BattleTech DMG: Quick Update

by Thomas1 Comment

I put together a sample deck and ran through it once with the wife. The gameplay feels right, but the cards need to be adjusted to make it seem like an actual game. I’ve made a few changes, mainly reducing the number of different cards and increasing the amount of the cards that remain in the game, adjusting the costs and the benefits of some cards, and adding heat to the game. Fire that Heavy PPC? Generate 3 Heat. The more heat your ‘Mech builds up, the smaller your hand size. Start discarding cards to remove heat. Too much heat? You’re a sitting duck.

I’ll have a quick playtest again on Monday and get some nicer cards printed up on Tuesday, then I’ll hopefully see you in Indianapolis on Wednesday!

Update to the update: Printed out new test cards and ran a quick two-player game with the wife again. Much better than the first playtest. The Heat mechanic worked out well. I think this may scale up to a four-player game, but I’ll probably only have the two-player version ready for my GenCon demo. Nice!

The BattleTech DMG: Really? Well, okay then.

by Thomas1 Comment

Based on the feedback I’ve received over the past 48 hours, I think it may be time to move the BattleTech Deckbuilding ‘Mechfighting Game from graphic design project to actual game design project. Like every third member of BoardGameGeek, I fancy myself a game designer — I even have a designer page on the Geek based on my 24 Hour RPG stuff — and, as part of the DMG graphic design project, I somewhat designed the game. So why not take that to the next level? Especially with people threatening to pick me up and carry me to the Catalyst Game Labs booth at GenCon?

Continue reading →

The BattleTech Deckbuilding ‘Mechfighting Game

by Thomas6 Comments

The BattleTech deckbuilding/deckfighting project came from a Twitter conversation between Daniel Perez (Highmoon Media) and Philip J. Reed (Steve Jackson Games), which was taken over to Daniel’s blog. Daniel writes,”I’d like to see the idea of deckbuilding combined with deckfighting. I mentioned it to Phil in relation to what form a BattleTech deckbuilding game would take, and he said that it might get too long, like two games in one. He’s right, considering how long a game of Dominion took to play, but I can’t shake the idea that it would be a good combination.” That’s been a thought in the back of my mind for a while now, and, wanting to expand the portfolio a bit, I decided to take on the idea of developing this type of game into a design project.

Continue reading →