I finally got a chance this weekend to prototype and playtest the core mechanics for Think Tank.
This would be a good time to mention something I hinted at during the IGDA meeting, namely:
Hardy’s First Law of Prototypes: If it looks good, you’ve spent too much time on it.
The theory here is that your first prototype is going to be bad, so there’s no sense it making it pretty; you’re just going to scrap it and redo it anyway.
There are a couple exceptions:
Exception 1: Unless your client needs it pretty before he’ll look at it.
Exception 2: Unless you’re making a game about tanks, and you have a copy of Memoir ’44 lying around, begging to be put to use.
Making the Prototype
Since I had a copy of Memoir lying around, full of tanks and featuring an attractive board full of hexes, I pulled that out to provide tanks and a board. It also provided terrain for the map, which I hadn’t thought of before, but was pretty obvious once all the pieces were laid out.
I decided to follow the First Law when it came to the control panel, and just play the cards on the table. I could keep track of which “slot” corresponded to which tank in my head.
As for the 100 cards, I just whipped up 20 of them, and printed them twice. I put them into a table in Word, then used the Mail Merge function to output them to a custom label (2″ x 2.5″), which let me put 20 on a page. I printed them on pink paper because I thought it would be more opaque thank white, so I couldn’t see through the “back of the card.” I was wrong, but realized it didn’t matter since I could just draw from the bottom of the deck. Mechanically, I kept the cards super-simple, with just a word or two on each telling what they did.
Grabbed a tin of dice from the game closet, and a notepad for taking notes, and I was all set up.
The First Iteration
The core rules I was testing were these:
- You have a hand of 5 cards.
- At the beginning of your turn, draw up to fill your hand.
- During your turn, assign up to three cards from your hand to up to three tanks. You may assign multiple cards to a single tank. (The multiple cards on a tank was a suggestion from Ryan on Saturday night. Thanks, Ryan!)
- Any tank without cards assigned to it is assigned a random card from the deck.
- You can activate your tanks in any order.
- When a tank is activated, it will Move (straight ahead one space) and Attack (straight ahead) by default. Depending on the card it gets, it might Move, Turn (one hex side) or Attack again – the player decides in which order to do these actions.
- Move and Turn actions are required to be executed, but the tank doesn’t have to Attack unless there is any enemy in range. (I might change my mind on this, but while “trying to control my chaotic tanks” is fun, “shooting my own tanks because I got unlucky” is not.)
- Some of the cards have stars on them. If you have three stars showing on your control panel, Something Bad happens. (Not sure what yet.) The idea is that the stars are mostly on the really good cards, so you don’t want to play too many of them, since you don’t know what stars the random cards may have.
- Tanks have 5 armor; 5 damage will kill them.
- To attack, roll a d6. If the total is equal to or greater than the range from the shooter to the target, give the target 1 damage. A roll of a “1” is always a miss. Tanks can only shoot straight ahead. Terrain and other tanks block line of sight.
Not that I had written any of this stuff down (the First Law refers to rules-writing too), but this is what I had in mind as I set up the playtest. Because I was focusing on the core mechanics, I decided to just do a one-player game. For an opponent, I tossed three enemy tanks on the far side of the board, and decided that destroying them was the goal of the playtest.
I played it for about 10 minutes. It was okay.
Remember, I was testing the core mechanic of playing cards to control tanks, with the added twist that some of the cards are random. The rest of mechanics hanging off that core (attacking, number of tanks, what actions are on the cards) didn’t really matter (though they seemed to be working fine).
I found that playing three of the five cards in my hand each turn felt a little unsatisfying. I didn’t want to play all five, since that would mean playing everything in your hand (not a lot of tactics there), and if you can hold cards back for a future turn, you can plan a little long-term strategy. And playing just one of the five would remove too much player control. I’d hoped that playing three would be a middle ground, but it still felt like I was playing everything I drew each turn. Meh.
Okay. Scrap it. Next iteration!
