Blog Post 3: Paper Prototype

This game is like a watered-down chess played on a modular board. The main mechanic is to place down tiles to reach your opponent's king, while they try to counter it by blocking off your path, and vice versa.

Session 1

• On the very first game, we tried the tile placement mechanic without any pieces, just to see if the pieces were even necessary. The player would start from a single point on their side and try to work their way to the opponent's side of the board. The problem with that showed itself almost immediately:

• With no real mechanic to counter the wall, we decided try now with the pieces.
• The initial rules were as follows:
• 6x6 board
• 1 King
• 2 Scouts
• 3 Soldiers
• Scouts "discover" tiles.
• Soldiers recapture enemy tiles.
• The only killing allowed were soldiers killing the king to win the game.
• I don't remember if I had thought about this beforehand or if we hashed it out a bit during the game, but by the end of this first match it was established that a player can move multiple pieces during their turn, but each only one space.
• During the first game, we realized that after all the tiles had been placed on the board, the scouts were now functionally useless.
• Another problem was no killing meant that whoever started first had the better advantage.
• Also, we were still having some stalemate issues.
• The revisions we made were:
• The ability to reclaim tiles was transferred from the soldier to the scout.
• Soldiers now had the ability to kill scouts.
• The next game we played was a little rough because I wasn't yet used to thinking around soldiers that can kill, so I ended up losing a scout or two.

Session 2

• In this session I had a bit more difficulty explaining the rules.
• One rule I had to make clear was that that there was no diagonal movement in this game. My opponent's game had diagonal movement, hence the confusion.
• My opponent asked me questions about the king I hadn't thought about.
• Can the king move? Since I thought this would make the game slightly more strategic, I said yes.
• Can the king kill? I figured that might be too overpowered. No.
• At one point we reached a stalemate: all the scouts were dead and there wasn't enough of a path for our  soldiers to get to each other's kings.

• To resolve this, I tried a something I had been thinking about for a while: changing the ratio of soldiers and scouts.
• Now there were 3 scouts and 2 soldiers per team.
• This change helped immensely, as the following game we played went on for longer and allowed for more thoughtful strategy.

Session 3

• This session I played with my brother. During the game he said he had a bit of experience with chess, so the mechanics of the game were pretty easy to explain.
• We only played one round, and it went on for the longest out of all my play sessions. This is good, as I want the game to take enough time that there's room for power shifts, while at the same time not being a 4-hour waiting game.
• He caught onto the dynamics very quick, and was very aware of the placement of his scouts in relation to my soldiers.
• He also picked up on the "sacrifice a scout so the soldier behind it can move next to the king" strategy all on his own.
• Only one question came up during the session: if a soldier kills, can it still move?
• I imagined the difference between "yes" and "no" was negligible, but you never know, so I just picked yes to see how that would play.
• This is one of those problems that you can only find the answer to by playing the "yes" path a bunch of times, playing the "no" path a bunch of times, and seeing how they compare.
• Needless to say, I haven't tested it enough to know the answer.
• Also, I got a lot of pictures out of this session. I ended up snapping one every 4 turns or so.

First 4 turns. (I'm black, he's white.)

Both sides meet.

Wall on the bottom but a scout sneaking through on top.

Many turns later. He's pushed forward on the bottom but now I have his king surrounded.

Chasing the king to the top. As you can see he's down one scout.

Cordoned off the king. He has three spaces to move the king, while I only have two soldiers. If that continues, he can jump around almost indefinitely to avoid my soldiers.

I use a scout to take away one of those spaces. At this point I've essentially won, and we call it game.

Blog Post 2: Board Game Session Report

Our group played Betrayal at House on the Hill. The game has two phases; in the first phase, players explore a house by wandering into unknown rooms and drawing room tiles from a stack. Room tiles can hold Item, Event, or Omen cards. If a player draws an Omen card, they must make a Haunt Roll-- a roll of 6 dice. (Dice in this game only have 0, 1, or 2 points.) If the number rolled is greater or equal to all the omen cards drawn during this game, you're safe. But if it's lower, the game shifts into the second phase.

In the second phase, depending on what the omen card was and where it was drawn, the players now have to deal with one of the game's 50 scenarios. In this phase, one player is revealed to be the traitor (nobody knows who the traitor will be until the second phase, not even the traitor), and now has a secret objective to meet. The remaining players must also meet their own secret objective.

My character's stats. Each player has 4 stat categories that can raise or lower based on various events.

The first play. Speed determines how many tiles you can move in a turn. If a room makes you draw a card, though, your movement ends there.

• On my first turn, I wandered into the dining room. There I found a girl, who boosted my knowledge and sanity, and I then made a successful Haunt Roll.

• A turn or two later, I found myself in the graveyard. There I drew an oddly fitting funeral card, and soon I had visions of myself in the casket. Fortunately I saw through them (sanity roll), and ended up gaining 1 sanity as a result.

• At one point in the game, somebody finds a chapel room, which allows everyone to regain 1 sanity point per game. Since I have been the most sane person this whole game, I don't really need to go there. Everyone else, though, is dangerously low on sanity, and all rush there immediately.

• As time goes on I notice we've been extremely lucky this game. All of my encounters so far have used only sanity checks. Andre, who has the fastest character, has been hitting a lot of speed checks. Jerika has just been finding a lot of items. We’ve also been dodging a lot of haunt rolls. (I forget the exact number, but I believe we made it up to 7 omen cards before finally losing the roll.)

• I travel upstairs and find the Mystic Elevator, which is a sort of free-floating room that allows me to connect to any unexplored doorway. The destination floor is decided by a roll.

• I end up in the basement.

• Mind you, I'm actually pretty excited by this. There are no stairs into the basement, which means 2 things:

1. At this point in the game, there's no way in or out except for the Mystic Elevator. There's something cool about having my own secret space.
2. I can grab items without anyone bothering me. Not that they'd bother me anyway, I mean, we're all on the same team... right?

• It doesn't take long for the secret adventure to be cut short, though. Two rooms into the basement, I find a Mask. I make a Haunt Roll. I fail a Haunt Roll.

Shit.

• Because I found the Mask in the Catacombs, we are assigned scenario #25: Voodoo.
• Except Maaike just played that scenario not to long ago. Because of this, we decide to skip to the next page, #26: Pay the Piper.
• Devon is found to be the traitor. We send her out with the Traitor's Tome while we read our own Secrets of Survival
• A few minutes into reading the objective, I realize that we possibly just jumped to a scenario that assumes there are cards or rooms in play that actually aren't. Maiike double-checks the requirements and assures me it's fine. (We later learn that the rules actually include a proper method for choosing another scenario if there are repeats.)
• Everyone comes back and the second phase begins.
• Scenario 26 involves one person controlling twice as many rats as there are players. Because there's a bucketful of tokens, Maiike decides it easier to just grab the first 10 monster tokens instead of wasting time fishing for rats.

Ah yes, the tentacle rat.

• We start killing rats. They're pretty weak.
• About halfway into her rat stock, Devon realizes that she can, technically, use her Adrenaline Shot (which allows you to add 4 or so points to a roll) on her rats. 
• Andre goes in to a room to fight two rats at once. This is the most tense part of the second phase.
• Unfortunately, the adrenaline doesn't help. A lot of the dice end up blank.

• As we continue to massacre the rats, the traitor tries completing her objective, which is to find the pentagram room and perform a ritual in it. She explores as much of the ground floor as she can.
• Soon, however, all the ground tiles are dispensed--and the pentagram room is among none of them (which means it's either in the basement or the second floor).
• Not long after that, though, all the rats are disposed of, and the survivors successfully escape the creepy rat house.