Army movement mechanic

I like this mechanic. Just so you know, it will make for a slower but more contemplative strategy game. I don't think you will be able to use arrows when flipping them over. You could use two tokens, an arrow and a cover that gets removed but you still have the chance that players won't place the arrows right or bump them. I know of two games that successfully use a simultaneous attack system.

The first is "A Game of Thrones" which uses simultaneous movement with tokens. Players place these tokens face down and resolve them in turn order. The game doesn't have directions on the tokens, instead, players chose where they want to attack when they resolve the move. This could be an option for you but it means that players might change how they act based on what other players do which changes your system.

The other game is Diplomacy which uses a written system to resolve simultaneous combat. Players all write down their orders and they get resolved simultaneously. This would only work in your game if you have a coordinate system or named/numbered hexes where players can write down their moves.

If you want to preserve the pre-determined directions, you could use cardinal directions. Hex boards are aligned in 3 "flat to flat" rows. If you stack the flat side of the hexagons on top of each other, then the alignments go up and down, top right to bottom left and top left to bottom right. If you were to name these directions like that of a compass they would be: North-South, Northeast-Southwest, and Northwest-Southeast. That way players can put tokens labeled N, NW, SW, S, SE, NE. This will fix players into moving a given direction. Notice there's no plain east or west because the hexagons don't line up that way.

Hey Lowlarh,

Star Fleet Battles solves the movement direction problem by placing a "compass" in the corner of 1 hex map. The compass is a simple ring of 6 hexes, labeled A-F. Players then use these absolute directions to denote the heading of their starships.

Rather than producing 6 times as many tokens, why not try letting players write the directions on an erasable surface? Have you tried getting cheap plastic poker chips and letting players write on them with black crayon or dry erase markers?

Lastly, about simultaneous combat: I played with a system awhile back that might give you some ideas. It assumes players get some number of combat dice in proportion to the number of attacking armies. Here's how it works:

1) All combatants roll their dice simultaneously.

2) Everyone discards 6s.

3) Players then pass their dice to the left as many times as the number on each die. Players skip themselves.

4) After all players have finished passing dice, players count up the dice they have been given and remove that many armies.

Example:

Suppose I attack a hex at the same time as players A and B. 'A' sits to my left. 'B' sits to A's left. I sit to B's left. I roll 5 attacking dice. I pass all my 1s to the left once, so they go to 'A'. I pass all my 2s to the left 2 times, so they go to B. My threes would pass left 3 times, so they would come back to me, but I skip myself and they go to 'A'. And so on.

If I rolled:

1
1
2
3
5

'A' would get 4 dice (1, 1, 3, 5) and 'B' would get 1 (the 2).

Of course, 'A' also gets dice from 'B', and I get dice from both 'A' and 'B'.

The "discard 6s" step is necessary to make this work for 2 players. Without it, 2-player conflicts become simple wars of attrition.

Don't know if any of that helps. Hope something does!

Mark

An alternative to having a compass on the map is to have each army token and the movement tokens printed with an indicator as to which way the token is facing.

In other words, there would now be a "front" or "forward" direction to each token. Then the movement tokens would be something like, move forward one space, move forward right, forward left, etc, to cover all six directions. This way the arrows can be clear and people couldn't change the direction after the fact.

A game with this sort of system, but not with simultaneous movement, was the old Babylon 5 Component Game System. All the units had different directions and when a starship was facing one direction or another it had more or less defense and weaponry to attack another ship.

For resolving combat, another option would be something like comparing power or damage totals and having different effects for each place. For example, with 3 players: The winning player totals 12, the second player totals 10, and the losing player totals 6. The second player loses the difference between his and the winners, so 2 armies; the loser loses the difference between his and the winners, so 6 armies.

One thing to consider is, at the end of the turn is it okay in your system for two opposing armies to occupy the same hex? Can a battle span more than one turn and allow armies to retreat?