Combat Design of a Battle Royale Boardgame – 1

The inspiration

I never though of myself designing a Battle Royale game, since it is a trend that I do not like that much. But the thing is we, as designers, has to give a try to everything and, more important, think about what our players like. And now, Battle Royales are a global trend.

So, as these subgenre it is a bit dull to me and it consider that can be far exploited, I decided to inspired myself in other battle royale themes as seen in Hunger Games where environment plays a huge roll in strategy and success of each player. It might be that videogames do not aim to these mechanics due to the casual public or the extra work that means have rich environment interactions and emergent gameplay. BUT, my project is a board game, so it does not have those constrains… Or yes?

The constrains

In deed, it got some of them. When it came to define the essence of the game, we (yes, after designing the combat system, I team up with my wife and a friend of mine, so from now on, it will be ‘We’), the team, run into defining the main premises for the game. These are the next:

• Mid-core audience: we thought it will be great have anyone playing the game and, for that purpose, we pick (after doing some research) a mithologic theme (known by most of people were previous knowledge can align with player’s expectations and game mechanics). Of course, an easy to pick combat system was necessary.
• Soft combat system: we want a deep combat experience but for a mid-core audience. Something easy to pick in the very first game.
• Replayability: games should be different and our living environment full of surprising events and the customizable champs supports that.

These are some of the constrains or premises we auto-imposed for the project and, mainly, to shape the main experience of the game.

The experience

“Fierce fights in a hostile environment”.

When it comes to design, I like to write down the experience I want to my audience feel while playing. It is very useful to me to read it from time to time so as to do not lose sight of the goal.

The Core

Well, having this in mind, let’s talk about design. Our core is fighting, and fighting is done through a combat system. This has to be easy to pick, but deep. And we want fierce battles among powerful beings, as Gods. So, player mush feel powerful. What is fierce? Something with unexpected result, intense… How is a Jason Bourne fight? There are close fights, really cool moves, use of the any kind of stuff around, great combos…

Then, after taking a look to some great combat in movies and videogames I wanted to make this experience playable in a easy way. I came up with the idea of creating that feeling with the ‘combo system’. This system empower player to unleash his fury over the enemies by chaining certain amount of combos; these can be done by throwing and matching dices by gathering consecutive and equal numbers. Easy peasy. I don’t really feel that it is necessary going over all the detaills of the systems since it is not the purpose of the article, but to show the experience as players.

First map prototype and combat ever

Those matched dices as combos will now be countered by the defender (the player being attacked). Let’s imagine that he got 1 combo less than attacker. So, defender will get 1 wound as a result of having 1 combo less. And that’s it!

Of course, there is more. It just not stop here. Equal combos let you throw again! Characters got a ‘Reaction’ attribute, which let you reroll as many dices as much ‘Reaction’ you got each turn. This means, more throws. More expectation, more dice-matching and taking interesting decisions embebed in the core system.

Blue wins with 9 combos

Players, in early testing sessions, was crazy about having several dices and throwing them at the same time.

1. First, they rush to gather the pool of dices (attak/def pool dice = attack or def. attribute from character + gear + possible passive skills called ‘Roles’  that we will discuss later on).
2. They get ready to throw a torrent of damage; THEY ARE SO EAGER. That feeling of power is seen in their faces. They seem really passionate about matching dices and looking for best combo, since each combo has its own particularities, as we seen.
3. Then, they started to looking for matches, fiddling over the dices and matching them; putting appart those which does not have any use and babling how many dices they got for next throw.

There, we think that the core system excels beacuse its simplicity and the ‘control’ over the randomness, shapping a positive result from its own luck, by matching pairs and ladders.

Than you for the reading, I will continue deconstructing our combat system talking in a second post about more peripherical elements as environment and skills, which will take advantage of the former.