According to the message I preached at the IGDA meeting, the next step is to refine the core mechanics of the game.
As I sit down to do exactly that for Think Tank, I realize I skipped a step. Before you can refine, you must first define the core mechanics. You must examine your game idea and discover its beating heart.
The core mechanic for Think Tank is this: “Players play brain cards to control tanks on the board.”
Now, you could build on that heart a couple different ways. My original idea had the player choosing cards from his hand and using them to “program” his tanks’ actions. Thinking that such a system might be a bit slow, I considered doing away with “programming” and just having the player activate the tank immediately with the card (so more Memoir ’44 than RoboRally). I’ve also been thinking about forcing the player to use some random cards from the deck to activate his tanks, to add some chaos and luck-pressing, and to reinforce the theme that you’re not in direct control of these rolling death machines.
While I ponder these things, let’s take a look at the control panel, card deck, and the tanks themselves, all of which are central to the core mechanics.
- Your control panel is used to control your tanks on the board. There are five slots on the panel (each corresponding to one of your tanks), and probably a space to put damage tokens and other status markers.
- The deck of cards is made up of brain cards. Each card represents a brain that can control a tank. Some are excellent tank pilots, some are incompetent, and some are specialists (such as the brain that can shoot further, but can’t maneuver very well).
The players all play from the same deck of cards. When a tank is activated, what it does (or can do) is determined by the brain currently piloting it. After a tank is activated, its brain is discarded.
- The tanks each have a number (corresponding to its slot on the control panel). They also have a facing (that is, a direction in which they will move and shoot – I’m assuming a board with hexes on it) and some sort of armor value that tells you how many hits it takes to kill them. Eventually, they might have other stats (speed, damage, rate of fire), but let’s keep it simple for now.
When activated, a tank’s default action is to move one space forward and fire. The only way to do more (or less) than this is through the use of a brain card.
For the sake of testing the core mechanics, I’m saying that all tanks have an armor value of 5 (takes 5 hits to kill them), and fire by rolling a six-sided die. If your roll is equal to or greater than the range to the target, you hit.
Now I just have figure out exactly what the brain cards do (I’ve got some ideas), and I’ll be ready to start some iterative playtesting and refine these core mechanics.
Great game idea, and the name is one of those rare slam-dunks–how could it be anything else!!?
I like the concept of different brains that give different bonuses and even personalities. Could be a fun strategic element to try to decide when to switch from, say, “precise moving brain” to “berserk firing brain” (not actual names, of course 🙂
Depending on your board structure, using some area effect weapons could be really interesting to add in a little bit of forgiveness for not pointing exactly in the right direction (since you only have partial control over the crazy tanks, anyway!).
Thanks for sharing some of you design process!
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