As I mentioned previously, I’m giving away one of the prototypes I had printed for Mechanisms. I’m going to draw for that prize on June the 30th, and I thought I’d show off the components in advance.
If you’re interested, join the Perfect Minute Games Discord server and react to the giveaway announcement (check the pinned posts in the #mechanisms-beta channel) for a chance to win!
As part of the process of developing the game that has become Mechanisms, I built a bunch of prototypes. There’s the Tabletop Simulator mod, and a couple of versions on Screentop.gg, and I’m partway through a Tabletop Playground version for Protospiel Online.
But it’s never really a tabletop game until you have cards and chonky bits in your grubby little hands, is it? So I made a Print and Play, which has now had enough printing and playing done that I’m comfortable showing it to you. I recommend the 77mm components, but the 60mm ones are there if you have a small table or just prefer smaller cards and tiles in general.
A good friend of mine is even helping me test setting up a Cricut design so that I don’t have to cut 199 components out by hand every time (You don’t either, by the way – the P&P is organized so you can just cut out what you need as you need it) (but it’s still a lot of cutting).
In addition to the P&P version, I went ahead and laid out and ordered copies from two online game prototyping services – The Game Crafter and AdMagic’s Print and Play. I’m very interested to see how the two compare, but at the end of the day I don’t think I’ll need both on hand.
It occurred to me today that maybe someone might want one, even if it’s just to start the wood furnace (kidding – please don’t burn my baby!). So I’ve decided that once I have had a chance to look both of them over, I’ll give one of the two away, as a small thank you to you folks who’ve supported me as I’ve been figuring out this design.
I expect I’ll have the two copies in hand sometime in June, after which I’ll draw for a winner. Depending on interest levels, I might even scrounge up a few other goodies to give out as consolation prizes.
If you’re interested, join the Perfect Minute Games Discord server and react to the giveaway announcement (in the pinned posts in #mechanisms-beta) for a chance to win!
I’ve been designing a tabletop game for a while now, and with Protospiel Online coming up (https://protospiel.online/prototype-games/april-2022/mechanisms-entry-1921/ ), I’ve been focused on making sure I have ways to play the game.
Tonight marks one of the big ones – I’ve started to get a few requests for a way to play the game in person. I tried out The Game Crafter and Print and Play Studio, but for a one-off printing both spots want over $150CAD, which I’ll be ok with – it’s my baby after all – but I don’t want to suggest it as an option to friends and family.
Enter the Print and Play – this is an option that many games use prior to publishing, whether it be licensed or crowdfunded. And, of course, I had to try it myself…
So that’s it. If you’re interested in trying it out, feel free to send me an email or message me on Twitter.
My regular tabletop gaming group kindly agreed to try Thornwatch during our last session. I read through the rules when I received the game earlier this month, but this was the first time trying it out at the table.
I hadn’t punched out any of the pieces, so the first several minutes were spent just getting those out and sorted. There’s not a ton of information about how to use those until you’ve read through the rules, and when you do, there’s a fair bit of jumping back and forth to do. I don’t expect that’s usually a problem, as the rulebook is quite short, but I was using a PDF on my phone, so this was not ideal. I suspect we missed several important aspects of the game, so keep that in mind as you read this discussion.
The game board, enemies, and setup are dictated by the scene. The opening scene is usually chosen by the Judge – that was me, in this case – but I threw the options out to the table. We decided to play through May He Die in the Forest, which, for the uninitiated, is one of the suggested starting scenarios from the base set.
We had three players, and the group composition proved to be critical to party success. The players chose Greenheart (healer/support/melee), Sage (support/ranged), and Blade (melee/ranged). This seems to have been a spectacularly effective combination.
Setup is focused on the board. The scene dictates which tiles to use and how to put them together, which is a neat mechanic, but it isn’t the best gameplay experience. The art on the board tiles is blurry and complex, so it’s hard to match against the board setup as it’s shown on the scene card. It also means the board feels muddled. Sideways stairs and weird crystal columns beside a cozy hut in the woods give the whole thing a dreamy “unplace” feel. Maybe that’s your thing! Not mine, though.
There are also a lot of symbols to figure out, and we missed at least a couple of steps. This is also the point where the Judge role kicks in in earnest, which was unfortunate for me, as I hadn’t fully absorbed the gameplay yet. I didn’t know what to do with my pool of Ebb or how to decide where monsters should go.
In general the Judge role feels quite odd, at least in this kind of mechanics-heavy playtest. Your resources are tightly constrained, and there isn’t so much play space that you can make much happen with good tactical play. I’m not sure if there should be more options or if we missed something important in setup/gameplay, or if the Judge is just meant to be a lighter role than I’m used to.
The primary thing that the Judge has access to beyond the monsters themselves are the momentum track and the damage mechanics. There are two parts to this equation, the NPC damage mechanic and the player wounds mechanic.
The momentum track acts as both initiative and NPC damage. It’s an interesting system that can suffer badly when players aren’t rolling well, as it can be straight-up impossible to kill the bad guys for extended periods. There are other options for handling this situation – the Sage’s board control powers, for example – but success still frequently hinges critically on making the bad guys go away somehow.
The wound mechanic, on the other hand, seems badly under-tuned. There are 10 wound cards for each player, and the scene is lost when this collection is exhausted. If the party has a Greenheart, however, it’s hard to see how this could possibly pose an issue, as the Greenheart’s healing abilities are extremely potent. If you don’t kill the party in the first couple of turns, the Greenheart has a good chance of simply preventing any meaningful threat from wounds.
Speaking of under-tuned mechanics, the Judge’s ebb supply also feels a bit wanting. Player dice that show the @ (ebb) symbol supply one point of ebb, and deck reshuffles supply two. Perhaps my players were simply amazing from the get-go, but I was having trouble maintaining my supply, and that meant my monsters often lacked the Ebb-infused trait, which meant they were kind of pathetic, inflicting very little damage and succumbing quickly to focused attacks.
As you can tell, we focused on the mechanics over the roleplaying for this test. We did use Traits, but didn’t get a lot of value out of them in this session. They’re an interesting mechanic, but it eventually became clear that they make a lot more sense if you’re treating the game as much more of an RPG and much less of a boardgame.
That feels a little in opposition to how the game is actually built, as much of the focus is on the board, tokens, and mechanics, but the trait mechanic is simple enough that it doesn’t interfere with normal play, and it does encourage a small degree of roleplaying even in a mechanics test.
Overall, Thornwatch is an interesting game, and one I’d like to give a second go with more involved roleplaying at the table, but also one I currently feel is going to need some house rules to really “finish” the play experience. I hope to stand corrected on that at some point.
Perfect Minute Games is primarily focused on video games, but one of the fun secrets about game design is that paper is always an option for prototyping mechanics. And if you can prototype on paper, you can implement the whole thing on paper.
(Well, sort of. I found out quickly that there are hard limits on how much paper prototyping you can do with a game like Contension without also building the dynamic experience in code!)
The new project, then: It’s a card game. Specifically, it’s a card game taking design notes from RPG-adjacent boardgames like Gloomhaven, Pathfinder Adventures, and Descent; from light RPGs like Fiasco and Thornwatch; from heavier but non-traditional RPGs like Fantasy Flight Games’ excellent Star Wars and Genesys systems and from the Fate RPG; and, finally, from some really interesting indie RPGs like Phoenix: Dawn Command, Ten Candles, and Tavern Tales.
The initial iteration of the game is focused on simple, purely card-driven mechanics and is playable as a regular game akin to Munchkin and other Expandable Card Games. I have, in parallel, been fleshing out an expansion that adds roleplaying elements.
As I’m not an artist, it all looks pretty terrible right now, especially given that there’s no built-in “setting” or “theme”. Please keep that in mind(!) when I’m a little further along and post some shots of the game and “cards” in action.
I haven’t decided whether I’ll establish a theme or setting to “ship” with the core game. At the moment, as with most of my initial designs, it’s mechanics-driven, and I think I can create something compelling without the need to tie it to a single setting.
I’d much rather have expansions (or “splats”, as some folks call ’em) that contribute their own unique mechanics and style sitting on top of the core game. But a lot of the interesting work for projects like this comes down to creating the worlds that players inhabit. So we’ll see.
