Happy Chinese New Year from Experimental Playground

We at Experimental Playground would like to wish all our readers

Happy Chinese New Year!

The Raider Attack Banana Village Minigame

The Raiders are attacking Banana village again! This time the villager are not going to hold back!

This is a game for 2 players where one player control the Raiders while the other controls the villagers. Villagers set traps and save routes, while Raiders maneuver through the map, both players collect points according to their strategy and player with the highest points is the winner.



download the game, print and play!

Merry Christmas from Experimental Playground!

We at Experimental Playground would like to wish all our readers

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Battle Mechanica Update (17/12/08)

This is just a progress update for Battle Mechanica. Please bear in mind that this is a Work In Progress (WIP), which means that the game is incomplete and is subject to change at any time by the designer.

After a long period of meditation and soul-searching, I'm back. I've also brought some updates for Battle Mechanica. The rules was almost a complete overhaul, but the major changes were necessary in order to make this game both easier to design and play.

I won't go into lengthy detail on the changes. Instead, I'll just briefly highlight on what are the major changes.

List of major changes:

1. The battleground is now tile-based. This is one of the biggest changes to the system. The game no longer needs rulers and templates. Instead, the hex-tile system will take care of all the measuring.
   
2. The attributes in Unit Profiles has been changed. The new set of attributes are: Hand-to-hand Combat, Ranged Attack, Strength, Control, Movement, Special Ability, Experience Level.
   
3. Rounds and Phases have been simplified. Each Round consists of 3 Phases: the Check phase, the Reinforce phase and the Activate phase.
   
4. Units are now represented by a single miniature to indicate the unit's type, and Strength counters to represent the unit's strength (just like a traditional board wargame).
   
5. The Hit Zone system has been removed. It's no longer needed since a unit will only consist of a single miniature.
   
6. The combat system has been simplified. It still uses attribute comparison, but the combat now is much simpler to play.
   

Additionally, the game will also introduce new features listed below:

List of planned features:

1. Simulate fog-of-war effects.
   
2. Implementation of reserved points that players can use to create game-changing effects.
   
3. Create game-affecting traits for terrains (for example, swamp slows down movement).
   
4. Create factions for the game
   
5. Create basic units for playtesting.
   

That's all for this post. I'm hoping to finish the basic ruleset of this game by the end of this year. In the mean time, if you missed ClickStartPlay.com's HobbyCon 2008, go here to see a coverage of the event.

Battle Mechanicum by Daniel Marcus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Hobbycon Minigame Flyer

more minigame yay! this time around im twiddling around with hobbycon theme on how to make a minigame out of hobbycon minigame flyer using only availability around us (i.e coins, paper, etc). there is 3 attempt at making it, each improve one another until finally i get this one

the first: theme is actually a war game. about a bear fighting with some other mascot on whose going to be the hobbycon mascot this year. uses six sided die, and very random at it. wasn't that fun at all.
the second: change to competition event, using coins substitute to dice to generate number and uses action point to boost stats. resolution task is flip coin + action point vs difficulty of the event. turn out its kinda ugly and very very predictable. it has character generation which make setup long.
the third:the one you saw, it still a competition, instead of character generation, each player start with 10 effort points, which have different uses on each competition. each event has different style of play unlike the previous one where you only look at difficulty level. uses finger to generate numbers.

without further ado, here is hobbycon minigame flyer (download and print)


go to this page to download, click full view.

Battle Mechanica Update (22/10/08)

This is just a progress update for Battle Mechanica. Please bear in mind that this is a Work In Progress (WIP), which means that the game is incomplete and is subject to change at any time by the designer.

I have a small but important update. Battle Mechanica will make a big change of direction: Battle Mechanica will now be a tile-based boardgame/wargame. It will be less like Warhammer: 40K and more towards Heroes of Might & Magic.

Why change?
Warhammer: 40K (and similar games like Warmachines and Confrontations) requires a level of complexity to make the game playable AND balanced at the same time. Ultimately, its the notion of managing dozens of tokens, paper models or miniatures that will bog down the design.

The new design will take a simpler approach, mechanics wise. Battle Mechanica will move more towards being a boardgame, while maintaining that wargame feel that one would get when playing the games mentioned in the previous paragraph. It will also make the design easier (compared to the previous design) which would allow me to move on to other projects faster. Lastly, it makes the game stay true to the credo of Experimental Playground: being simple to learn yet fun to play.

I'll give more update on the new tile-based design in my next post.

Battle Mechanica Progress Update (6th Oct 2008)

This is just a progress update for Battle Mechanica. Please bear in mind that this is a Work In Progress (WIP), which means that the game is incomplete and is subject to change at any time by the designer.

Another small update. I've added a "General Rules" section to the rulebook, which contains brief information of the following:

1. How distances are measured
   
2. Unit formations, Unit Types and Characters
   
3. Unit movements
   
4. Model's field-of-vision and how to check a its line-of-sight
   
5. Model profiles
   
6. A brief overview of the game's flow of play
   
7. Made some changes to the types of Ranged Attacks:
   
8. Changed 'Burst' to 'Directed Burst', which is a fan-shaped area-based ranged attack, like flamethrowers.

I'm working on the Turns and Phases next, and after that I'll be working on the rules for Movement. Before then, check out this post from Life In Borneo about the recent bloggers gathering in North Borneo, or visit the forum that I frequent to, ClickStartPlay.com. I go by the handle shiVER.



Battle Mechanicum by Daniel Marcus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.