Wesnoth as a board game

[elricz]

Thanks for the help, and thanks for your mail, it helped me putting some things together.

In fact, we playtest the rules with mixed results, some things worked fine and other less fine.
Things that worked:
- Economy: Using a single currency for everything was simple and easy. The ways of earning and spending gold needs tweaking, but it can work.
- Six sided dices: Switching to only 5 types of defenses, and using standard dices worked really well.
- Lady Luck. Pay one gold to repeat one full attack once per turn was a good thing, we missed that on the real game!

Things that need to improve:
- Unit stats: The numbers were too small, and the kills were achieved very quickly. It needs tuning, and at least double the figures. Also, I didn't include any special, but there are some that can be included easily, and that will help with the balance and spirit
- Attack types: The split on melee/ranged/magic is confusing for any Wesnoth player. It would be better to keep two ranges, and different types of damage
- Unit spirit: With those two things, the units were not recognizable from the game, leading to strange usage of units. The spirit and basic usage of the units should be maintained.
- Materials: The pawns were too flaky, and fall over too easily. It is good to have a reference sheet, and some information on the pawns, but the current pawns printed on normal paper, with cents below them to represent the wounds, just don't work.

Back to the drawing board!

[konsnos]

- Unit stats: The numbers were too small, and the kills were achieved very quickly. It needs tuning, and at least double the figures. Also, I didn't include any special, but there are some that can be included easily, and that will help with the balance and spirit

Different factions should have different characteristics. One may be defensive (elves), other offensive (dragons), others may have number superiority (undead) or abilities (fire arrows for orcs, or net).
Just an example.

[Czestmyr]

In fact, guys, I think that we have a great possibility of Wesnoth-geek brainstorming on these forums. So if you have an idea that could resolve difficulties that arose while test-playing the game, post it here. Also when you discover a new difficulty, post it as well so that others can adress it.

I will start by replying to what elricz wrote by some of my thoughts:
Six sided dice: Originally I was thinking about 10-sided dice, which also aren't so rare. They have them in every RPG board game shop. The advantage would be having more variations than 6 to defence types. These basic types could be further altered by special unit abilities or by attack type resistances to give the game more variation as in original Wesnoth. But maybe this would be too complex for a board game. We have to keep in mind that copying the original Wesnoth wouldn't do it.
Unit stats: I absolutely agree with increasing the unit hit-points. But another issue with hit points is how to keep track of all units' HP. My idea was to have a way of reffering to each figure on the board - maybe a sort of paper pedestal that would bear the unit's type and number. The precise stats and hitpoints could be shown on some cards beside the playing board. You would place some coin with the unit number on the card, so that everyone knows which card belongs to which unit.
Attack types: My opinion is that we should keep melee and ranged attacks to provide variation for the game. Each attack would then have its damage type associated. Each unit type would have defence bonus (or malus) against some of the damage types, just like in Wesnoth. Here, the system proposed by elricz seems good - subtracting or adding the malus/bonus to the damage dealt with minimum inflicted damage being 1. Percentages are not fun to calculate in your head.
Unit spirit: Absolutely agree. The game should not differ from original Wesnoth in concept, merely in complexity.
Materials: See unit stats in this post. I will add a graphic of how I picture the pawns and their cards later.

P.S.: I am starting to feel that this really COULD work. With more people thinking about the game and helping out with the design, we could even create something playable

[Czestmyr]

Another issue:
Unit movement: Having the cost of movement points unique for unit seems too complex to me. Personally I thought about this: graphical representation of movement costs on each tile (see my previous graphic with forest tiles). Every unit would then have a number of movement points at its disposal that could be used for movement. E.g.: no matter what unit you you have, movement would still cost the same number of movement points (with some exceptions: land units cannot move in water, water units have to use twice the number of movement points when on land, horse units double their movement point usage in the mountains, etc...). The only thing that would make difference between unit types from the notion of movement would be the number of movement points they have each turn. So for example, horse units would have much more movement points than heavy infantrymen.
To prevent confusion, the player would be required to play with one pawn at a time and will be able to play with the other unit when he/she finishes playing with the previous one.

What do you think?

[Czestmyr]

So this is how I pictured the pawns. The ring with unit type and number would be removeable so that you could use one pawn for more unit types and not have to make a different pawn for each unit type. The player would have a card with the unit type, hitpoints, stats, etc... that would have to be placed on the table to be visible by everyone. The player would then have some token - for example a cardboard circle with blue number 1 on it - that he/she would place over the card to indicate that the pawn and the card belong together.

[Czestmyr]

This is how I pictured the unit cards. Hit points and experience would probably have to be kept track of by some other means.

[Czestmyr]

Gimp made image of a mountain range for the board game

[Czestmyr]

Preview of mountain and castle tiles

[Czestmyr]

I have finished the first version of game rules. It doesn't include a unit reference sheet and the map reference yet. Comments are very welcome. Also, if you don't understand something in the rules and have a proposal of a clearer formulation, don't hesitate to post it here as well as grammar corrections of the text.

[elricz]

I am not sure about the rules, but it looks a good middle point between the complexity of the game and the basic rules that I made. The stats of the units will determine how easy or difficult is to actually handle the wounds and experience.

One thing that I am not sure is to use the terrain movement and defense for all the units; it will probably be harder to capture the spirit of the units without making a lot of exceptions to the terrain rules.

But you have something to start, my recommendation would be to craft the materials required to play test them, and do it. You will find out what things work and what doesn't more effectively than discussing about them.

Good work, and good luck!

P.S. For MS Office users, there is an add-in to read this type of documents at http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/download.html

[ADmiral-N]

Has anyone made any progress / experiences playing the board game?
I love the idea!

Here's some suggestions & ideas:

- Unit recruitment: Drop the gold, keeping track of that is annoying, especially if you don't happen to have a large number of coins at home to use as game material. Instead, everyone can recruit one unit per turn plus one unit for every X villages in their posession (X = 2, maybe 3?)
- Attacks: Drop the idea of X attacks for Y damage. Noone likes to reroll their hit chances over and over. Rather have one roll determine hit or miss, then to decide damage roll one die for every level of the attacker and that's your base damage (e.g. 2 to 12 for a lvl2 unit).
- Movement: I think there should be one (or two) types of terrain with movement cost 1 for every unit and a few types of terrain with cost 2 (snow, hills, cave, water for example). Every unit has a terrain speciality, on which terrain they can move for the cost of just 1 movement point.
- Game Board: Let's have bigger chunks of game board which you can connect like puzzle tiles. These chunks would have a center area that represents the "characteristics" of the board piece, for example a keep with surrounding castle, or some difficult terrain, and a border area used for connecting with other board pieces, consisting of movement-neutral grass tiles. I've attached a quick example with some of those forest tiles (the real board pieces could use some variation, also the graphics don't even need to repeat for each hex!).
- Units: There is a cheap way to simulate unit traits. Make a fixed number of individuals for each kind of unit, for example mage. Give each of those individuals a name and slightly different stats, for example one has move movement points, another has "+1 damage" on one of it's attacks, yet another has more life points etc. When you decide to recruit a mage, you draw the topmost card from the "mage" deck and have one of these cards in front of you for each of your units

[Deathlance]

Realy good idea.

[Czestmyr]

Been away for a while

Let's finish this game till X-Mass, people

ad ADmiral-N:

I like some of your ideas and I dislike some of them. Here's which and why:
I don't like the idea of no gold. You can print out banknotes instead of coins and you can have plenty of them, so there's no problem with keeping track of that. Plus, if you have one extra unit per two or three villages, what do you get for the villages in between? Nothing? That seems pretty unfair to me. If you can have an extra unit for every three villages in your posession and I have five villages and my opponent three - that means we both have only one unit extra?
I like the idea with just one attack (and consequently one attack throw), which would simplify and speed-up things a lot. But I'd rather have a fixed damage for the attacks. This way, you can have less hit points and that's easier to keep track of. (To me, this seems like a bigger problem than gold)
Lowering movement counts for units is not a bad idea. This would certainly simplify things a lot and make smaller maps more feasible. But the cons are that playing maps like those you describe further would swallow a hell lot of time and also the units would be harder to differentiate (which is not necessarily a bad thing - the board game doesn't have to be as complex as the computer game)
Game board - I love the way your board pieces hold together. But I can't imagine larger boards than 3x3 (in hex coordinates ) And if you reduce the movement count of the units, this gets a real pain in the ... buttocks
Last but not least - I love the special unit traits. This will add more variety, but won't add much more complexity. The game could limit the maximum number of mages to, let's say, five, because there would be no more than five of those individual mage cards you described.

Thx for the feedback. Keep'em comming!

[ADmiral-N]

Don't worry, my opinions have also changed a bit since I posted this list

Gold: I also think there is no good replacement for it. And I like hoarding a lot of treasure in front of me. The question is: How do we make gold usable? In Wesnoth, the amount of gold you have can easily exceed 100 or even 200 once in a while. On the other hand, banknotes don't really seem to fit the Wesnoth style. Where's the shiny gold pieces?
Proposed solution: Players can use any normal coins they have at home, and we should cut all the prices so that the most expensive units don't cost more than 7 gold maybe. This way, you won't often be dealing with amounts greater than 50 gold.

Attacks: The idea from my previous post, roll once and then some, actually uses potentially more dice than just rolling for every attack... Considering that players can probably get several 6-sided dice somewhere (players probably have Risk, Monopoly, Backgammon, Yahtzee etc.), we should imo keep the system used in the original Wesnoth.

Board: Forget the 2-hex-border. It would be much easier to make just the middle part out of cardboard and glue underneath another layer of cardboard of the same size & shape with puzzle connectors at the sides. The lower layer only needs to cover the border of the upper layer; the middle can be cut out and used to make some other parts out of it.

HP: Again, same thing as with the gold. We must not use too many of them because it's tedious to create all the game material. Instead of showing "HP left" with units starting out at 10 or so, we should probably use "damage tokens" to show how much damage the units have taken already. Thus, units start with no damage tokens and die at the maximum.

XP: Should use a fixed number of kills and no XP just for fighting. Intelligent units need 1 less kill to level up. Nr. of kills required can be written directly on the unit info card, so the intelligent-trait cards can just have that number changed without much hassle. But again, we need kill tokens as game material.

Movement: Maybe we can have terrain "levels". Normal terrain such as grasslands, roads, etc. would cost 1 movement point, level1-terrain such as hills, forest, shallow water would cost 2 points and level2-terrain such as mountain, swamp, deep water, etc. would cost 3 points.
Units have "terrain affinity" where the movement cost is reduced by 1, e.g. orcs can move for 1 on hills and 2 on mountains. Other units have "bad terrain" where the level1 version costs 3 points to move across, and they can't cross the level2 version at all. E.g. heavy infantry and horsemen would have terrain disadvantage on hills. Fencers on water etc.
Maybe then we could have a special ability just like leadership, heal etc. which would work like terrain affinity to every terrain. Saurians, Footpads, Dwarves etc. could have that. Another ability "fly" for Ghosts, Drakes and the like, which reduces all terrain cost to 1, even the level2.
... I got carried away a bit there, sorry

I'd come up with some mockups for the game material, but as it turns out I can't handle the Gimp drawing program at all, and I don't have the motivation to get another one.

[AI]

A small modification to the XP system: units of level X count as X kills. More like wesnoth without seriously complicating things.