This is a board game that focuses on player elimination with two people going head to head in a battle of spells and magic. The objective is to destroy your opponents walls and get a direct hit on them, reducing their hit points to 0. The game is played on a 4 by 10 board with two character pieces, a deck of cards, and two dice. The first time I played this game I had a clear vision as to what kind of game I wanted to make. I really enjoyed the Megaman Battle Network series, which pit two opponents on a grid against each other. What I did not foresee was the just how difficult it would be to balance all the different parts of the game. Each player would place 4 cards face up on their side of the field to act as their walls. The walls had hit points equal to their cost(Ex. Jack of Hearts has 11HP). Then each player would draw 5 cards which acted as the spells a player could cast. The four suites formed the strengths and weaknesses. Hearts beat Clover, Clover beat Spade, Spade beat Diamond, and Diamond beat Hearts. So Hearts does double damage to Spade and half damage to Diamond. Each turn a player could choose to move and attack, or set up a wall only if they had less than four walls. Each turn a player would roll the two dice and that would determine the distance a spell could travel in a straight line. We decided that rolls greater than 9 would equate to more movement for the player and all leftover points were used to determine the distance of the spells. A spell that hit a wall can only destroy it. Hit points are not deducted. If a player casts a spell on their opponent, that player can stop the attack by playing the weakness of the spell that was cast on them(Ex. 5 of Hearts is stopped by 3 of Diamond, because Hearts is weak to Diamond and 3 times 2 is greater than 5). All these rules were defined on the first day of playing this game. We didn't have much of a chance to iterate through and actually play multiple games all the way through.
Over the next weekend, I sat down and played this game with my family. My mother definitely had the hardest time understanding the rules, but after watching my brother and I play she was able to play my dad and held her own fairly well. The rules for the game seemed to be holding up pretty well, but I decided that the extra movement created by die roll was a bad mechanic. So instead I chose to allow those extra points to be saved and used as extra damage or distance on a later turn. This definitely changed the dynamic of the game, because you could choose to use the points instantly or save them and use a big spell on a later turn with more distance. This definitely played out good, but there were still some changes I wanted to test out when we played the game one more time. In class, I decided that the four walls each player had should be turned face down, so the other player doesn't know the strength or type of the wall he or she is attacking. This gave the game an element of surprise which I liked. I also decided that the hand should be limited to 3 cards and not automatically be replenished. Instead a player would have to spend action points to draw a card. I also gave a player the option to move a wall, given that they possessed enough action points. So the way the action points work, is that a player rolls two dice and that is the number of action points they have this turn. Each action has a cost associated with it, movement costs 2, attacking costs 3, drawing a card costs 3, and moving a wall costs 4. A player can do as many of the above actions as long as they don't overspend and any leftover points are gone. This made the game slightly more strategic and gave players the opportunity to plan out turns, instead of having to choose one or the other. The game at the beginning had a very solid base and with some tweaking it definitely became quite entertaining, but alas it still needs work and perhaps a complete revamp of the system itself. I believe this game functions much better as video game and I do plan on making this into a full video game with a real-time battle system.
This is a board game that focuses on player elimination with two people going head to head in a battle of spells and magic. The objective is to destroy your opponents walls and get a direct hit on them, reducing their hit points to 0. The game is played on a 4 by 10 board with two character pieces, a deck of cards, and two dice. The first time I played this game I had a clear vision as to what kind of game I wanted to make. I really enjoyed the Megaman Battle Network series, which pit two opponents on a grid against each other. What I did not foresee was the just how difficult it would be to balance all the different parts of the game. Each player would place 4 cards face up on their side of the field to act as their walls. The walls had hit points equal to their cost(Ex. Jack of Hearts has 11HP). Then each player would draw 5 cards which acted as the spells a player could cast. The four suites formed the strengths and weaknesses. Hearts beat Clover, Clover beat Spade, Spade beat Diamond, and Diamond beat Hearts. So Hearts does double damage to Spade and half damage to Diamond. Each turn a player could choose to move and attack, or set up a wall only if they had less than four walls. Each turn a player would roll the two dice and that would determine the distance a spell could travel in a straight line. We decided that rolls greater than 9 would equate to more movement for the player and all leftover points were used to determine the distance of the spells. A spell that hit a wall can only destroy it. Hit points are not deducted. If a player casts a spell on their opponent, that player can stop the attack by playing the weakness of the spell that was cast on them(Ex. 5 of Hearts is stopped by 3 of Diamond, because Hearts is weak to Diamond and 3 times 2 is greater than 5). All these rules were defined on the first day of playing this game. We didn't have much of a chance to iterate through and actually play multiple games all the way through.
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