Battle of the Gods

You may remember the 10x10x10 blog from a month or so ago, you may also have just read about the midyear exhibition we had. When we had 1 week until the show I realised I had nothing to show that represented me the way I wanted to be seen, I had a shit scrappy looking game, a low quality looking video and then just a very fleshed out idea proposal. As I said that I like real proper outcomes especially I felt that this wouldn't do.

Out of the 3 projects the only one I was excited about enought to make into something really cool within 1 week was the game. So what needed fixing in my game?

Currently nothing happened in playtime because of moving around and attacking being nearly impossible, and needing to move to attack. Squares for movement allowed too few directions, and there were too few squares to warrant moving at all really. I fixed this by introducing a bigger, hexagonal playing area

This is what we played on first to get the rules ironed out. The other thing was that it made no sense that a goat took as many hits to kill as a dragon, so the different monsters needed to have different HP values, and the only way to balance this was to make each player take a group of monsters in their team. 4 felt like the right number, so I changed the 1 0-5 dice into 4 regular 6 sided dice.

Using the 10 monsters I already had I assigned them HP values based on their groupings from before, so Dragon and Squid were 4HP (originally 6, but this was too high) Stone Golem and Laser Shark were 3HP, Fire Ghost and Giant Spider were 2HP and Human Warrior, Milipede, Goat and Eagle were 1HP. Sticking with the 10HP thing from before I decided that players would select a team of monsters up to a total of 10 HP, players could not exceed this HP and they had to take a minimum of 4 monsters.

The way the game now worked was Player A and B roll a dice each, the highest decides whether to choose a monster first or have the first turn. Then players take it in turns to choose monsters, up to a max HP of 10. Then monsters were placed on the field along the edge closest to their player. The 4 dice are rolled, they still represent energy. Originally all energy was pooled, but then creatures like goat would just race forwards and head butt everyone on a good roll or just run up to dragon and machine gun head butt him 4 times. To counteract this the rules were changed to: You had to spend a dice on each remaining monster before you could spend an additional dice on them and each monster can only attack a monster once per turn, it may attack as many monsters as it can but each one can only receive 1 attack.

This meant that high energy attackers (squid, dragon) had to be kept in reserve until towards the end of the game because with only 1 dice they could at best move 2 hex tiles and attack, whereas Human Warrior could move 5 hex tiles and attack, making him more useful early on. This made the 1HP guys feel like pawns and the 4HP guys feel like queens (to use chess terms) with 2 and 3HP guys in between obviously.

Terrain was decided by shuffling the terrain cards and then drawing 1 at random, if your monster was good in that terrain it moved at double speed (1 energy moving it 2 hex tiles) this encouraged players to make sure that within their team they had a range of terrains covered.

Finally to add some variety to the battlefield each game each player took it in turns to place 3 obstacles on the board, making 6 of the hexagonal tiles impassable to monsters. No ranged attacks through them, no movement through them, only around them.

Because the game was so good Dan, Anastasia and Sajan wanted to get involved, because there was a lot to do within 1 week I was happy with this arrangement and tasked them with the drawing of the monsters (excluding Squid, as I already had a cool drawing of a squid from my Natural History Museum drawings).

My initial plan was to have a thick game board that would have a gap in it that I could slide a picture of the terrain into, I planned to have them as print outs but dropped this idea as it felt cumbersome, and the battlefield could just as well be represented by a card that you shuffled and drew out randomly.

original monster card design

original battlefield card design

original card backs design

I had planned to make cards similar to pokemon, but instead decided to make a big deal of the wooden rustic aesthetic. Instead we searched for something wooden we could use for cards, we thought coasters originally but Dan got some mousetraps and they worked really well. Because they were a different size to regular cards (wider and shorter) the design needed to be changed a bit.

monster cards

The drawings are by Anastasia Ivanova, Daniel de Sosa and Sajan Rai, I only drew Squid, but I did the design of the cards. I quite like the variety of styles on the cards, that's the way pokemon does it.

battlefield cards

These are all my own design. We changed the cards to black and white so that when we glued the printed sheets onto the mousetraps and varnished them everything would still stand out.

card backs

Dan came up with this sun and moon conflict idea on the board, and we carried it over to the back of cards. The cards were really successful in the end, Dan glued and varnished them, and they came out like this:

I created a mock up out of foam board for the game board, then placed it over the top of a 60x45x 1.5cm piece of wood.

Dan then took over making the board, here's some pictures of him doing some cool shit:

Whilst Dan was in charge of sorting out the board my part was to make the playing pieces. We searched Camden for little animal toys, a lot of what we found was too big, and we didn't have all of the animals we were after, but I have some experience in sculpting small models out of putty, at a smaller scale than I needed in fact, so it wasn't too hard. At this point a couple of the characters changed, Fire Ghost became Fire Bat and Giant Spider became Science Rat. I tried to sculpt a Giant Spider but it was really hard, I couldn't sculpt it solidly, I needed thinner wire, which is why we changed it to Science Rat when we found a little Zodiac Rat keyring. Some models I just made alteration to the toys, for instance Millipede is an upside down stegosaurus type dinosaur with the legs removed, Stone Golem is a gorilla who had all the fur chipped off, Human Warrior was a toy from a Donald Duck film, so I shaved the duck down so it looked like he knight in armour, then made a sword out of plasticard. Here's some pictures of me making the models:

 Laser Shark, made from  a hippo toy with extra bits sculpted on

 (from left to right) Squid, Laser Shark, Giant Spider

 Fire Bat made from a upside down lion's head with extra bits sculpted on

After all the models were built I attached them to the tops of 2x2x5cm blocks of wood, I primed them with light blue spray paint, as I thought it was a better midpoint between black and white, then painted each monsters name onto the blocks of wood, in white and black, and then painted the models.

Then when everything was glued and dried we varnished the lot, this would protect everything and shade the monster models.

For the obstacles Dan bought some nice looking stones from Camden Lock market. I'm really happy with how the whole game came together in just 1 week, and I think it looks really good. Things that need addressing; whilst the models are quite cool, they keep breaking, I want to make a more totem like object, just one piece of wood carved into with a drawing and the monster name, but I'm considering flat tokens or 3D printed models.

We took the game into uni for the show the next day and everyone thought it looked really cool, I printed up a set of rules so people could see how to play it without my explaining it personally.

Feedback was really positive, at one point I went into the room we were doing the show in and saw 2 girls playing Battle of the Gods, I knew then that the rules were understandable and the board attractive enough to invite play. I was making Christmas cards to raise funds for Backwards Burd in the print room, so I got to the show about 20 mins in, when I got there the lights were switched off and an hour or so long video reel started, I think it discouraged people from wandering around and engaging with any of the things on the walls or tables. To play my game you would have had to stand in front of the screen everyone was watching videos on. I'm glad I didn't put my Perfect Guide video in the video reel, it had enough shit, overly long, videos.

I should probably quickly explain where the game title comes from, I thought it would be cool if you played as a God, and that's why you can summon such an eclectic group of monsters to fight for you all across the world. Plus, I'm hoping people find the title a bit confrontational so it sticks in their minds, or even better gets discussed as a result. Plus it sounds cool and has only ever been a subtitle of things up until now.

I need to make some more monsters, less general, more special unique powers. I will do this over the Christmas holiday, as it's really fun to play and come up with new monsters, try to figure out what they can do, how fair it all is etc, and Dan and Sajan are very happy to play against me and each other to playtest the new stuff.