Welcome back to the Think Tank log. I’ve been meaning to return to this since about a week ago, but any spare time I had was spent doing battle with a plugged floor drain in the basement. When I broke down and hired a professional, he spent five hours pulling something like five pounds of tree roots out of my sewer pipe.
One the one hand, it cost me over $400. On the other, I no longer felt like a loser for being unable to clear the clog myself.
Anyway… Brains in Tanks!
After the first iteration let me a little cold, I decided to change the card part of the game:
- You have a hand of 7 cards.
- At the beginning of the round, you may play as many as you want. Again, you can assign multiple cards to a single tank if you wish. And again, any tank left unassigned is given a random card from the deck.
- You don’t draw cards automatically. Instead, you have to skip your turn (and not activate any tanks) to discard whatever you want from your hand, then draw back up to 7 cards.
In order to make it matter, in my little one-player prototype, that you’re skipping a turn, I put three enemy tanks on the board and moved them each one space closer to my side each round. If they reached my side of the board, I would lose.
And while I had been able to mostly keep track of which tank corresponded to which card slot, for this iteration I cut up some labels, and labeled the tanks 1-5. That made things easier.
The results? The game was much more satisfying to play. Working from a larger hand, I was able to better guide my tanks, while paying the price (with random moves) for ignoring some of them. Now I just had to try it with two players.
Iteration Three: Doubling the Number of Players
For a two-player game, I set up both sides of the board symmetrically. Each side got five tanks and one HQ; the object of the game is destroy your opponent’s HQ (since that’s where the master brain lives, of course). And I threw some terrain in the middle, so the tanks have something to steer around.
An HQ takes 5 damage to kill. And I figured out what the “three stars showing on your cards” does: it causes “brain strain” and gives your HQ a damage. Suddenly, you really don’t want to be playing random cards if you don’t have to.
With two players, it now matters who goes first. And it matters when you allocate your cards, since the other players will know which of your tanks are on random auto-pilot.
To keep it as simple and fair as I could, I came up with this initiative system and turn sequence:
- Randomly choose a first player at the beginning of the game.
- At the beginning of the round, the first player allocates all his cards (including the random ones from the deck).
- Going clockwise, each player does the same.
- Once the cards are allocated, the game round begins. The first player chooses and activates one of his tanks, revealing and executing the tank’s card or cards.
- Going clockwise, each player does the same.
- Play continues until all players have activated all their tanks.
- The round is over, the activated cards are discarded, and a new round begins. The role of first player passes clockwise to the next player.
I’m not thrilled with this. For one thing, having players take turns allocating cards means there can be downtime. You sit there twiddling your thumbs, waiting for me to decide whether to play two cards on Tank 3, or three cards on Tank 2.
For another, I’m not sure when or how to declare that you’re skipping your turn to draw cards. If you do it during the allocation phase, then your opponents can take advantage of that knowledge by either attacking or skipping their own turns. (This is how I played it.) A better idea might be to declare it at your first activation – just discard all your cards from the board and announce you’re refreshing.
But it works. It worked, when I played it. And even though I was just playing by myself, it was still pretty fun.
What’s next? I think it’s time to test it out with another player. Because as brilliant as I am, I’m as blind to my design flaws as the next guy, and I need someone else to help point them out.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
