In today’s episode of “Turning Spider Siege into a Real Game,” we’ll be looking at the intersection of board resources, unit value, and econom — wait! Where are you going? I promise, it’s not nearly as dull or confusing as I’m making it sound.
Okay, let’s try this again.
This is a war game, right? With different types of units, some of which are better than others. Better units should “cost more,” but since we don’t have a universal currency in the game, it’s going to take a little brain-work to figure out how that’s going to function.
Let’s start by looking at how to “pay for stuff,” i.e., resources on the board.
Rare resources are more valuable than those that are more common. (That’s the “supply” part of the classic “supply and demand” gimmick.)
As we established earlier, our rarities look like this:
- Food is the most common resource, since it’s produced by Fields, of which there are 15 on the board.
- Population is #2, with 12 Villages on the board.
- Metal is third most common, with 9 Mines.
- Milk of the Earth is the rarest resources, bubbling up from just 6 Milk Caves.
I’m going to remove Food from the equation since it’s mainly spent on moving dudes, not making dudes.
So ignoring Food and going strictly on scarcity, our resource values look like this:
- Population is worth 1 point.
- Metal is worth 2 points.
- Milk is worth 3 points.
“Um… points?” you may ask. “Why are you adding yet another resource, on top of the stuff on the board?
“Because we need to have a universal currency,” I answer. “This way, we can balance units and game effects on one scale across the whole game. And yeah, it might look like it’s just added complication right now, but this is the sausage-making part. The players won’t see this messy underside; they’ll just see a bunch of balanced units that cost varying amounts of Population, Metal, and Milk.”
“Ah,” you may say, still skeptical. “So different units cost different numbers of points?”
“Exactly.”
You may nod, letting it sink in.
“So what do these units look like?” you may ask. “What do we get for our points’ worth of resource?”
I glance at my watch and grimace. “We’re out of time today, but I’ll totally show you if you stick around for the next blog entry.”
