Ninja Showdown: a sneaky game
-
So here's an idea for a game I had a while ago. Since I really like this forum idea, I shall discuss the idea here, despite the terrible risks of idea theft.
NINJA SHOWDOWN!
To a seemingly idyllic mountain town i feudal Japan, where the cherry trees blossom and scent the air with their heavenly fragrance, come a number of important court officials to relax and forget their courtly worries. But danger is afoot! A number of the officials are actually ninjas in disguise, infiltrating the little town and getting ready to assasinate their targets.
Rules
So you've got a pretty board showing the quaint little mountain town. Something like 20 different court officials are represented both by pieces moving on the board and by cards in a pile. Every player chooses a ninja clan to play. Each clan has a different special ability. One can assasinate over very long distances, another can, when in a shadow, act as though he stands anywhere in that shadow, &c. Anyway.
Each ninja draws a card from the pile of court officials. This is their secret identity. Now they draw another: their first mark.
Gameplay consists of playing cards allowing you to move one or more of the officials on the board. You're trying to get to a position where your secret identity can assassinate your mark. When you do, you reveal your mark and get some points, and draw a new mark. All the other players will of course look carefully at the board to find out which people could have been the murderer and make mental notes, so make sure you're in a crowded place!
Play continues as ninjas assassinate their marks and the numbers of court officials dwindle. If you think you've figured out who's a ninja, you can assassinate them. If you kill an enemy ninja, you get lots of points. If you kill someone who's not your mark and not a ninja, however, you are shamed and lose points, as well as risking your identity for no reason.
Probably, you can choose to reveal your identity when you know you've been discovered. The advantage would be that nobody can control your movement on the board but you. But most likely you're not long for this world.
When a ninja dies, that player takes the role of a samurai. The samurai's only mission is to root out the ninjas and kill them. A samurai can also be killed, of course, for a bunch of points, though the player will just get a new samurai.
I have a few different ideas for how the game ends:
* Play ends when there's just one ninja left.
* Play ends when all ninjas are dead.
* There are a limited number of samurai, and play ends when either all ninjas or all samurai are dead.
Most points win. To summarize, you get points for:
* Killing your mark
* Killing an enemy ninja
* Killing a samurai
* Killing a ninja when you're a samurai
You lose points by killing "innocents".
Thoughts? Comments? It's a memory game combined with risk management. Can you see flaws in the mechanics? -
Great theme, particularly the secret clan abilities.
Does "reveal your mark and get some points" operate entirely on trust that the kill was legal, or is it worth keeping a formal, public track of who could have killed whom, to avoid mistakes? (Perhaps with a separate board listing all the townspeople, and tracking which types of kills could be attributed to them. So when the third kill of the game is the Daimyo, you claim 10 points and put a black shadow-clan stone in the third track space for "Fisherman" and "Blacksmith" who were both standing in the same patch of shadow, and a blue projectile-clan stone in the third track space for "Gardener", who was in line-of-sight for an arrow, without anyone being able to see him fire it.) Framing it that way, it makes the game much more obviously about keeping tabs on a small group of NPC buddies who you can frame for each kill. -
That's a good idea, actually, Kevan. And it doesn't detract from the memory game part so much, as you'll want to remember which person was moved into position for the kill and which people were just standing there.
Though I can't see a method of killing without revealing which player was doing the killing, so I think you'd just place one kind of token at a time. Like, the blue ninja made his kill now, and these people were possibly involved.
I think you'll need to make a couple of moves each turn, or move several people at once, to enable tactics like scattering the people you suspect your enemy to hide behind without sacrificing too much efficiency. I'm thinking cards that do stuff like "Tavern brawl: If the Poet and the Artist are both at the tavern, move one of them next to the other and move everyone at the street outside (within five squares of) the tavern to any square inside, to watch the fight." This would make interesting combo moves possible and also give some cool background flavor to the game. Obviously the Poet and the Artist hate each other, and having a different card placing the Poet and the Artist's Wife together in an otherwise empty room would give an explanation. Then a different card where they make friends, &c. Thus, just by playing out the cards, you also get an interesting story unfolding, depending on the order in which they come into play.
Though that might be hard to do without getting the players to sit around with lots of cards they can't use, since people die off quickly. Probably better with generic cards. They can still kinda tell a story, if well made. -
Ah, are the special ninja abilities public? I assumed they'd be secret, so that working out a player's method would be part of the challenge. It might also be easier to play - if I was openly the shadow ninja, I'd have to move a load of NPC alibis into the shadows before making my kill. If my shadow ability was a secret, I could just make sure that there were enough potential, different assassins scattered around, along with my one shadow ninja.
Event cards sound good. If you want to play around with a method of anonymous killing; maybe have the event cards played simultaneously and anonymously once per round (everyone plays one face down, they get shuffled and then processed in some arbitrary order), and have the "mark" cards just being another type of event card ("The Poet is assassinated!"). All possible Poet-murder suspects would get tagged with a stone, and at the end of the game, everyone reveals their identity and ninja skill, then scores for any murder in which they were the only ninja suspect who was marked with their own ninja-skill stone (which is slightly hazy, but seems the easiest way to do it; if you've shot someone in such a way that it could feasibly have also been the shadow ninja ambushing him in the shadows, then the kill is ambiguous, the public are unconvinced and neither of you scores for it).
Of course, that system would mean that you could only assassinate characters (and opponents!) that you had the card for. It might need two draw decks (and when you draw from the mark deck, you get to pick any card from it), or something. -
This is a really cool idea. I had one thing I wanted to add to it: in addition to clan membership, each official should have a lunar horoscope sign, and every time the players go around the table, the marker moves to the next one. (I realize I'm mixing Chinese horoscopes with Japanese assassins here; feel free to suggest a better handwave.) Other "opposed" markers could move to its oppositional signs.
This not only enables a slightly more generic draw / event deck ("move any Dragon and any Tiger" / "A Monkey has been assassinated!"), it also opens up the possibility of periodically activating powers like the "kill from a distance" thing, which I think is potentially game-breaking if only one clan gets it. You could also record on a character's death certificate that they were killed in the Year of the Pig, for example, thus expanding and recording the pool of suspects as the game goes on. -
It shouldn't be too hard to equalise the ninja powers in playtesting, particularly if the board is a designed grid map. If the shadow ninjas are too weak, make the shadows larger; if the bowmen are too strong, stagger the buildings so that nobody can ever see very far; and so on.
-
How about genericising the event cards by grouping characters by their job type, gender or status? "Tavern Brawl: If two Artistic characters are both at the tavern..." "Assignation: Move a male and a female character to an unoccupied building..."
A developing background narrative is good, but I think you can always rely on your players to build a lot of that themselves; give any gaming group a boardgame with named NPCs, and you'll automatically get character traits emerging from whatever simple game events occur (if a particular NPC always seems to roll a six for his armour save, he'll get a running joke and a rationale). And this would be particularly true in a game where the players were deviously trying to move NPCs around for "no reason", but were able to give a fun, ongoing-narrative reason why they decided to pick the Poet as the second Artistic character for that event card. -
(Incidentally, Simon, I have already managed to steal your ideas.)
-
Kevan, you're right, traits make more sense than a horoscope system. It might even enable a bit of Mystery of the Abbey-style logic gaming, assuming each player has a scratchpad ("I know Holly tends to move a lot of Civil Servant characters around, but they tend to end up next to male Merchants, of which..." etc).
Simon, what's the next step here? Are you interested in this direction, and/or further brainstorming on a list of occupations, clans and board locations? -
I think the ninja clan abilities -have- to be public, so you can verify what a player is doing can be legal.
Is the board divided in squares like game of Clue or just a connected graph of locations?
Some ideas for ninja abilities:
- Blowgun: Can murder anyone in the same row, column or diagonal of you provided there are no obstructions in between
- Smoke Bomb: Can ask all other players to close their eyes, and reposition an official to any other place in the map.
- Wall Climber: Can kill anyone concealed from you by a wall. -
We've got some different possible ideas branching off here, but I think "not revealing which of the NPCs is secretly your ninja" is a strong core element that's worth keeping. Which means that if players are trying to score multiple kills, the game needs a slightly more opaque system for keeping track of whether a kill was legal - I was imagining "The Daimyo is now dead; looking at the board, either the Koi Feeder used a blowpipe, the Gardener poisoned his food, or the Fisherman or Scribe snuck through the shadows. We'll find out for sure at the end of the game." rather than "Hi everyone, I'm the Koi Feeder, and I just blowpiped the Daimyo. See - I have line of sight!"
Design could go either way on whether your ninja clan is secret or open, but I think "either the Koi Feeder used the blowpipe, the Gardener poisoned the food..." has more intrigue than "shadow player says any of these five guys could have shadow-killed the Daimyo; we can ignore the others". It could go either way in playtesting, though - I'm not sure if inadvertently completing another ninja's kill ("Behold, for it was I who killed the Daimyo, with my trusty crossbow!" "Actually, ahem, I was standing right behind him with this garrotte wire when he died.") would be an interesting danger, or an annoying disappointment. -
Ah, I suppose I don't really mean "completing", I just mean "giving" - it's possible to kill a target in such a way that one of your NPC stooges was actually a rival ninja poised with exactly the right sort of attack (even if they were actually on their way to kill someone else). I was still on the "anonymous killing" branch, though, where the game ends with "so, we've got this big pile of bodies, let's see who actually killed them" - if it turns out that two ninjas could legally have killed a particular target, we have no way of backtracking to prove who played the kill card, so might as well split (or nullify) the score for that target.
If players are openly playing the kill cards in front of them, though, we can obviously keep track of who made each kill. And maybe that's actually better, for getting a sense of how everyone's doing. -
I think openly playing kill cards along with the cluedo-style scratchpad is a good idea:
Every ninja has two (poosibly three) abilities, like blowgun, shadow ninja, garrotte wire and so on. These are randomised at the beginning of the game. Several players can (should) have one ability in common.
Mark cards have the NPC name on them, and are drawn randomly whenever you have no mark. In the beginning each player draws one, which then tells them which NPC is secretly their ninja. At a certain point in the game, these are shuffled back into the draw pile (so that one can get a mission to kill another ninja).
When you position your ninja so that he could kill your mark, you reveal your kill card and take the victim's piece away. You then place tokens on the NPC board representing the powers that could have been used to kill them. And that's meaning all the ways it could possibly have happened, since everyone knows which abilities there are in the game.
This way, one would know how many kills every player has, and can note down the possible methods: all player A's kills were performed with either a blowgun or a wire, then those two are pretty good guesses for A's abilities.
Now I realize that this is essentially the original version but with randomised abilities, kill method tokens and a scratchpad, and maybe it would be better to keep with Simon's version, with mental notes instead. As long as everyone agrees that there was at least one way for a victim to be killed, it's up to each player to find out all the possible ways. However, without the tokens you have to trust the other players, since one could actually claim to kill someone when it actually was just an NPC who stood behind him. Hmm... -
I think that in my group of friends, scratchpads would come into play anyway, so a game design that includes them is probably stronger. There are plenty more things to try and mentally keep track of than "who could have killed X" anyway--you want to remember who moved that victim there to begin with, for instance, or who played an event card that moved a potential victim OUT of the shadows, since you're trying to kill your fellow ninja.
Jonatan, I like the idea of powers being randomized, but I think the kill-method-token board and the scratchpads would be basically redundant to each other, wouldn't they? Also, if the goal of the game is to kill off your fellow players by means of deduction, keeping the character card you originally drew OUT of the deck would reinforce that; I feel like it would be really cheap if I was killed because somebody just drew my card, instead of carefully determining my identity and plotting to bring me down. -
About putting the card back in: that would be by the end, when there's like three or four ordinary cards left. Or wait, better idea: by that time, you start putting in cards named "the blue ninja". If you haven't figured it out by then, well, now you don't have anything else to do in the meantime. Maybe?
-
Holy smokes, there are a lot of stuff here. Thanks everyone for great ideas! My thoughts at the moment:
First of all, while I might do something with the idea, anyone stealing it would be a relief rather than an annoyance, since it would mean I don't have to. If it's to be published, it will be in print and play format.
Second, I think a playtest would be needed to determine whether ninja abilities should be hidden or open. It's basically down to pacing, right? If it's open, the narrowing down of suspects might be too quick. Or maybe it's too slow if you have many abilities to consider. Randomising several kill abilities might be an idea. Also down to pacing, basically. So all that is playtest based.
Ninjas will not get missions to kill each other. That's definite. You don't put your mark card in with the rest of them. If you think you've figured out who's a ninja, you always get points for killing them. Also, scratch pads would probably even out some of the memory differences and make an assurance of kill legality. You can't make a cheat kill, since they'll all cross your character out and it'll be obvious you cheated.
As to different attributes, I like it very much. You get interesting decisions when you have a couple of people to choose from. You can still get cards that have no effect, though Need to find a way to deal with that.
So, anyway, since I'm pretty busy and have a bad track record, is anyone interested in actually trying to make this game with me? If I do it by myself, I will most likely pewter off, but if there are two (or more!) of us, we could motivate each other. There are a lot of roles, cards and places to define. Or maybe we could just brainstorm in this thread. Also, playtesting will be easier. Anyone? -
I'd be happy to work on this. What's the Internet like for communal boardgame playtesting, these days? I've got a rusty old custom-card-deck MUSH object, and if the board was grid-based, it'd be easy enough to read out moves. Could maybe set up a couple of wiki pages somewhere - one for the kill track, and one image-heavy page for the board, with CSS-floating images for pawns.
(In fact, a wiki would be useful for thrashing out rulesets generally. Any plans to set one up, or repurpose the Dispatch one, Brendan?) -
Awesome! If this board can be used for collaborative board game creation, that'd be so sweet. For playtesting, I think maybe http://www.vassalengine.org>Vassal? I haven't used it, so I don't know how much work it would be. I'm a descent photoshop guy, so I could probably make a lot of graphics, if I could find the time. A wiki would be so awesome.
-
I've heard Vassal mentioned on S-G, and I gather it's a virtual tabletop, but I'm not specifically familiar with it. How does it compare with MapTool, and other virtual tabletops?
Also, though I doubt anyone has a good answer for this one, does anyone have any idea how well it would function with a crappy internet connection from Iraq? Specifically, does it seem to have trouble running when largish image files are being used? -
I really wish I had more time. I'm hoping we'll get a wiki; that'd make coming up with cards and roles and stuff a lot easier to manage.
-
I'm in for online playtesting and brainstorming.
-
Uh, yeah. Damn, I totally suck for not hanging around here, but I've got too much stuff going on. I'll se if I can guilt myself to show up more often, but otherwise, do as you wish with the game. The licence is fine. Go for it.
-
Thanks for the go-ahead. I've now posted your ruleset verbatim to the Codex page, and have made a stab at summarising my own thoughts on secret murder mechanisms.
Putting the thoughts down in order, they suggest a possible, neat endgame of "when there are as many officials left as there are players, everyone takes off their masks and the game ends", if the initial identity cards are kept out of assassination-target circulation for the whole game. Although this does make the ninja-on-ninja combat a little harder to pull off. Maybe it could use a Cluedo-style "I blow my cover and garrotte the Fisherman, because I'm really, really sure that he's Bob" option, once the court deck has been emptied; if I guess wrong - if anyone can reveal the Fisherman card from their hand - I'm in trouble. (Not sure how it should work if the Fisherman was actually a different player, though.)
I'm also wondering whether different scores for different assassination targets would add depth, or just introduce a frustrating random element if you draw nothing but low cards. (If I've got the 1-point Beggar card, I might kill him off when I'm all the way across town, just to cloud suspicions, or just stab him in the crowd and not care too much if a couple of other players get a point from it. If I've got the 10-point Daimyo, though, I really want to make sure that I'm the only ninja who's anywhere within range, when he dies.) -
I think different scores for different targets is going to be frustratingly random unless the higher point values are counterbalanced along some orthogonal axis--as in Ticket to Ride, say, where higher-scoring routes are longer and more difficult to complete. Do we have a "kill difficulty" lever we can adjust for different targets? Maybe certain types of officials are subject to fewer event cards, which means you have to move a number of other officials toward them rather than moving them out in the open, which would be worth more points.
-
Event cards are a good solution. Maybe it could be as simple as three or four social levels (labour/mercantile/priesthood/government), each scored from 1 through 4 - there'd be plenty of thematic reasons for events to only apply to particular social classes, and it'd be easy to weight it so that priests and government officials didn't move around so much. (There could even be built-in restrictions for the higher classes; priesthood can't enter certain buildings, government aren't even allowed to leave the daimyo's court.)
I'm not sure if it's a problem that some of the players will be subject to these restrictions, since they'll each be one of the characters. To some extent I think it probably balances out - the Gardener can move himself around quite freely, but he'll also get moved around a lot and will have to spend event cards just to get back into position; the Daimyo can't move very far or very often, but is also fairly safe from being moved to somewhere he doesn't want to be. (To be fair, I suppose we should let players draw X court cards and pick one, when being assigned a character, so that they aren't forced into a role they don't want to play today. You could even prepare little one-of-each-rank hands at the start, to guarantee a full choice.) -
So, for my original rules, I think that maybe the easiest way to do the movement would be with cards moving specific people, but that have alternative instructions for if the people in question are dead. So a card might be "Move the Fisherman to any empty house. If the Fisherman is dead, move anyone up to five squares." This could, if well done, lead to some interesting endgame play where the instructions at the end are more general and maybe have different characteristics, changing the gameplay.
Anyway, Kevan, your "Secret Death" rules are interesting. I was personally quite fond of the Samurai, though (as long as they're extra hard to kill in some way so they don't die too easy). I liked that a player whose ninja is dead is not out of the game and may indeed still win and even score points.
Also, I think there is a risk of cards being less and less useful as the characters die in your variant (instead of more and more useful, as in my version above). What if all the officials are killed? Do all those cards do nothing? What if only one official is left?
Love the event cards, though. Stuff like the rain card you use as an example. Awesome. That sort of thing can be used in elaborate ruses to smoke people out. If I suspect you're the Poet, but don't want to risk the negative points by killing you, I can lock the Poet into a house and watch to see if you start working to fulfill the conditions that'll set him free. -
Good point about alternate instructions. Requiring the main subject to be dead has a nice sense of theme to it; that the secondary effects will sometimes be townsfolk trying to do the work of their dead colleague, and will sometimes be the consequences of the dead citizen not being around. But making the primary targets as specific as "the Fisherman" might make for a frustrating early game for an unlucky player, if the cards they draw mean that they can't actually move themselves or their target, for the first few turns of the game.
It could be worth having players draw back up to three cards at the end of each turn, rather than drawing a card at the start of each turn, to encourage card thrashing; if I've got cards that move the Gardener and Fisherman, but my current target is the Daimyo, I might just play them to get them out of my hand. (Which could be a good thing to encourage, if every time I play a card I pretend that I "just want to get it out of my hand", and don't actually have any interest in the Fisherman being moved to the riverside, opposite that window that the Poet is looking out from...)
On the other hand, constantly playing and drawing cards (and shuffling the discards) can get a little wearying. How about having a compulsory "move three characters three squares each" phase of each turn, to keep the townsfolk moving around, and to give players a chance to move themselves, their stooges and their target without needing specific cards? You'd use event cards purely for big, sudden moves - either to set up a kill, to foil another player, or to throw everyone off the scent. -
I like both the compulsory-movement idea (the officials should be constantly shifting around, after all) and the alternate-card-effects. Maybe there need to be three characteristics per official--rank, name and color, say, which I think was mentioned at some point in the thread. "Move the Fisherman to any water-bordering space OR move a Mercantile official four spaces OR move two Green officials two spaces each," maybe? Is that too much text per card?
-
I think it's probably okay - a minor, third effect like "move two Green officials" will either be at the forefront of your mind if you or your current target are Green, and ignorable hand filler otherwise. In terms of text you could even shrink it down to a number in the corner of every card, and have the third effect always being "move X color-Y townsfolk X spaces each" or something.
It feels a little abstract, though; I was imagining that - going back to Simon's original poet-brawling storytelling - each event card could signify an actual, small situation in the town, and that any alternate effects would still be able to fit within that story ("Catch of the Day: Move the Fisherman from a water-adjacent square to the Market, and draw two cards. If the Fisherman is dead, move any character from a water-adjacent square to the Market and draw one card." or "Bandit Raid: Move the Guard or the Soldier to the Watchtower. If both of them are dead, move every townsperson who is outside into a building.").
Making the event cards describe actual events gives us a lot of free and useful mileage from the human thirst for narrative. It's hard to explain why you decided to move the Cook rather than the Flower-Seller, when you played that abstract "move a Mercantile character four spaces" card, but easier (and more fun) to explain why the Cook is taking a fish to market in the Fisherman's absence. -
Okay, let's go with that ("Move specific character to specific place; if he or she is dead, move any character to that place and draw") and keep the color/number corner as a backup option if we find the specific cards too restrictive.
So let's brainstorm a list of officials here, to begin with, at ranks 1-4, where 4s will be the hardest to affect with event cards.
Rank 1 (Labor?)
Fisherman
Blacksmith
Cook
Soldier
Basketweaver
Beggar
Ox-Minder
Carpenter
Rank 2 (Mercantile?)
Flower-Seller
Innkeep
Chickenmonger
Hostler
Jeweler
Gangster
Wine Merchant
Rank 3 (Priesthood/Artists?)
Poet
Artist
Temple Guard
Courtesan
Shrine Dancer
Monk
Rank 4 (Government/Nobility?)
Daimyo
Overseer
Imperial Liaison
Noble Daughter -
Looks good. It might be helpful to brainstorm locations and event cards at the same time, on the wiki somewhere, so that we can shake out any obvious omissions as we go along (rather than thinking up a great location later on, and having to drop someone to make room for its owner).
Do we have a feel for how many event cards the game might need? It might help the balance of design to have one card per official (which is usually "move that official in a dramatic way; or do something else if they're dead"), then a bunch of rank-level cards ("move a labourer in some way; or do something else if all the labourers are dead"), then a bunch of weird extra ones.
Incidentally, reading up a bit on the history, the Edo period actually had four castes (samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants), which might be a useful touchstone here. (Most strikingly, the merchants were actually considered to be the lowest class of the four, below labourers.) -
Huh, interesting, although I'd have a hard time coming up with enough farmers, and "samurai" has a pretty specific connotation already. Maybe just switch the ordering of ranks 1 and 2, and then put the Fisherman back in rank 1, for some hint of authenticity.
I like the one-per-official, x-rank-cards and y-weird-cards assortment; I think it will fall to playtesting to determine how many cards we need. -
I've started brainstorming some cards on the wiki. I'm not doing much to make the higher ranks harder to move around - now that I'm writing the cards, I'm wondering if it might be useful to have a generic keyword for "lowest rank that's still on the board". Maybe "lowly official"? That way we can write cards like "Move the Flower-Seller to any outdoor square. (If the Flower-Seller is dead, move a lowly official to any outdoor square.)" which would mean that "lowly official" was "merchant" until all the merchants were dead, and wouldn't be any use for moving the highest-rank officials until every other rank had been completely killed off. This doesn't quite work with the current rules (some ninjas will be disguised as merchants, and will stick around for a long time), but seems like it could be a useful direction to think in.
The actual Edo hierarchy goes Samurai (ruling), Farmers (essential goods), Artisans (non-essential goods) and Merchants (non-producing freeloaders). I'm not sure this entirely fits with the idea of higher bounties on the heads of higher classes, but does seem like a nice historical detail to pick up, if you're playing the game. -
So here are, I think, all the locations already mentioned:
Rock Garden
"Water"
Temple
Inn
Market
Palace
A lot of the cards Kevan's already sketched out make use of inside/outside distinctions; I think we probably need to keep the board around 60-40 outside-inside. Assuming that the Inn, the Temple and the Palace count as "inside" and the Market and Rock Garden count as "outside," that means we need those three buildings to be relatively large on the map. We also need to make sure that their interiors provide lots of variation on lines of sight.
Any other locations we should add? -
Line-of-sight is something we need to think about - given that the game involves secret crossbow shots, should we keep line-of-sight to simple "orthogonal or diagonal line", so that a player doesn't have to check anything with a ruler before playing their "Daimyo has been killed" card?
I think we could probably get away with boring, small, rectangular buildings (3x3 for the inn is probably plenty, if there aren't any "move everyone to the inn" cards), and leave most of the interesting line-of-sight challenges for the streets. Maybe we could scatter a lot of small, unimportant buildings, purely to give ninja something to sneak between.
In terms of the map, are the walls going to be one square thick, or will we just draw thick borders around buildings, with a gap for the door? (Would windows be interesting, to shoot through?) -
I think the board will be claustrophobic enough with just the number of buildings and outdoor areas that you've already, without taking up squares for walls. A thick border should be sufficient, I think.
Windows, if easily distinguished from doors, would be an interesting options. -
Yeah, I'd say "if a rook or a bishop couldn't get there, then it doesn't work as line of sight for an arrow." Maybe we could even do some subtle checkered highlighting on the map to make it more intuitive.
I agree about windows--thick lines for walls, blue lines for windows, open spaces with a path leading up to them for doors. -
I've sketched up a basic first draft map to see what things look like (click for the big version, or go here to get the original PSD). There's a lot of blank space that needs to be filled, but I'm not sure if that means we should make the board smaller, the buildings bigger, or just add more buildings. I'd be tempted to try the third option (just adding a load of meaningless buildings to fill the gaps), and see how it goes with playtesting.
Actually, looking at it, "trees" might be good as one-square obstacles (you can't enter them or take line of sight through them) which we could dot around as required. They'd be good for a couple of event cards, and could even be the basis for another ninja attack power.
It also looks like we might not actually need windows, since the doors alone open up the lines of sight quite a lot. I'm not sure how diagonal line-of-sight should work through doors, though. -
It definitely needs... more.
I'm imagining something about twice that size. If it were 26 inches square with a 1-inch border and 1-inch tiles, you'd have a lot of space to work with. The market should be more than an open area; It should be stalls, carts and stacks of goods. The palace could include another location or two, such as a balcony. Then you could dot in a couple residences and some trees, maybe another watchtower, possibly with a wall between them, and a gate.
As for diagonal line of sight through doors.. There ain't none. Simple. That also makes windows a bit more useful, as simply not being in line of sight of the door makes a given character safer. -
I think we need a playtest to get a feel for how much space the officials need - is a crowded board too easy (because there are plenty of alibis when you make a kill) or too difficult (because people keep walking into your line of sight)? It feels like a larger, sparsely populated board would make it easier to work out who the ninjas are (because each kill will only have a few suspects), but maybe that's a healthy incentive to set up elaborate alibis and bluffs right from the start.
I was wondering how to do the market stalls. I guess a general "obstacle" mechanic would be useful here, for trees, stalls, stacks, carts, statues, and rocks - if a square has a picture of a thing in it, then you can't enter or see through that square. -
A larger board, yes. Sparsely populated, not so much.
I imagine crowds of people being clustered on the board, providing mobile obstacles as well as the stationary obstacles provided by buildings, et al. I'm realizing with just officials and samurai on the board, it's unlikely to happen that way.
Maybe there could be generic 'villager' pawns, and each card draw allows you to move up to x villagers a short ways, so you can take advantage of milling crowds to open and close options as you like. -
If we're using the "each turn, you have to move three officials" mechanic to encourage milling, anonymous villagers might detract from the casual bluffing of that (as any player choosing to move a named official rather than a faceless villager will instantly draw suspicion). It's nice if a character who seems faceless to you might actually be another player's ninja, or primary target. But I guess there are plenty of other ways to do it.
A few livestock pawns might be nice, actually, with a few farmer-related cards to control them.
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!