FFH Board Game

[fuzzy_bunnies]

Ok ok, I know Sifaus has a card game post already. I had actually started writing this up a few weeks ago but shelved it because, frankly, I'm an adult and don't have any friends that play games and I didn't think anyone here would care... so it seemed like a waste of effort.

After seeing the response to Sifaus' thread, though, I decided to finish up the basic rules and sample game to post and see what people thought. Although this game uses only cards, it is not a CCG sort of like Sifaus is proposing (I think, he doesn't have much info posted yet) in that the game is complete in itself and all the players share cards from a common pool.

The game is a much simplified version of FFH but is designed to be played rather quickly. The general phases of a full game are here but I've stripped out a lot of the micromanagement. I didn't have time to write up every card combination and civ specific trait etc, but I hope this taste will give anyone who's interested an idea.

The general concepts/Notes:

The first phase of the game is the building phase. There is enforced peace for 6 rounds after which you can attack.

Cities produce units at any time, but the discovery of resources, promotions and city upgrades requires a bit of luck.

Most city upgrades and units have a standard version and an upgrade version. In the case of city upgrades, you have to have a pre-requisite building/terrain in order to upgrade to a better one. For unit upgrades, you have to draw an upgrade card and have a city that can build the upgraded unit. This makes the loss of a city and its upgrades or the loss of a unit and its upgrades more difficult.

Units are rather easy to come by but are limited because each civ only has a fixed number of unit cards. Sort of like Monopoly where if you run out of hotels, no one can build any more. When a unit dies, it frees up a slot and can be rebuilt in a city. Certain actions (such as the Hippus' Raider trait which lets you destroy any resource that an enemy has in exchange for permanently removing one of your units from the game) can affect the total number of units you can have out at once.

Normal units gain promotions but its rather difficult to do so. Heroes are more powerful units and gain promotions more easily but once a Hero is destroyed, it is removed from the game.

Religions can be founded/adopted/shared with the religious hero going to the first civ that can build it.

Hrmm ok, I'm probably being more confusing than necessary. I'll just attach the files.

PS You can probably guess that my card game experience comes mainly from MTG since I use quite a bit of the terminology. Sorry about that.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

I don't have time to read the rules you attached, but this seems like a good game.

 

[Sifaus]

Good luck, if you need something, i'm here

Your game seems very cool and fun to play. And you know, we use almost same cards I have an idea about general game, my game haven't got any maps, because it's a card game. If you make an map for playing on it, it will be great.

 

[civ_king]

good progress, it needs work, but hey FFH2 is still in Beta

 

[Agent327]

Nice idea, I'll check it out.

 

[arcticnightwolf]

oh, nice!
(10 char)

 

[seZereth]

Hey, I´ve read your rules, I attached a file, with some suggestions.
cheers.

EDIT:
updated the rules again to make them a bit more clearer.

 

[arcticnightwolf]

Hey, I´ve read your rules, I attached a file, with some suggestions.
cheers.

EDIT:
updated the rules to make them a bit more clearer.

oh ... now I understand sifaus' card game...

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

Hey, I´ve read your rules, I attached a file, with some suggestions.
cheers.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments! There are basically 2 parts to your notes, I’ll respond to each one separately and maybe explain why I may or may not agree and/or what I was going for.

Regarding the combat portion, I hate to say it but I don’t think the method that you’re describing works for me. It’s not bad, but it’s not what I’m going for which is the general feel of how combat works in FFH.

In FFH, when it’s your turn you control everything. When it’s not your turn, you try to set yourself up and pray that you can survive until it’s your turn again.

For example, I want people to have to make the decision if your standing army has just attacked and is wounded, do you want to summon an elemental to stand guard until your next turn and risk wasting the spell card? Or do you want to save that spell card to cast a fireball when you’re ready to attack again? If your enemy chooses to attack, you won’t be able to cast during their turn so you have to decide whether your valuable spell card is worth being used as a deterrent.

Same as when you’re doing standard attacks. In FFH, you rarely ever just select your whole stack and attack and hope for the best. Each attack is decided upon one at a time. If you have a Champion and an Archmage vs an Archer and a Warrior, you send the Champion first to kill the Archer, then the Archmage to kill the Warrior. Not the other way around.

In this case, it’s not the computer picking defenders for you. The attacker picks the attacking unit, the defender picks the defending unit. This allows a level of strategy for both players.

For example, a Champion and an Archer attack your Archmage and Warrior. Your Archmage has a higher strength but your Warrior is expendible so you decide to have your Warrior defend the Champion’s attack. If the warrior is killed, you will be forced to defend the enemy Archer with your Archmage. On the other hand, if the warrior manages to survive the Champion, you can choose to try your luck by using him to defend the attacking Archer to protect your Archmage. The attacker knows that both your wounded defending Warrior and your Archmage has a decent chance to kill his Archer so he can choose to stop right there and end his attack round, he doesn’t HAVE to attack even though the unit is in his army. This also means that during his opponents turn, his archer will be unwounded and ready to defend any attacks against his army.

In your method, each unit basically has the Guardsman promotion and is nearly guaranteed to die if they’re at the top of the stack. This removes an important layer of strategy because you can’t react to the changing tempo of battle at all. Also, promotion cards go underneath unit cards so moving them around and re-arranging them for combat would be a gigantic pain in the rear.

I think the actual roll method we’re using is similar but I’d rather keep the combat simple. Attack rolls are 1d6 + strength and modifiers, defense rolls are 1d6 + defense and modifiers. Each unit rolls because just as its possible to have a really good attack, its possible to have a really bad defense roll. Highest roll wins. I like the randomness. Each battle is 2 dice rolls, that’s it.

NOTE: I'm not saying there will never be first strikes or other combat funkiness, but those will be for rare heroes and highly limited units. Generally, unit bonuses can be easily done as a +/- to attack defense with a qualifier. (IE +2 defense in city, -1 attack vs mounted, etc) and I don't want mental math to go more than 2-3 bonuses/penalties. Some special bonuses can be for marksman where you select defender and for war chariots or mounted UU's where if your unit is about to die, you can flip a coin to see if it retreats instead.

 

[seZereth]

Thanks for the thoughtful comments! There are basically 2 parts to your notes, I’ll respond to each one separately and maybe explain why I may or may not agree and/or what I was going for.

Regarding the combat portion, I hate to say it but I don’t think the method that you’re describing works for me. It’s not bad, but it’s not what I’m going for which is the general feel of how combat works in FFH.

In FFH, when it’s your turn you control everything. When it’s not your turn, you try to set yourself up and pray that you can survive until it’s your turn again.

For example, I want people to have to make the decision if your standing army has just attacked and is wounded, do you want to summon an elemental to stand guard until your next turn and risk wasting the spell card? Or do you want to save that spell card to cast a fireball when you’re ready to attack again? If your enemy chooses to attack, you won’t be able to cast during their turn so you have to decide whether your valuable spell card is worth being used as a deterrent.

Same as when you’re doing standard attacks. In FFH, you rarely ever just select your whole stack and attack and hope for the best. Each attack is decided upon one at a time. If you have a Champion and an Archmage vs an Archer and a Warrior, you send the Champion first to kill the Archer, then the Archmage to kill the Warrior. Not the other way around.

In this case, it’s not the computer picking defenders for you. The attacker picks the attacking unit, the defender picks the defending unit. This allows a level of strategy for both players.

For example, a Champion and an Archer attack your Archmage and Warrior. Your Archmage has a higher strength but your Warrior is expendible so you decide to have your Warrior defend the Champion’s attack. If the warrior is killed, you will be forced to defend the enemy Archer with your Archmage. On the other hand, if the warrior manages to survive the Champion, you can choose to try your luck by using him to defend the attacking Archer to protect your Archmage. The attacker knows that both your wounded defending Warrior and your Archmage has a decent chance to kill his Archer so he can choose to stop right there and end his attack round, he doesn’t HAVE to attack even though the unit is in his army. This also means that during his opponents turn, his archer will be unwounded and ready to defend any attacks against his army.

In your method, each unit basically has the Guardsman promotion and is nearly guaranteed to die if they’re at the top of the stack. This removes an important layer of strategy because you can’t react to the changing tempo of battle at all. Also, promotion cards go underneath unit cards so moving them around and re-arranging them for combat would be a gigantic pain in the rear.

I think the actual roll method we’re using is similar but I’d rather keep the combat simple. Attack rolls are 1d6 + strength and modifiers, defense rolls are 1d6 + defense and modifiers. Each unit rolls because just as its possible to have a really good attack, its possible to have a really bad defense roll. Highest roll wins. I like the randomness. Each battle is 2 dice rolls, that’s it.

NOTE: I'm not saying there will never be first strikes or other combat funkiness, but those will be for rare heroes and highly limited units. Generally, unit bonuses can be easily done as a +/- to attack defense with a qualifier. (IE +2 defense in city, -1 attack vs mounted, etc) and I don't want mental math to go more than 2-3 bonuses/penalties. Some special bonuses can be for marksman where you select defender and for war chariots or mounted UU's where if your unit is about to die, you can flip a coin to see if it retreats instead.

was just trying to sell my combat system, as it floats around in my head all the time, since sifaus started this ccg thread

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

was just trying to sell my combat system, as it floats around in my head all the time, since sifaus started this ccg thread

Taking a bit of time, I have a good inkling of an idea based on yours and Sifaus' comment.

There's now a 3x3 hidden map of land that needs to be explored with scouts. I'll have more details in reposted rules, look for version 2 later.

As an aside, I'm going to rename this: Fall from Heaven, Border Skirmishes

This is because this game will represent smaller battles in the grander campaign that is Fall From Heaven. Due to the card format, and the board game format, putting every feature that's available is pretty much unfeasible. Here's an example why:

From the Land deck, you draw lands, barbarians/animals and rare features (ie mirror of heaven). I want the chance of a rare feature to appear as about 1 in 10 (or 1 rare feature in a map of 9 cards). Since there can only be 1 of each rare feature in the deck and there are 11 rare features, this means that the Land deck needs to be approximately 100 cards.

Since getting land for your cities is important, I want the approximately 1/2 of the land deck to be actually land. In this case, I want about 50 land cards. Since lands need to have a simple and linear upgrade path and upgrades are randomly achieved, there can't be too many different land types or the odds of getting a particular land and a particular upgrade will be nigh impossible. This means I had to cut it down to 4 land types with 12 cards each.

Then the same goes for barbarians and animals. I can't put every combination of barbarian and animal in because it would be pointless. You'd have 1 of each animal... so everything needs to be nipped and tucked to keep the flavor of the game alive.

So Skirmishes in this case represents the smaller battles that we gloss over while playing the epic game. I'll generally be trying to capture the common earlier game... while sacrificing rare events that mainly serve to add flavor to a world where you spend 500 turns and NEED the extra flavor.

So umm...

Still working on it, but I need some opinions. Right now it looks like you'd need to print out:

100 cards Game Library
100 cards Land deck
100 cards Action deck
then each civ would be about 50 cards.

Thats a LOT of cards... I'm beginning to think too many. I mean... assuming you can print out 8 cards per sheet of 8.5x11 paper (some doublesided) that would be 38 sheets of paper for the Library, Land and Action decks, then another say 6 sheets per civ.

An easier solution would be to cut everything severely. IE 3 religions, 3 magic types, drop most of the animals and resources... what do you all think?