At the beginning of the design process, for this game, I imagined that the characters were all connected through radio waves using headphones and microphones and even most of the times connected to a close central command HQ, like an underground moving driller occupied by the Intelligence service who would dispatch orders and directions to their above the ground troops. Also I wanted to get away from all the ordinary commonly used game mechanics to activate your various miniatures and try to find something new that could match the above simulation. Meaning, when you are awaiting for your superiors orders through air-waves it’s not always so easy, and you cannot always get the info right away, hear well or interpret in the right way some orders, there might be some perturbations in the signal, the radio frequencies you are using could be scrambled (and that comes in with the Radio Scrambling rule), and so on...
To simulate all that I had to find a game mechanic that allows sufficient freedom to the players so that they can perform actions according to their objectives, but on the other hand this shouldn’t be too easy because of all these chain of orders and transmission problems. To define more clearly what I had in mind in terms of translating the rules back to what they are supposed to simulate : to my POV (Point Of View) each player is partly playing the command centre distributing orders from their remote HQ or vehicle, and partly playing the leader characters in the team he is controlling. This is why some leaders bring extra Command Points during the Initiative Phase, it’s because they are able and allowed to take some of their own decisions on the field and radio-transmit orders to their troop or act on their own.
From all the game mechanics I had imagined it seemed that the Order Tiles system was the most flexible and yet with some constraints that I had.
The constraints:
And even with these constraints, we can really feel when playing the game that the players still have lots of choices and combining possibilities, at least sufficient freedom and control to be able to perform almost any type of combinations of actions to reach the goals they strategically aim for.
Then also, the tiles are very useful to keep track of how many Command Points each character has already used this turn.
Play tests went on and on.... and apart from the tile distribution, nothing has changed since the original design of this new order / activation mechanic.
Welcome aboard a brand new tile order activating system ;) I hope you’ll enjoy... |
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