values that are copied from the original game.

When I said go with 5-10, I didn't mean have 5 to 10 cards total. Card games like Magic: The Gathering, Dominion etc. have multiple hundreds of cards. What I meant is, if you are having an abstract game - go with 5 to 10 actions (represented by the cards). You can of course have multiples of the cards for randomness, but for example you can do something like this (and this is totally random and perhaps almost completely not applicable to your game, but for the example):

• Action 1: Roll d6 and if you roll 6, you can remove an adjacent opponent piece.
• Action 2: You can skip over an opponent tile.
• Action 3: Fill a row/column with your own tiles if you have at least two units there.
• Action 4: Move any of your tiles at most 3 spaces
• Action 5: Stack a tile onto an adjacent tile making it invulnerable for two turns.
• Action 6: ...
• Action 7: ...

You can then have different amounts of each action cards, depending on how you value their power. Having too many actions will soon become too complex. Or even too random: imagine having only two cards of each of 50 actions - total of 100 cards - and if the players consume only 12 cards during a game, it is possible that the two players that were supposed to have similar actions will play with COMPLETELY different actions, the whole game. Of course, I've taken this to the extreme of 50 actions, but you see where I'm going with this.

Start with a few actions and see if the game is any fun. Test, tweak. Test, tweak. Test, tweak.

I've managed to find an analogy for moving<->spreading relation. Fluids move by spreading (if we disregard the z-axis). But I guess the warriors can't swim. :) (water elementals anyone?)