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A way to make none player, Characters move

6 replies [Last post]
Thu, 11/09/2017 - 11:21
Kohlstech
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I am creating a board game called "Bank Heist".

With a team of players, Goal is to rob a bank.
with each team member has their own special skill set.
without getting caught by the guards or Employees.
This is a Co-op game against the game.
other elements in the game involve Alarms,Stealth,Cameras,doors with passcodes

The board is set up like a more involved CLUE board with a series of rooms and corridors with doors and links between rooms.

I need a mechanic to be able to move the Guards and employees of the bank around the board.

I have tried using just a deck of cards with rooms on them but this did not feel right where a guard would just teleport to another room on the board.
which made it hard for the players to strategize there moves.
Some kind of path i feel would be better but it would be nice if this could change each game.

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Thu, 11/09/2017 - 13:54
#1
let-off studios
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Some Options

Kohlstech wrote:
I have tried using just a deck of cards with rooms on them but this did not feel right where a guard would just teleport to another room on the board.
which made it hard for the players to strategize there moves.
Some kind of path i feel would be better but it would be nice if this could change each game.
A couple options to develop movement for guards and employees, where you will still use cards but the cards can be randomized each game.

For each of these options, rooms would be labeled in some way: letters, numbers, colours, symbols, etc. This would allow players to quickly determine where their opponents would go. Additionally, you may want guards to move from one location to the next, or roll a die and move that many spaces, or have a set number of spaces they'll move when activated.

PRE-SET PATHS
A card has a list where guards must visit to complete their patrol. The sequence of letters/numbers indicates where the guard is headed. Use a small counter or clip on the card to indicate the guard's next destination. When it's time for the guards to be moved, they are moved along the most direct path to the next destination indicated on their card. Once they reach their destination uninterrupted, move the clip or token to indicate the next destination along their route, and resume the process.

NEW DESTINATIONS
This may work well for the set of cards you've described, with one room shown on each. And it's similar to the path option above, but it only indicates the next room the guard will visit. Once the guard makes it to the room shown on their card, a new destination card is drawn and they are moved along the most direct route towards that room.

MOVEMENT PATTERNS
In an earlier version of Arkham Horror, I recall that each monster had a symbol and a movement pattern listed on their token. When it was time to move the monsters, a card was drawn and a symbol was referenced on it. Each monster whose symbol matched that of the card drawn was moved to different locations based on the movement pattern shown on that monster's token. This way, players didn't know which of the (many) monsters would be moved on a given turn, but had a general idea of where they would go if they did move.

SELECT UNITS
A final option is similar to what I remember in the old game BattleMasters. There was a deck of cards, and to start a round a card was drawn. Whatever units were displayed on the card were the ones moved that round. For your purposes, you can have a security guard with a flashlight, a bank employee pushing a cart, etc. to illustrate which opponents will be moved. You can use one of the movement patterns suggested above to be combined with this.

Hope these are useful and/or give you some food for thought! :)

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Thu, 11/09/2017 - 14:21
#2
Kohlstech
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Nice Options

All very viable Options

I already have the cards made for the rooms,seems like i can utilize the
NEW DESTINATIONS method.

As there are multiple directions to get to a location.
I was thinking that the guard cards could have attributes to movement prefrence
Left,right,center and would move accordingly.
A simple 1,2,3 choice (guard 1) Attr ( Left = 2 Forward = 3 Right =1 )
so when the guard is given a choice of directions its first choice would be forward and so on.

Thank you for your suggestions, all of them have been noted and added to my mechanics hand book.

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Thu, 11/09/2017 - 14:29
#3
Fri
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Joined: 09/06/2017
Burgle Bros

Your game sounds really similar to Burgle Bros. You may want to check it out just to see how it does things.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172081/burgle-bros

It uses the new destination method.

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Thu, 11/09/2017 - 15:42
#4
FrankM
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Joined: 01/27/2017
Marks on the board

If the board is a grid-plus-rooms like Clue, the standard path can be predetermined for each patrolling NPC, and the places where the NPC turns can simply be little color-coded arrows on the grids. With no arrow, the NPC always steps forward. A curved arrow in front of a room indicates entry, a curved arrow outward indicates where he/she exits the next turn.

The drawback of this system is when the NPC is pulled off their normal route. When the “emergency” (e.g., heard an odd noise) is over, the NPC makes a beeline for the next arrow along their route from that location.

Players can game this to distract the NPC from covering a bit of their usual route.

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Thu, 11/09/2017 - 20:07
#5
CanucKnight
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Joined: 09/29/2017
I really like what people are

I really like what people are saying about highlighting a predetermined path on the grid. Remember! To keep the players decisions meaningful your guards need to be predictable, which means their possible actions should be rather limited. Maybe a 50% chance to move normally, 25% to switch directions or paths, and 25% chance to move further than normal. Also make sure the NPC actions can be resolved in minimal time (ie a die roll or card flip for each guard) to minimize down time.

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Tue, 11/28/2017 - 03:16
#6
cignox1
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Joined: 11/22/2016
In the game I'm currently

In the game I'm currently designing I have passengers on a train that have to move in a partially deterministic but not easily trackable way.
An option would be to have a separate board with "rails" where you can put and slide a "train of cards": you insert a new card at one side and the whole row slides towards the opposite side. Most of the cards are empty, but some are guards (and the cards are face down). If you imagine that board as a matrix, the columns represent the rooms. So at every turn you slide all rows, making all the guards move to the next room.
As you can't see where the guards are, you can't always predict where they are and where they will be next, but sometimes the game allows you to "watch" inside a room to see if there is a guard there. If one is there, then you can partially track his future moves (because you know that the next turn he will be in the next column/row).

You should include events that randomly swap the cards so that you either invest a lot of energies tracking them out, or you will loose them in a couple of turns.

You can play a bit with other ideas as well: there can be cameras in the bank so that you can watch inside a room in some cases, or you can do something that stops one or more guards etc.

In addition, every row can differ in the sequence of the rooms, one of the row can loop only the 3 most important rooms, another row can represent the backyard etc. You can add as many guards as you like (both at design time adding new rows, and at playtime adding more guard cards), increasing and decreasing the difficulty. When you enter a room, you pick all the cards representing that room to see if there are guards etc.

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