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Join me on my continuing multi-part series (First-Time Designer) as we attempt to turn our jumble of half-conceived brain sparks into our first fully functioning board game.
Part Two - Mods and Monsters (and Martin)
I always knew Martin would come through. I saw him as someone who was able to really dissect games and appeared to understand the systems in far more detail than I did.
We spent a couple of hours bouncing ideas back and forth and coming to some sort of middle ground of understanding. It was a really cool experience, creating something out of thin air. It was a bit like ‘idea tennis’, where I’d think of something and Martin would unpick it or present his own adaptation. It felt good to start something as too many ideas remain…just that.
I left Martin’s house exuberant and optimistic. I also felt a quiet hope that this might become a lifeline for Martin, out of the doldrums of his current employ. He’s wasted there…
Over the next week our brains were working overtime. The podcasts I regularly listened to were just not getting heard. I tried, but after using that ‘skip back 30 seconds’ button multiple times, I gave up and just allowed the ideas to come through.
We thought about how the core mechanics would work. How do we ‘build’ the robots (or ‘Jaeger’ as we started calling them) during the game? How would the combat play out as we defended our world against the rampaging Kaiju? How would they be represented?
I knew that I wanted dice and dice manipulation in there as I like mitigated randomness. I was also convinced there can be a lot of enjoyment in rolling a handful of dice and then thinking about which ones you would like to modify.
We started thinking about the maths of the dice rolled versus the monster health. I didn’t expect to get this right without a lot of trial and error and any sort of arithmetic causes my brain to short-circuit. I generally went with the average dice rolls of the average dice we planned to use. As numbers are a bit of a mystery to me I enlisted my maths-y friend Callum to help with this. He was excited to be involved and worked on a dice mechanic hierarchy and ran some algorithms. It probably involved a lot of bead-sliding and montages.
We envisaged the Kaiju attacking by land, air and sea and we thought it would be cool if the robots reflected that in some way. What if, say, a sea robot was specifically equipped to deal with a sea Kaiju? What if there was a disadvantage if you fought ‘against type’?
We played with some names. If maths is my nemesis then grammar is my sidekick. In the same way that people like fiddling with numbers, I quite enjoy mucking about with words so thinking up a title seemed a fun distraction. We accepted Kaijukazi just wasn’t sitting right and we needed an alternative. It brought up images of a deliberate Japanese suicide and, if you think a bit, a place where you poo. We figured we would have to revisit this at some point...as fun as Jaeger Bomb was.
We considered a system of upgrading the meeples so they have bonuses on placements like in Manhattan Project.
We had a little nag that we’d have to look at too: what if a player fought a monster and got royally screwed? They would then spend several rounds building the robot again; giving rise to a ‘runaway leader’. A concept of a scrap yard came up where destroyed limbs could be purchased for cheap, as a way of getting beleaguered players back in the game.
Martin advised we should have a look into games like Level 7 (Invasion) regarding what the board might look like. We also thought about how the Kaiju might make their way across the board (world). Random movement? No, that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Appear out of nowhere? Not sure on that.
When I feel uncertain about what to do next, I like to involve others who, most likely, know more than I do. It was time to draw on our social networks.