There are Some Things I'd Like To Talk About

Hey!  So I saw the Avengers last night!  I liked it!  Blah blah blah blah.  Enough about that.  Seeing the Avengers made me realize that I don't really like seeing big movies on opening night.  Sure it is exciting and it is nice to be there and I can gloat about how I am cooler than you and stuff it is a good time.  I like being me.  But the movie started at 12:20.  It did you know what time is started because that's when you showed up at the theater and bought your tickets.  The time was printed on them.  Now knowing how long the movie lasts...well okay that requires a minuscule amount of effort on your part but whatever.  Everyone knows there is an after credits sequence.  I mean EVERYONE.  Last night some dude bro loudly declared, "I don't care it is 3:20 and I want to go home".  Actually when I say declared I meant whined.  Seriously dude what the fuck?  You can't handle staying out late with the big boys then stay home sucking your mom's tit and shut the hell up.  Late night activities isn't for bitches you like you.  Joel joined us, he complained once about being out late but he ended up sitting next to me which pretty much killed his ability to take part in our reindeer games.  That's really all I have to say on that subject.

Now on to my game:

I did some major work on it recently and when I checked my internet posts to see how it synched up with my original goals I realized my internet stuff was woefully out of date.  So here we go!

Turn order is going to look like
Bookkeeping
Moral
Initative
Action!
Broken Units Shuffle
Assaut
and back around again.

This is similar to ASL's and I like doing the shooting before the moving.  It is also, for now, going to be Igo, yougo though I am considering my turn your turn.  We'll see.

One of the big things I am going to do is that during the iniatuve stage you announce that you are going to be using one of three stances, Offensive, Defensive, Tactical.  Each of the three stances alters your hand size and determains how many units you can move before you opponent gets to move some units.  So tactical lets you move less units per activation but you will be able to out activate your opponent and respond to what they do and potentially out manuver them which is important.

Each unit will just have a whole pile of action points which they can use to shoot, move, and special actions.  Shooting will be expensive, like half of a unit's total action points expensive.  So if you a unit wants to shoot it is not going to be doing a bunch of other stuff.  One of the main design goals is tough tactical choices and when to shoot or when to dig in and do other things is important to me.

I orginally wanted to have a shooting phase come first and then a general action phase but that becomes messy with igoyougo.  This has a certain elegance to it as well as flexibility.  It rides the line between miniature skirmish game and hex and chit war game which is right where I like it.

Let's talk about the stances:

Offensive:
Half your units activate.
No defensive actions (like digging in, overwatch, et cetera)
Hand size 5

Tactical:
Hand size 7
1/3 of your units can activate
No action restriction

Defensive:
Hand Size 9
1/2 of your units can activate but they may only take certain actions
-Overwatch
-Dig in
-Lay Explosives
All units to gain a defensive bonus.

Initiative goes:
Base Flip
Cheat (cheating gets no redraw)
Winner decides who announces Stance First
Winner  decides who goes first.
The winner can choose to force his opponent to annouce his stance first then choose to go first.  Winning iniative is a big deal.  Big enough so that we might make it so that there are two contests one for stance announcement and one for intative.  

Also any discarding that would happen from stance changes are random.

I am considering adding another stance to make things like protecting convoys easier.  But that would be something that would only need to be available on a per senario basis.

GNAR my lunch is over so I will have to finish this up tonight.

Alright back!  I am riding the clock at work because my boss is the master of scheduals and the lady who works in the morning is a nosy bitch who can't mind her own business.

ANYWAY!

One of the things I really want to do is to make ALL the cards in your hand valuable.  So if you got a hand of one's and two's you can still do something...just so long as it isn't win fights.  However, the way to replenish cards in your hand is to get into fights.  After a fight where a combat flip is made you redraw back up to your max hand size.  That kinda makes offensive stance a little rough.  The way I want it to work is instead of using offensive stance to demolish some people it is more to build an excellent hand so you can decisivly win two or three key battles while your heroes do their things.  So you could resolve a couple of random outlier skirmishes or harrass your enemy's flank for a couple of fights, gathering up the right cards you need before striking at the target you really want to split open.  I am hoping it will work that way.  I'll know once I see it in action.  I already suspect that Defensive and tactical stances will be used to the most so perhaps I should give the offsenive stance a bit of a boost.  I dunno.

As for making the cards valuable.  Most of the special actions like laying down smoke, setting explosives, setting fire to things, digging trenches...et cetera will require a card to be discarded, perhaps a card of a specific suit or a specific colour, maybe of a certain numerical component.  I haven't decided.  What I have decided is that by discarding cards to do stuff your lower number stuff is gonna be handy.  It is also going to make the larger hand sizes of tactical and defensive stance useful so you can get things done.  Offensive stance doesn't need a whole lot of options because...well it is more for building the perfect offensive hand then using it, not getting shit done.

Oh!  Also heroes won't need cards to preform the majority of their feats.

One of the ways offensive stance can get an interesting buff is that before you redraw you have the OPTION of discarding one card.  So you would use some cards in combat and stuff like that then you could discard another card before redrawing up to full.  THAT HAS POTENTIAL!

Alright well that is about where I am at right now.  My next problem is how to distribute hits amoungst multiple targets in the same hex.  I'll get it though, I am rapidly closing in on the answer.  Tonight though?  It is a night for steak, movies, and video games!