I’m working on a new game. It’s called “Robot Drop” (for now) and, while you might think it sounds like a typical “dudes fighting on a board” game, it’s actually an exploration of temporal and tactical game play space using… dudes. On a board. Who are… um. Fighting.
Okay, it’s not exactly smashing genre boundaries, but it does have some cool new mechanics that I think are different enough to make it interesting.
Let’s check out one of the playing pieces.
The key element here is the unit’s Timer value. When the unit comes into play, its timer is set to that stat. At the end of each turn, the timer “counts down.” When it hits zero, the unit attacks, dealing damage equal to its Attack value.
Clever, eh?
What’s not so clever, is that each unit has six numbers on it.
Oh, sure, six numbers is nothing on a chit for a war game like Delta Commandos Squad Forward Assault Leader, but I’m targeting a more general audience; an audience (like myself) that would be a little freaked out by so many numbers on a playing piece.
Clearly, the solution here is to make most of these numbers their default value.
For example, Speed will almost always be 2. Let’s just say “units can move two spaces” in the rules, thus making it the default, and remove the stat from the unit.
Shields? Default to zero. Range? I’m going to get brave and give everything infinite range, since the board really isn’t that big. As for Attack…
It’s no coincidence that Timer and Attack are the same value. If you have to wait five turns for your attack to go off, it should be pretty powerful — and in this game, 5 damage is enough to destroy most units.
So let’s make the Attack value default to being the same value as the Timer.
Let’s see how it looks now:
Ah, that’s much cleaner!
What’s more, you’ll note we now have space for text or icons or whatever on the playing piece. So if we want to deviate from the default (“Shields 3” for example, or “Speed +2”) we can do that where necessary without cluttering up all the other units.
So is the game any good? I’m just printing up a prototype right now, so we’ll find out together in the days to come!
