I just had an idea this after noon to make a board game about the battle of Hoth. For some reason, this is one of the most interesting battle in the whole starwars series.
My idea is to use a combination of ideas from Castle Panic, Plant VS Zombies and Battle Master. It will be a 2 player game where 1 player play the rebels and the other the empire. Compared to other battle of the Hoth game, I don't want to have a heavy tactical war game that use an hex map. Here is a draft of the mechanics:
The board will be made of 3 rows each representing a flank. Eahc row will have a series of square that the unit must pass through to reach the other side. On one side you have the rebel, on the other you have the empire. Both players will select and place their force secretly at the beginning of the game.
The empire must distribute his troops between 3 transports each located at the end of a row (kept secret until deployed). The rebel must setup his defense forces and turret locations.
Each player has a deck of cards with various units, unit categories, or group of units (to be defined) like in battle masters. There are various ways those cards could be used but the retained method so far is that each player will have 3 cards in hand, they play 1 card and draw 1 each turn.
A played card will activate 1 unit in each row of the matching type. For example, if you play AT-AT then you can either move forward, attack OR deploy a new AT-AT in each row once. The rebel does the same. Some units could have the move AND attack capability when activated while AT-AT will be more OR attack.
The goal of the game for the empire is to move close enough to destroy the shield generator. The generator is an attackable target by some units (mostly AT-AT) when they are close enough.
The goal of the rebel is to secure the retreat of all his ships. The rebel player has an ion cannon card, when this card is played, the rebel player lose a turn but one of his ship retreat into space. If all the ships (3-5 ships) retreat before the shield generator is destroyed, the rebel wins.
The way combat are resolve, when a unit is in attack range ( some unit attack adjacent other at a range of 2), you roll X dice where X is the strength of the unit the defense of the unit. Each roll greater than the defense scores a hit. I am thinking to use a token rotation system like in castle panic to keep track of HP of stronger units like AT-AT.
There could be terrain modifiers like hills that will give bonus on any infantry positioned in this location. I will try to look into the other games or any other star wars documentation to include other vehicles that were not present in the movie but that could still be useful in the game to make sure there is a good variety of units.
AT-AT would act as wall that only moves forward pushing or stomping any enemy in front of it. So other units like speeders will have the option to sidestep in a different row while moving.
What do you think?
Do you like the idea?
Any other suggestions?
MIrror Threads
The way I see it is that the rebel transport to send in space is the game timer. But the rebels cannot do it every turn becasue only 1 card in their deck allow them to do that. So they must wait for the card to come back before being able to shoot the ion cannon again.
As for empire, if they are close to the rebel base, they can shoot at the generator. This is be mostly done by AT-AT. The combat system will make it hard for other type of units like AT-ST to actually damage the generator.
So for the empire, the AT-AT reaching the other edge of the board to shoot the generator is the timer. They are like moving walls that stomping everything on their path while others are fighting.
This is why I made the escape the victory condition, not destroy the whole empire. This way, the goal is to buy time because on the long run, they are going to lose anyway.
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Some other ideas I posted on BGG
Force powers: Power up/down cards would be force cards. Force cards are played in addition to other cards to make a combined effect.
Double card functions: All cards would have a flank identification. It could happen that some cards becomes obsolete because there are no matching unit type in play (that occured in battle masters). So a second way to use a card is by playing cards according to their flank value. You can play up to 1 card per flank (max 3) which allows you to activate any unit in the played flank. So you'll generally activate less unit in a turn, but that can allow players to make 2 different unit attack the same target, or focus in something important of the board.
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Now I am trying to see if I could introduce additional units that were not seen in the movies. I added some land speeder transport to carry snow troopers for the empire. I was thinking if there could be a vehicle for the rebels. Else the some banthan cavalry could be an idea. The units so far:
Empire: AT-AT, AT-ST, Land Speeder, Snow Troopers, Heavy Troopers
Rebel: Batteries, Snow Speeder, Rebel Trooper, Heavy trooper, banthan riders (not sure).
The idea is to allow player to configure their army at the start of the game, so having various unit configuration could be interesting. But I dod not want to have too much unit types. I am aiming between 5 or 8 units.