“I’m gonna wait til the midnight hour…”

Role-playing survival game is willing to take risks

By  Feb 24th, 2009 8:09 am UTC

Well this is certainly a weird time to be posting. Anyway work is going… pretty much like work. I’m attempting to get my Left 4 Dead fix in at 1:30 in the morning which hasn’t been going too well. I do know some people who are completely out of my time zone which has made getting a game somewhat easier.

Anyway I got a problem for all the board game players out there. Looking over my design document for my game, most of my rules and mechanics can easily be translated from playable on the pc, to playable on a board. Except for one, knowing where the monster is for the Victor player. Obviously both players are viewing the board at the same time and telling the Victor player to look away while the monster is moving works. However what happens when the monster is done moving, the player can’t leave the piece on the board as Victor will know where he is and ruin the use of the security check feature.

Now I have a few ideas on the backburner for this problem but I would really like to hear from players of the genre who have dealt with this problem before or have any solutions of their own to contribute. I just don’t want my big epiphany idea to be something that someone came up with 10 years ago as a solution. Well, the massive caffeine boost I took to stay up is starting to fade so I’m going to log off here and get some shut eye.

Josh

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  • The boardgame “Fury of Dracula” I believe keeps track of Dracula’s location by having a deck of cards representing all locations in the game from which the player draws the one where their playing piece is for that turn (or something along those lines). You could do something like that, maybe. Or the Frankenstein player could just keep track of it on a piece of upside down paper which is placed upside down under the board between the two players (under one side of the board, with a corner sticking out or something). This makes the player’s location concrete – there is a record of where they are – and they are unable to cheat and change it halfway through their turn if the Victor player finds them.

  • Check out Scotland Yard if you get a chance. It’s rather similar to Fury of Dracula. There are 4 or 5 detectives trying to find Mr. X on a map of London, with different numbered “nodes” that players (including Mr. X) can move to. Each node is connected to other nodes with a combination of taxi, bus, and subway routes. Mr. X is hidden for most of the game except his position is revealed every 5 turns. The only hints the players have otherwise is the tickets that he uses, which cover the node position that Mr. X writes down, representing his current position. Since all of his positions are on a piece of paper, the moves can be verified at the end of the game.

  • Thanks for the suggestions, I’m still thinking in terms of computer logic where most tasks have to be kept away from the player which is where my problems reside. Just having the player right down where they are at the end of each turn would be the simpliest solution.

    Right now I’m working on a big entry where I’ll show how I translated the mechanics to a board including my long winded idea for this problem(which might be changed at this point). I also have a rough idea of how the actual board will look.