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Upgrade Wars - Thoughts, ideas and criticisms needed!

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trollitc
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A two player game layout

Hi all,

I've been hard at work on my first serious entry into board and card game design. It's a game called Upgrade Wars, which mixes deck building with some light tactical combat. More of a deck 'churning' game really - your base deck serves as an engine to create massive robots which you then use tactically through three combat zones in an attempt to wipe out the other opponents.

This is the umpteenth iteration of the game - but one that I'm really happy with. It's gone through hours and hours of play testing, both by me, my group and other groups as well.

I've set up a BoardGameGeek page for this: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128701/upgrade-wars where you can also find the rule book as a PDF. I've also attached the rules to this post. I'm really curious to hear other's thoughts and ideas about this game. You can reach me directly at bgerber@gmail.com.

The game consists of 272 cards, dice for resolving combat and tracking damage and may have a battle mat or board as well. At the moment I've printed a physical prototype with some donated and public domain artwork. I'm not an artist or graphic designer, so the iconography and design isn't where it needs to be.

Here's the pitch:

~~~~~~~~~~

Far in the future, war has been relegated to a spectator sport. As humanity has spread throughout the solar system, advances in material sciences have left us wanting for nothing yet craving new forms of entertainment.

3D printers ranging in size from minuscule to mammoth process material known as Nano-Goo (or just “Goo”) into virtually anything a person could need, from food and clothing to massive, space-faring ships. Using these technologies, a few enterprising individuals capitalized on humanity’s need for entertainment and have brought back to life the ancient custom of gladiatorial combat -- done safely by remotely operating (teleoperating) vastly powerful machines of war known as War Bots.

Large 3D printing structures are dropped onto remote asteroids and other small, celestial bodies. These come with a small complement of devices which begin to process the raw materials of these asteroids into Goo, which these massive printers can use to create War Bots. Printers use a series of programs called .WAR Files, which give them the specifics of War Bots which they can then use Goo to print.

War Bots are printed out of Goo, which is programmed to take a specific form with specific functions. Because they are made of self organizing nanomaterials, War Bots can be modified by simple programs called .UPGrade Files – or upgrades. These upgrades can be applied to War Bots while they are in the field.

Governed by a strict set of rules, and limited by the programs made available to them, contestants manufacture and then fight with these giant machines, for the delight of audiences throughout the Solar System.

Upgrade Wars is a deck building, tactical combat game. Players begin the game with a starter deck of 10 resources and two War Bots (the giant robots that do the actual fighting).

Through the course of the game, they may purchase new programs to deploy as War Bots or to Upgrade existing War Bots that have already been deployed.

The battle field is divided into three zones - the Printer zone (where the magic happens), the Defensive Ring and the Front Line - a zone shared by all players.

Your bots traverse the battlefield under your command in an attempt to reach other player's printers and destroy them.

Complete Victory: The last player with a Printer still capable of creating War Bots wins the game!

Tactical Victory: Each enemy War Bot you destroy is worth 1 Victory Point. Each enemy Printer is worth 5 Victory Points. Once three card piles are depleted, the player with the most Victory Points wins!

Featuring strategic and tactical play - players must decide where and when to spend their resources, which can go to either purchasing new program files or deploying War Bots into the field of battle. At the same time, you must manage your existing War Bots to defend your Printer and attack the enemy.

JustActCasual
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Goo-d

Looks like a fun game!

The concerns I have are mostly to do with flavour. You spend a lot of time explaining the cool setting, at the expense of a clear idea of gameplay, but not much of it seems to come through in the game itself. Robot Fight comes through strong, but I don't see a lot of 3D-printed nanobot based space gladiators in the mechanics. I would say you need to figure out a shorter pitch: in one sentence, why should people be playing your game over everything else available? Obviously better art quality can also help integration, but if it's only a gloss of paint you shouldn't be pushing the theme so hard.

I am also slightly worried about the time: 60-90 minutes is a long time for a game like this. A single game of Dominion or Quarriors takes 30 minutes or less. Especially because you describe it as a 'tactical' game off the bat, I was expecting something shorter. Maybe you want something long and grindy, but I would definitely be inclined to look at ways of quickening gameplay to get more of a fun intense gladiatorial feel. This seems like the kind of game you would want a bunch of short rounds of, rather than one long game.

Horatio252
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A couple thoughts

I like the concept. It stands out to me. Giant robots battling is a theme that has a pretty broad appeal. Definitely a game that if I saw it on the shelf I would pick up and look at the back of the box before going to bgg to watch or read some reviews.

The mechanics are simple in a good way. The game is accessible. It does not involve too much math and is free from result tables. Gamers understand the mechanic of discarding cards to pay for other cards. There are a lot of good elements here and the game is promising.

Several places where I think you could improve the game:

Not sure why thematically you went with "printers" instead of factories. Factories are intuitive with the theme.

Is the 4 player game a team game? The layout suggests that some players can move from their printer zone directly to their neighbor's printer zone. That fine if they are on the same team, but bad if they are competing against each other.

You offer too many options for set up in the set-up part of your rules. The first time I read a game's rules I want to know how to play my first game. I'm not ready for options like that. I recommend listing only the random set-up options here. Then at the end of your rules, provide "advanced" or "alternate" rules for set-up where you describe the drafting rules.

How much risk is there that the program pool will not have all of the needed elements? What if we randomly select only upgrade cards?

Related, what is the risk that one player's personal pool is clearly better than another player's pool?

Mechanically speaking, I don't think you need a "build goo" phase at the beginning of each player's turn. If you want to build or upgrade a bot during the print phase then just discard the cards then.

Your rules on multiple war bots attacking at once are, I think, highly favorable to the attacker. Let's imagine I have two war bots with an attack value of 4 and I want to attack a warbot with a defense of 2. With your rules my attack is at 4+4+1D6 against a defense of 2+1D6. Attackers worst result is 9 and defenders best result is 8. No matter what attackers will win and inflict 8 damage (attacker always inflicts full attack value). If instead each attack was separate, then it would be 4+1D6 vs 2+1D6 and then 4+1D6 vs 2+1D6. Now one of those attacks will probably succeed and deal 4 damage, but both succeeding is less likely. I'm not sure if I am making sense on this point.

One of the major lessons to take from Sentinels of the Multiverse is that damage trackers should be in the box. If these are PnP rules, then that's okay, but you should not ask players to provide their own way to track damage in a game they paid for.

I'm not clear on what the construction bots do. You use them as goo throughout the example game, but any card can be used as goo, so I'm not sure what else a player could do with construction bots. Or are construction bots the only thing that can be goo? Are they the only way to pay for programs? If so that needs to be much clearer.

I hope my feedback was helpful. Good luck with your game!

The Chaz
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Player area layout

Horatio252 wrote:

Is the 4 player game a team game? The layout suggests that some players can move from their printer zone directly to their neighbor's printer zone. That fine if they are on the same team, but bad if they are competing against each other.

This stuck out to me, as well.
My understanding is that players must move through the "Front Line" before entering the defended areas.
A quick "fix" would be to give each player a square layout card. A simple arrangement would be:
In the top left quadrant (or smaller square in the top left corner): Front Line
In the center of the layout card would be the Defense area - connected to the Front Line, but maybe 4-6cm from each edge.
In the bottom right would be the Printer area - connected to the Defense area.

The symmetry of such layout cards would allow you to make identical cards for each player. The only touching areas between two players' layout cards would be the Front Line.

trollitc
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Thanks!

Thanks for all the suggestions so far! I've noted them down and am going through all of your replies point by point.

You've all made some great suggestions and had some great observations! I very much appreciate the time you put into reading my rules and thinking about this.

I'll post an update in a bit (although my time's getting sucked away by the holidays!) when I've made some changes. Then I'll get the newest "new" instructions uploaded to BGG!

Again, thanks! Once I have some changes in place, I'll let you all know!

-Ben

trollitc
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Horatio252 wrote: Not sure

Horatio252 wrote:

Not sure why thematically you went with "printers" instead of factories. Factories are intuitive with the theme.

Is the 4 player game a team game? The layout suggests that some players can move from their printer zone directly to their neighbor's printer zone. That fine if they are on the same team, but bad if they are competing against each other.

To address a few things real quick while I still have some lunch break time left.

Printers: I work at a large university that does a lot with 3D printers. They're everywhere around me and the image stick with me. Also, I'm a big fan of certain semi-dystopian future scifi books and 3D printing or pipelines of generic material that can be turned into just about anything by downloading the blueprints figure big. I guess it's been on my mind!

The 4 player layout: No teams in this one, although that's not out of the question! I just hadn't thought of it! Not the best way to show this, I agree. A graphic designer buddy of mine did it for me for free as a quick mock- up. It's what I have right now, but will have to be changed if/when this game ever gets into production. Each player has their own Printer zone and their own Defensive Ring. The Front Line is shared by all players.

War Bots must move from Printer Zone to Defensive Ring to Front Line to then move to another player's Defensive Ring and then Printer Zone. You can't skip zones or move directly from your Printer Zone to another's, despite how the graphic appears.

Thanks again!
-Ben

JustActCasual
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Goo

The Goo icon from the cards should really be used for the card backs as well: the large G makes no sense when you have an icon for Goo already.

On the matter of Printers and flavour: I really like the Printers! But they need to show through in consistent conceptualization. Right now there is too much of a 'chunky robot' feel to the cards: things like modular platforms and missile system upgrades give a feel of Lego-ing parts together. The elements that I really like are the things like Nanoswarms, Goo, reactive armour, synthetic muscles: the more sleek, cyborganic robot. The programming upgrades are somewhere in the middle. These kind of naming upgrades to flavour can be made before any art upgrade, and should be, as they will directly inform the art. For example, "Missile Systems" could be "Embedded Missiles", "Projectile Tubes", or "Plasma Darts": they still give the ranged weapon message, but have a much more fluid, oozing, plastic feel.

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