A board game analysis
|
This blog post is going to be about an assignment in the course Advanced Game design.
The class is split up in groups for when we do assignments and this is about when we play and analyze a board game. The assignment is to play a board game 3 times and analyze it. We do this to better understand how the game system works and how it is built and what components it is built with. This helps us understand the systems behind games in general, it’s often easier to see it in a board game then a computer game. It will also help us designs systems for games because we get a bigger understanding of them.
Dust strategy board game Dust is a turn based strategy game where the players are battling on the world map to get the most points by concurring different aspects of the map. The core game system is risk and reward to use your resources and cards to conquer different areas of the map to get victory points in the end of the turn with the help of strategy. The components used to play the game are a deck of cards unique for the game, 10 six sided dices, the small figures for troops and buildings, resources and of course the players. The game is played in in 5 phases per turn and a setup phase. You start with the setup phase, each player chooses a color to play as, and this has no impact on the game other then what color your troops are. Then each player gets 6 cards. There are 11 different cards in a deck of 44. The cards have a special unit on them and stats. The cards can do different things from each other, and can only be used in specified phases depending on what the ability is. The stats are for the Initiative phase which is also used in the setup phase. They have stats in Combat, Movement, Production and card rank. The players start with choosing which of the cards they want to play for this turn, this decides what player starts. It is chosen first from how many combat points the cards have, if two or more players have the same you look at the movement points. If there are two or more players with the same amount of points again you look at the rank points of the cards which can be 1 – 3. All these points are different for each card. So no of the cards are a copy to another, they are all identical in points So you won’t have two players with the same amount and have a problem with knowing which player starts. The order of who plays after who is done exactly the same way until you know which order everyone is going to play in. The starting player then starts with placing a tank unit on a Capital city tile to claim it, and then the other players do it in the given order. Then you do the same thing again but the players place their tanks on a land tile to claim it. Usually you start with placing them on power source tiles because it’s important to have as many as possible because they will give points at the end of each turn. The players continue to do this until all land tiles are occupied and divided between the players. Then they place out 3 production centers on a tile they own, except for on power source tiles. All players then get token representing their capital, and power sources they own. They help you see how many points each player get at the end of a turn. Then the setup phase is done and you start playing. You start the first turn in the same order as the setup phase. The player starts with the production phase, in the production phase you build units and production centers. The production centers can only be built on tiles you own and are land tiles and not on a power source. The units you can build are tanks, mechs, fighter planes, bomber planes and submarines which can only be built on a production center that is on a shore tile. A shore tile is a land tile that has a way to a water tile. Each unit costs different amounts of production points and have different stats. The stats are combat value and tactical supremacy. The amount of production points a player has is determined on the what the card says you have chosen for the turn, 3 for each production center that you have power for and 6 for each capital you own. You must have a power source to power the production centers, one power source can only power 3 production centers. After the player is done with the production phase he moves on to the movement phase. How many times the player can move units is depending on what the card says. One move point is used when you move a unit or more from one tile to another. So you can move several units for one point if the move from the same tile to the same destination. You can only move one tile if it unoccupied, but you can move how far as you want on land if you have a unit on the tiles you move through, so you need to own the whole path you want to move through. The submarine can only move on water tiles and can be used as a bridge for land units if you have a path of submarines from one shore to another your land units can move from that shore tile to the other for one movement point. If you move onto a power source you get a power source token. If you decided to attack, you move on to the combat phase and cannot go back to moving your troops. When you are in the combat phase you can only attack enemy units which are next to your units except for amphibious attacks. An amphibious attack is made by having a path from one shore to another with submarines and you move your units to attack the other shore but you can’t retreat. A battle is played out with dices, each dive have six sides, 4 blank sides and 2 with hit marks on. The players throw dice in turns to attack the other player. How many dices you are allowed to use is as many as your forces combat points. What player attacks first depends on the forces tactical supremacy points. If they have the same amount of tactical supremacy points, the defender as the tactical advantage and start the attack. The player that start attacks by throwing the dice and kill the amount of units that the dice show, if a hit mark side is up it is a hit. The player choose what units it want to kill, but tanks always get hit before mechs, and fighter planes before bomber planes. Then the other player attacks with the unit’s it have left, this continues after there have been 3 dice throws of misses or one side has been killed. If there is 3 throws in a row and there is only misses the enemy retreat back to the tile they attacked from. The enemy can’t attack again with the same units on the same targets. The amount of times a player can go into battle is the same as the turn cards combat points. If a player defeats another player in battle and take a power source tile the player get the power source token from that player as well. After the player is done with his or her turn the next player in the order start their turn. When all players have played their turn you continue to the victory point phase. Here you see how many points each player gets. At the bottom of the map you have the score board, the players start at 1 and have a tank there to show what points they have. What you get a point from is, power sources, capital city, land supremacy which goes to the one who own the most land tiles, water supremacy that works like the land supremacy but with water tiles, and factory supremacy which goes to the player with the most production centers. This cycle then continues until one player have won, which is when the player gets 30 points, if to players get 30 points the same turn the player that gets the most points over 30 wins. A picture of the game board taken from http://www.fantasyflightgames.com
Testing the game The first time we played the game it was a disaster. It took us one and a half hour just to set it up and read the rules and we still didn’t really understand it so we continued to play it and learn on the go. A lot of rules were confusing and we had to check what to do almost every time we did something. The box says it takes about 2 hours to play a game of Dust, the first time it took us 5 hours. One thing that was very confusing and hard to keep track of was whose turn it was, because it changed every round. And with us not knowing the rules it took a lot of time to read up on them, this resulted in us not knowing who really was in the lead and the game changed really quickly in the end. The one not posing a threat almost in 2 round rose up and took victory. This happened because of the special abilities the cards have, you could play one in different situations and all of them was over powered in one way or another. One guy used a card which let him take all his mechs on the map and drop them on an enemy tile to attack them, and he had a lot. Another card used gas to make all the troops on an enemy tile to retreat to a nearby friendly tile, this could be used to take a capital really easy without any losses. The cards could really change the game in an instant, because of this it was hard to know who could win when you got to the last 10 points, no one knew what the others hard on their hand and when they were going to use them. We also played a round where we made alliances while we played, when I and another noticed we couldn’t win we decided to make an alliance with the one in the third spot and help him to victory. When the others noticed this was effective the other three made an alliance to make the guy in first spot win. This added a lot of more joy into the game, the first time we played it was agonizing long and if you got behind too much it was no longer fun. But with making alliances to achieve something bigger together it gave it a whole new purpose and made it a lot more interesting for those who were in last place. And in the end we managed to make our alliance win. But even this time we had a hard time with the rules and had to look in the rule book a lot. This time it took us 4 hours to play, and not 2. I can’t help to feel that this game would be better as a computer game instead of a board game, it has so many confusing scenarios that the game should do it all for you so you don’t have to think a lot. One instant we had a problem with were if you made a submarine and it had to go to the closest water tile when built, what happened if it was blocked by an enemy? This was not stated in the rule book, so we made the rule up ourselves and decided that if you build a submarine it has to attack the enemy submarine in the combat phase. Another is when you change for example land supremacy token, if someone had it before and someone get the same amount of land tiles the next turn it stays with the one who had it first. But if there are two players who get the same amount of land supremacy and over the one that had the most the last time, the rule book had nothing to say who got the token and the point for it.
The best and the worst The best and the worst side to the game is the card system. To choose what you can do in your turn and what order you play in is really good and adds a lot of tactical thinking into the game, if it’s going to be a turn of destruction or building. But that you can play cards and use their special ability is a really tough one, it adds a lot of strategy but they are too powerful, they can change the game too much and makes it hard to see who actually is in the lead even if the points differ in 5 points. But also that it’s not a fixed order of who play before who it makes it confusing and hard at time. So that is the best and worst about the game, it’s a love and hate situation. Another really bad side to the game is the confusing rules, there is a lot and it’s hard to remember them all, so it takes time to check the rule book all the time. Really the best part of the game is probably all the small figures for your units, because when you don’t have anything to do you play around with the ones not in play and place them in formations, make super mechas and other crazy units you can think of by placing them on top of each other. The most interesting system To use the cards is one of the core systems and is by far the most interesting, they decide everything you do, they decide how much production, how many times you can attack, and have many times you can move in that turn. They also have special abilities which can change the situation so much that the guy in last place could become the victor in just 2-3 turns. They decide your whole strategy for the next turn and the others after that. The core system The cards decided your strategy and how you are going to use your resources. The resources decide what you can and are going to build. The strategy is always in a risk and reward system, you have to see if the risk is worth the reward, but do you have the resources or the right cards you can turn a big risk into a small one, at least for that turn. Target group interpretation The box says from the age of 12 and up, but I don’t think it can be restrained to only that. I would say that the target group is people that like playing board games for a long time and have a lot of patience. Because if you don’t, you will probably not like this game, it’s not for those who want to play a quick game together an evening, because you will sit there forever. And you need to really learn how to play the game before you can enjoy it, so patience is needed to play through it at least 2 or 3 times before you can get any fun out of it. Summary The most interesting part of the game and the core system is the cards and how they decide you whole strategy, they control production, combat and movement, have special abilities that can change the game really quickly and in general have a really big impact on the game. The best and worst sides to the game are the cards, you either love them or you hate them. I love that they control your resources and decided the order you play in, but I hate the over powered abilities. The cards add a lot of strategy but also a lot of uncertainty, because you don’t know what over powered ability you enemy is going to use against you next or who sits on the best chance of winning. The other really bad side to the game is the rules, there is too many and is too confusing which makes it hard to play the game and do it around 2 hours. |
