Spider Plan

Weeks ago, I promised to work up what the Spider Siege board game looks like from the perspective of the spider player. It’s got to be different from the human players, right?

While those two-legged meatbags scurry across the board trying to gobble up resources like iron, food, and population in order to create and maintain their armies, their eight-legged adversaries are ignoring such logistics and simply conquering the realm. Right?

Um. Yes?

I’ll be honest. After spending more time than I’d like to admit pondering the spider-side of the game, I’m not entirely satisfied with what I’ve come up with. But it’s better to have something you can test (even if it’s not perfect) than to spend still more time coming up with something you think is perfect (because it’s not).

So ready or not, I’m pulling the trigger on this spider-plan.

Spider Cards

While human players draw resource cards for each of their resource spaces, the spider player draws spider cards for each space the spiders occupy. (This encourages you, as the spider player, to spread your units out as much as you can.)

Spider cards have up to three bits of information on them:

• Power Value
• Magic Value
• Spider Type

I’m thinking they always a Power value (probably 1-3), but the others don’t show up on every card.

Spider Actions

Like human players, the spider player can spend cards from hand to pay for the actions listed on his or her command sheet. Unlike human players, those actions are more restricted in terms of where they can take place. New recruits, for example, need to enter play where you have a nest, and new nests can only be spawned where you have a minimum of three units.

Here, check it out:

Hmm. Actually… this should work. It’s close enough to the human player experience that it doesn’t seem completely disconnected, but different enough to seem like its own thing. I feel better about it now than I did when I started writing it up.

Not to jinx it, but we might be ready to prototype this game.