Game Deconstruction: Battle Platform Antilles

In Battle Platform Antilles, you take command of a group of 7 of Earth's most advanced battleships, called Paladins, in an effort to dismantle a dangerous alien AI that has been terrorizing the galaxy. Previously thought to be dormant and harmless, the battle platform came to life, moving and devastating several Earth colonies, and spurring the Earth to take action. Heavily outgunned by the extremely complex alien technology, you have 9 turns to use your wits to outsmart the alien AI and make the galaxy safe again (with careful application of heavy ordinance).




The game is single player, with the player directly controlling the Paladins and rolling a die to create random actions for the Battle Platform they are attempting to destroy. The Paladin turn plays as one might expect, moving your ships and taking shots at the Battle Platform. The Battle Platform turn, on the other hand, is a series of several dice rolls, with each roll of the 20-sided die determining the actions the platform takes such as firing shots (each of which destroy your ships in a single hit) and recharging its shields. Shots from the Antilles take random trajectories also determined by dice rolls, meaning that it is impossible to predict where to place your Paladins without being hit.

The playing field

The gameboard is a large field of hexagons around the stationary Antilles. The Paladins have a range of 3, while the Antilles' projectiles travel until they leave the edge of the board. The random trajectories of the Antilles, while different types have different effects, always travel within this "danger zone" upon their first turn of movement.

There are only 2 types of objects in the main game: Paladins and Missiles. The Paladins are allowed to go anywhere on the gameboard in their turn, being equipped with advanced propulsion and warp technology. The missiles move on random trajectories, zigzagging all over the place and being very difficult to avoid as a result, even with the ability to freely move Paladins wherever you like.

The "scoreboard"

There is a second board used to keep track of the Antilles, which simply consists of some hit counters and tables to help you with understanding what your rolls are doing. There are 3 layers to the Antilles consisting of Shields, which can be recharged, Armor, which can only be hit by a high roll or after the shields are downed, and Bolt Casters, which you can attack after the Armor and Shields are down to reduce the number of moves the platform gets and ultimately destroy it.

The Paladins must destroy the Battle Platform in 9 turns. At the end of the game, you must evaluate damages and determine the end result based on how many Paladins were destroyed and how much the Antilles was damaged. This means that it is possible to lose even without getting hit by the Antilles, as the mission was to destroy the Antilles, not to get out with no casualties.

The game relies almost entirely on chance rather than any kind of learned skills, with every single action of your enemy being randomly determined by dice rolling, along with each shot your ships take being random dice results as well. While there is some merit to learning the most common rolls and being able to avoid those, it's really not something you can reliably predict or strategize. While a somewhat frustrating element, it also works well with the narrative, one of a bunch of random people in spaceships taking potshots at a mysterious alien behemoth in a desperate attempt to stop it.

The game, while it is a bit odd to learn, is an interesting experience that I would think is well worth the 45-60 minutes it takes to print out, cut out, set up, and play through.

You can download Battle Platform Antilles from BattlePlay Games here. All you need to provide is a 20-sided die.

I Have No Friends: Roshambo Champion, Escape of the Dead, and Delve

It was a rainy night and I needed something to do, and so I found a few Print & Play games that could be played solo and required very little extra components, just a few dice and a pencil.

Roshambo Champion

 

My first game of the night was Roshambo Champion, a fun little game about cheating and rolling low. You are in a Rock-Paper-Scissors championship, and based on a few quick rolls at the beginning you have a Great Advantage (For this playthrough I got Smoothness, which allowed me to cheat without the usual consequence for failure, decreased sneakiness), a Crippling Weakness (I got Paper Fetish, meaning I could only play Paper unless I cheated), and a set number of Bribes and Sneakiness points.

The game is very quick to learn and quite a bit of fun. Your opponents are cards that briefly explain their strategies, allowing you to simulate them and use your sneakiness and bribery to outwit and defeat them.

I lucked out in my Weakness/Advantage combination, as though I needed to cheat to play anything other than Paper, if I failed the cheat attempt I didn't lose Sneakiness (In order to cheat, you must roll below or equal to your sneakiness. For each failed attempt, you lose a point of this stat and cheating becomes much harder.)

I ultimately emerged triumphant in spite of some close calls, (particularly against the guy that only played scissors, that was an unfortunate combination) and am now the proud Roshambo Champion.

I would highly recommend this one, as while it seems a bit complicated when you're reading through it, it is incredibly simple to play and goes very quickly. It's very challenging, I think my victory could only be attributed to unbelievable beginner's luck, and I think any average player would find it challenging as well as fun. It would be interesting to see a 2-player variant of this.

Escape of the Dead

Escape of the Dead is a game so simple that the rules, board, and pieces all fit on one piece of paper. You must fend off an ever increasing number of zombies while repairing your barricade and ultimately trying to fix your getaway car. Everything is based on dice rolls, which you assign to these three tasks out of 4 dice. Killing 10 zombies gives you a bonus (such as killing all zombies in your yard, autofixing the car, etc.), and the more repaired the car gets the more zombies appear per turn (up to 6).

It's very quick-paced, but also surprisingly frantic, as the closer you get to victory the more it seems to slip out of your reach as you botch rolls and the zombies pile up, tearing apart your barricade.

I very narrowly won with only 2 points left in my barricade and 5 zombies in the yard, after taking a risky gamble and throwing all my dice into repairing the car.

I enjoyed this game as well, it seemed to be pretty well balanced and fast-paced, with a nice mix of strategic and luck-based elements. Again, seeing a 2-player variant would be interesting, perhaps giving a Zombie player similar tasks to divide amongst rolls and making the game a race against the clock.

Delve

This game seemed to have a fair following when I found it. The rules are very basic to anyone that knows how Yahtzee works, simply altering the rolls to apply to the player's 4 Adventurers to indicate varying attacks and damage.

There's not much to say about this one, unfortunately. While the other 3 classes' attacks required specific numbers or sequences thereof that, even with 3 rolls of 6 dice, were very unlikely to occur, while the Wizard's spells not only did damage to all monsters in a given instance, but relied only on getting 4-6 of a kind, something much easier to attain and much more useful. I blazed through the game in a matter of minutes, as the Wizard nuked everything with fireballs and lightning.

The only real challenge was the Dragon at the end, but as my party had made it through the dungeon almost entirely unscathed, I made quick work of him as well.

The idea for this was interesting, but either due to poor balancing or possibly my own misunderstanding of the rather simple rules, it hardly presents any kind of interesting challenge or replay interest.

 

Board Game Geek Links (Check them out for yourself!):

Roshambo Champion
Escape of the Dead
Delve

Rewards in Gameplay

Rewards are a major element of game design: They motivate the player to move on and keep playing the game in spite of obstacles, as well as outdoing any competitors, in order to achieve the reward at the end.

Rewards can be a lot of things, such as points, leveling up, cosmetic and practical gear, prestigious titles, narrative advancement, and any other things in the game that set goals for the player and help to move them forward.

It's very tricky to balance rewards and gameplay in a satisfactory manner. If the game is too difficult or tedious, the reward will very quickly lose all value and the player will lose interest. This is a common effect in MMO/RPGs, where leveling up becomes so difficult at a certain point that the player has to repeatedly "grind" activities they previously only needed to do one or two times.

If the reward is too easily obtained, on the other hand, the game will still lose its value as there is no challenge. The reward, regardless of how great it seems, will be worthless because the player can achieve it with nearly no effort.

As a result of the importance of this balance, how the game designer uses rewards can have a powerful effect on the success or failure of the game.

Gamers and Cameras

After listening to tutorials on Adobe Premiere for 4 hours and counting, I can't help thinking about film and editing. In game design terms, these don't really have a lot of use outside of things like cutscenes or other similar narrative segments, as often cameras are accused of interfering with players and often just being frustrating in general. However cameras themselves are very relevant, being the window through which the player experiences the game.

I'm not sure where specifically in time games went from stationary cameras to the free-roaming, player-following entities they are now (presumably around the time 3D games became popular), but I can't help but wonder whether untethering the camera from the environment and connecting it to the player character instead was really a good idea.

I mean, it seems to make sense, right? Have the camera follow the character around, so you see the same things they can see and experience the world in the first person, exploring and fighting right in the middle of things. It's a simple enough conclusion to come to, and works fine most of the time aside from the occasional graphical glitch where the camera gets hung up on things, but that can be fixed as technology marches on.

However, I feel like there are a lot of cinematic opportunities that are missed by chaining the camera to the player and only breaking that link when the player does not have direct control of events limits a lot of opportunities for better gameplay and cinematic experience.

Let's take something simple like Super Mario on the NES. While the camera technically follows the player, it's still zoomed way out into a wide shot that reveals much of the environment in both directions. This creates a strategic effect, making the player evaluate what's ahead while simultaneously dealing with what is immediately around him such as enemies or blocks. If the camera were closer, it would be unfair to the player, forcing them to make leaps of faith and even memorize the locations of narrow platforms or enemies that they would normally be able to see coming much earlier.

I'm not suggesting that close camera needs to go out completely, of course, as there are whole genres that rely on the limited scope of a close camera to amplify their gameplay, such as horror or shooter games. However, I think it's important for game designers to remember that the player is not dumb, and doesn't need the camera stapled to their character's head to know where they are or to be immersed in the environment.