Stealth movement in a miniatures combat board game?

Not sure if it can be applied to your game, but for a ninja game of mine I was thinking that the player can see the location of his ennemy but he cannot simply move the guards where the ninja is located because certain restrictions prevent him to do so.

For example, the ninja might need to fail a roll near a guard to give a chance to the player to rotate the guard facing the right direction to hinder the ninja player. It's just a coincidence that the guard chosen the right direction.

The the global idea would be to give player restrictions, but the fact both player's know it's location is to perform some actions that could be justified as coincidence.

Not sure if it's usable in your game since both players can have ninjas, but you could get something out of the coicidence idea.

Perhaps there is a way for the player using the ninja to secretly document where his ninja will appear on the following round, and when it comes time for the ninja's next turn, the player reveals the document and moves the ninja there? It would also make sense that a ninja could only hide in areas that allowed it (obstacles, shadows, etc).

Perhaps the player could document that, for instance, in three turns his ninja will appear in a certain location within his movement range. The player leaves his ninja in place, and then three turns later the player reveals the document and moves his ninja to that location? This would simulate the ninja looking at a situation, coming up with a plan, and executing it.

This could be an advantage and a disadvantage, because the game could change dramatically over the course of three turns. Perhaps at the end of the three turns, the ninja would have the option to moving as documented, or of aborting his stealthy attempt and returning to where he started (in essence losing three turns)?

Maybe part of the answer would also be that in order to remain hidden, the ninja would have to move much more slowly than normal?

CS

Hey Splinter

One option for stealth in a tactical board game is to simply make the ninja's, while "stealthed", untargetable.

This is how I utilize sneaking in my board game. Obviously, the other player will know where the characters are, but they simply cannot target them with spells, abilities, or attacks. However, if the stealthed player happens to be in an AoE effect, they are affected as normal. For me, this was simply the easiest method to employ stealth while making it effortless and easy to understand.

This may not work exactly the same way, in your game, though (depending on your game mechanics). Possibly stealth makes them untargetable to certain abilities. Anyways, I hope this helps spark some ideas for you.

Good luck,

It reminds me of an idea for a war game I posted. Instead of having a fog of war, you needed to spot units by moving adjacent to it before another unit could attack it. You could use a similar mechanic where you need to spot the ninja first and then act on them.

An idea I've had would be using something that is effectively a "margin of error" with a stealth character. Once a character goes into stealth mode, their token remains in place (or can only be moved at half speed or something like that). This token does not represent the actual location of the character, but instead represents a hunch of where the character "could" be. The stealth character can then appear anywhere within a certain range of that token at a later time, the range determined by the number of turns the stealth character was in stealth mode (perhaps 1/2 movement speed in range per turn in stealth). Kind of like they went into stealth mode, moved slowly while remaining concealed, then appeared somewhere else. The opposing player doesn't know exactly where they went, but they have an idea of where he might possibly be. When revealing the stealth character, the player doing so needs to count out the movement that the stealth character took while they were in stealth mode in a legal way (accounting for walls, obstacles, barriers, hazards, etc).

Other characters might have the ability to spot stealth characters, forcing the player to reveal a stealth character earlier than intended, or in a more limited range from the current location of the stealth character token, or not allowing the stealth character to appear within x number of squares of that character (can't be snuck up on).