Game Mechanics Overview

I've finally finished my first run of posts on the game design. To wrap it all up (and provide a TLDR version) here's a quick summary of each game mechanic with links to the full articles. These summaries are quite brief - if you have a question or want a more in-depth writeup, click the links for the full versions. And if you're new to the blog, click the Introduction and Overview links above for more information.

• Heat, Endurance, Health: your three core resources. You lose heat every night in the cold; you lose endurance if you have no heat left, and you can also spend it to move more or to re-roll; and you lose health if you have no heat or endurance left. There are other ways to lose endurance and health directly. If you run out of health, you fall unconscious and return to town.
• The Board: divided into three zones - green, blue, and black - with the spaces of each zone randomized at the start of the game. The black zone is the north end, and the zones get progressively more dangerous as you move north. There are a few unique locations in each zone with special encounters and rules.
• Enemies: hostile bandits and monsters (called coldbringers) wander the board - bandits move randomly, coldbringers move towards town. If you lose a fight with a bandit you discard items; if you lose a fight with a coldbringer you lose heat.
• Skills: the conflict resolution mechanic. Roll a 20-sided die and add your skill modifier. If the result is equal to or higher than the difficulty score, you succeed. There are 5 skills, each of which can be added to with items or other bonuses: combat, evasion, perception, stealth, and survival.
• Encounters: when you end your movement on a board space, you draw an encounter card and do what it says. Usually this means rolling a skill check. Some encounters give you a benefit on success, some a penalty on failure, and some provide both.
• Items: give you various types of bonuses - increase a skill modifier, resistance to a damage type, special abilities, etc. Obtained in encounters or by buying from traders.
• Winning and Losing: you win by rescuing all the people from the coldbringer lairs by working together on difficult skill checks. You lose if everyone dies (permanent death occurs if coldbringers have destroyed the town and you hit 0 health).

And that's all for now. I'll try to work on playtesting, and I should have news on a logo very soon. Exciting!

Design & Inspiration: Winning, Losing, and Player Interaction

To close out my posts on game mechanics, now I'll finally talk about how you win and how you lose!

Design & Inspiration: Items

I've mentioned items in the last two posts with the basics on how they interact with skill checks and one of the ways to get them. Here's the full treatment.

Design & Inspiration: Encounters

Now that I've posted a quick overview of the board concept, it's time to talk about what'll happen on that board.

Um

So uh... maybe I have too many item cards.

I never gave any thought to the number of item cards I should have. I can probably cut it down a lot when I work on balancing the frequency of the various items. On the other hand, I already see gaps that I'll need to fill with new items (for example, there currently aren't any that grant a stealth bonus).

I wonder what other important stuff I haven't thought about yet. This is what revisions and playtesting are for.

Design & Inspiration: Skills

Continuing the introduction to game mechanics, today I'll talk about skills!

Design & Inspiration: Enemies

North is a cooperative game - the players work together to attain their goal. To make the game dramatic, I need something to get in the players' way. The players won't be the only ones moving around the board! I have two enemy types in mind: bandits and coldbringers. 

Design & Inspiration: Heat, Endurance, Health

Heat, endurance, and health are the core representations of a player's vitality in North. I've already mentioned these in an earlier post, but I figure I should make sure everything is explicit, since most of the other game mechanics key off of these attributes.

Design & Inspiration: The Board

If I'm making a board game, I'll need a board!

The Plan

I don't want to get ahead of myself here and dive right into the details without a plan. So here is THE PLAN:

Step 1: basic concept.

Already done, since this is an idea I've had since forever. In fact, I've already posted about it. Hooray, I'm making progress!

Premise & Overview

So yeah, I'm making a board game. Of course, I can't just dive right in and start talking mechanics - a game needs a reason to play, some kind of context or story for what you're doing and why you're doing it. As I continue to work on the game I'm sure this description will evolve, but this is the core I'm starting with. 

In North, the world is facing an ice age which is slowly descending from (you guessed it) the north. As the cold and snow creep south, contact is being lost with the people and cities enveloped by the ice.

A lot of people have disappeared. At first it was thought they stayed behind and were buried in the snow or froze to death, but now reports are coming in that people are simply getting up and walking north, into the darkness. There are also rumours of chilling monsters moving south, but that's ridiculous... isn't it?

Introduction

North is a game concept I've been kicking around for quite a while now.

The idea started life as a video game concept, since I'm a huge fan of video games (I've been reviewing a game per week for almost two years over at Post-Launch Reviews). I thought up all the game mechanics, the setting, and even started on some basic concept art to establish the tone of the setting and the appearance of the playable character and the enemies. 

When I tried to get started on the project, I came to a very important realization: I don't know how to make a video game. 

That's a pretty big obstacle, considering that I was picturing something fairly complex. I have thousands of hours of play time across hundreds of games, so I think I have a pretty good picture of what kind of mechanics I could use to build a fun game. The problem is that none of that knowledge or experience tells me anything about programming.

So I reconsidered. There are other kinds of games. Board games, for example.

I don't have nearly as much experience with board games as I do with video games. I've played Dungeons & Dragons for 10 years, but that's a very different kind of thing (which I also write about somewhat infrequently at D4sign). It's only relatively recently - the last couple of years - that I've been introduced to "good" games, the kind the enthusiasts play and talk about. Big names like Settlers of Catan and Dominion (my personal favourite), co-op games like Pandemic and Arkham Horror, and sillier but well thought out games like Munchkin. But I really love these games, and I thought maybe North could work as a board game.

As I said, I don't know that much about board games, but the change of type gives me a distinct advantage: I don't need to know programming or use special software to build a board game. I can simply start writing rules and cutting out a board and game pieces to experiment with. I can share the material, run playtests, collect feedback, and refine the design until I have something that works.

With this blog I'll be documenting my foray into board game design. I'm not going into this with any expectations - I know that it's very hard for board games to make a profit, and that there are an awful lot of them already. I just want to make something cool that works, and actually do something with one of these concepts I've been kicking around since forever.  If things go really well maybe I'll look into a Kickstarter campaign, but that's crossing over into marketing and publicity and production, which, like game programming, are topics I know nothing about. So as of now, that's just a far-off maybe, to be ignored until I already have a solid game.

As I write this I'm taking a break from writing out game cards for a... I don't know, pre-pre-pre alpha. I'm not completely settled on anything yet, I'm still conceptualizing and playing with ideas. I'm starting with a simple base and I plan to add complexity and variety when I have the core somewhat stable.

So, early posts on this blog will talk about basic design goals: the story, basic core mechanics, the board, sources of inspiration, and stuff like that. As I start to nail things down I'll go into more detail about how things work specifically, and I'll start solo playtesting and put down some thoughts on how things are going.

Whether or not anything ever comes out of this, it'll be a  fun project that will teach me more about board games, game design, and the development and testing processes. Follow along as I explore the process!