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.