Battle for Bluntrock (was "Expansionism")

From my semi-abstract lightweight wargame design that I had originally called "Expansionism" (GDW'd here), I pushed it down the theme-road a bit and came up with a futuristic control-the-newly-discovered-planet theme that I'm calling "Battle for Bluntrock".

You can see the current state of my in-progress design in a section of my website's message board: http://www.mwgames.com/MessageBoard/viewforum.php?f=22&sid=26e5c96d91c500e008d89eaf8437c860

I was able to do a quick 2-player over-lunchtime playtest of this design a bit over a week ago, with a friend of mine at the office ... he's playtested some of my previous designs, so he knew what he was in store for. ;)

My buddy got himself in trouble right out of the gate by launching a large battle against me on his first turn, which I won ... this removed almost all of his Armies from the map and nearly all of the cards from his hand. So ... I had about 2 or 3 turns of relatively unimpeded building. He eventually mounted a minor comeback, which had me worried for a few hands. But, in the end, I loaded up for the final mother-of-all-battles and wiped him off the planet for good. The game latest about a half-hour, after setup and explanation and had barely made it through the draw deck a single time.

A couple of the design points changed a bit after the playtest (and are now reflected in the messageboard posts), but not majorly. I was happily surprised that a couple of things in the design worked as well as they did on this first playtest. The Tile space/distance/movement system seems to work fine and my friend seemed to easily understand and use it. I did have to tweak the bonuses given by the different terrain tiles however, since the added range given by Hilands was a bit heavy-handed -- I setup camp in the Hilands and my Sabres and LongBlades up there were involved in just about every battle. The old Lolands "bonus", however, made them not even worth travelling on ... so those have changed as well.

The battle system worked pretty well, although for that game the "attack" rule was that all units on a tile would be picked as the attacked target ... and attackers and supporters had to be in range of *any* Army on that tile. This resulted in a lot of units involved in battles, and a lot of cards being played -- which meant that each battle was a bigger-than-wanted potentially-game-changing affair. This did create a bit of tension in the end of the game as we were in a race of sorts -- me to build up a big enough attack to finish him off, and him to build up a survivable defense with a bit extra to counter-attack. While I was happy to see the tension/fun created, it seemed to be giving a single battle too much weight over the whole game and felt a touch chaotic.

So, the new rules now have the attacker picking a single Army as the target, then all attackers and supporters have to be in-range of that individual target. This will hopefully result in an average of 2 or 3 units per side in a battle (we had about an average of 4 or 5 units per side in a battle).

I would like a 2-player game to average out to about 30 to 45 minutes, with perhaps 15 minutes gained for every additional player beyond that. And I would like the deck to be gone through twice to end the game -- having it be unlikely that a player would be completely eliminated before that point (unless they play an overly-aggressive ... not to mention "bad" ... game).

Hopefully, he'll be up for another lunchtime session later this week ...

-Bryk