Chall & Sindall Battlefields is a board game I'm designing based on a universe that I created. This universe has 20 different unique races in it each with their own unique cultures and nations within them. This world is full of its own wars, clashes, adventures, and political and cultural struggles.
In this game I have explored the military clashes that have occured over the history of these races/nations. The first game will feature the two most central races in this world, the Elves and the Scythrakians (poisonous lizard people).
The feel I wanted to create for the game was a feel that you were actually commanding an army in the field. Most war games only allow you to move a certain number of units a turn. I wanted the game to give the feel that the army is actually moving all at once. So one unique mechanic to the game is that all units may move one space per turn. Each side has certain abilities they are able to do after spending command points to use them. These include being able to attack with more than three units, moving X number of units extra spaces, being able to manipulate enemy pieces locations, bring in reinforcements, etc.
The other part of the game is that victory is attained by dropping your opponent's morale to 0. This is achieved by killing and flanking units, or by advancing your pieces to the other side of the board (raiding the enemy supply wagons). Morale is regained through reinforcements.
Each race will have a completely different feel to their army. (Some may think this is hard with 20 races and with somewhere around 25-30 nations to make them all unique, but I've made it possible). I was able to playtest it yesterday with my brother for the first time and my Scythrakians really got stomped. It was a great learning session though and I was able to identify many of the flaws in the game already. With repeated playtesting hopefully I'll be able to identify even more flaws and weaknesses. So far though the mechanics of the game seem to work fine, it's the abilities and costs of these abilities that seem to need fine tuning.
Comments
Sounds interesting. Good plan
Sounds interesting. Good plan so far. I think the game will depend a lot on how well you design and describe the world. Fantasy (or scifi, or obviously history-based) games rely a lot on existing background-story and player familiarity with the situation (although personally I would be happy to play a good tactical game with some elves vs lizardmen without worrying too much about context).
Have you played Battles of Westeros? Your mechanics sound like many are similar to what is in that game. (Not a bad thing really.)
There are many wargames where you move all your units every turn, so not sure if you just did not see those games or if there was something I didn't get about that part of your description.
Back Story
Here is some backstory for why I chose to do the Elves vs. Scythrakians first. The Scythrakians are a crocodile/komodo dragonesque people that live in a giant swamp. The elves at the beginning of the story were the most powerful race in the known world. They would often times go hunting in the swamp, killing Scythrakians. One Scythrakian named Xamnor, watched his parents murdered before his eyes as he and his siblings hid. That experienced burned into his heart a deep hatred for all elves. Using that hatred he was able to unify his people. They didn't even have tribes or cities really. He was the first ruler of any kind for his people.
He founded the first Scythrakian city and from there he built an army. Once the army was strong enough, he marched it out of the swamp to attack the unsuspecting elves destroying their largest kingdom and enslaving the local populace. Bent on destroying their civilization though he marched north to destroy the rest of the Elven kingdoms. The wars lasted for decades until two other races allied with the Elves were able to push the newly created Xamnor Empire back to the borders of what was once The Kingdom of Ogintoth. There they were able to contain them. Over the years wars constantly break out between the Scytrakians and the Tripartate Alliance.
Xamnor's marriage to his sister creates three distint imperial bloodlines, one becoming the ruling family, one becoming a family of beserk warriors, and the last becoming a family of battlefield assassins.
I could keep going on about the REAL reasons these wars keep starting up but that's a topic for another day.
Hmmmm
The game is actually pretty light. The rules could probably fit on a just a couple of pages. The depth would come from the special abilities of the different units. It seems that the lighter the wargame gets, the more it turns to "move x amount of units per turn" mechanic. The lighter wargames/minis games tend to center around activating squads of units whereas my game is much about moving your whole army and then deciding where your attack will be concentrated, where your forces will make the push since you can only attck with three units a turn.
I have not played Battle of Westeros, I'll have to watch a video of a playthrough.
The back story for this game is already well in depth and it's necessary to understand the five different main elven kingdoms. Expansions are planned that will add new armies, like the fire healing Rigan, the mountain trolls, Gold Dwarves, Thunder Dwarves, Silver Elves, Men, Kyr (water people), etc. I've created a rich history that reaches back thousands of years and I've even written the creation story for the world from the different perspectives of the races (they all believe in one unified pantheon, but they each have a god they worship over the others because he/she is the one that created them). I've got pages worth of documents just on the history and culture of the different nations and even some cities. Still I haven't populated it the way I would like.
Eventually I'll add things like terrain and scenarios (based on historical battles).
Both miniatures and board
Both miniatures and board wargames used to be move-all-units back before someone invented non-light wargames. Combining it with a limited number of attacks is more common in operational than tactical games and more common in heavier games. The lightest games usually just allow you to move and attack with everything you have each turn; difficult to beat that for simplicity.
BoW has some kind if activation-mechanics with rolling dice to get different colored markers you then use during the turn to activate units, so that particular aspect of the game is different from what you described.
Examples?
I must admit, my knowledge of older wargames is limited. I really only have some knowledge of the heavier ones and the newer lighter ones that seem to have people taking turns activating X amount of units that turn.
Could you provide me with some examples of some older tactical games that use this mechanic? I'd like to look into them to see how they play and what may work for my game and what may not work.
One of the things I'm going for is a game like Commands & Colors/Memoir but with a feeling of greater control than those games. In those games your strategy is limited by the cards you draw and the results by the dice you throw. I want a game that allows for greater control of your army, thus you can activate them all (Allowing the army to move in a cohesive group) and attack with three that you would like, as opposed to forcing you to attack with a certain number in a certain location. I may end up adding dice for the attacker but we'll see where the game goes from here on out.
What did you think of the backstory?