HoN Board Game Design Note Summery #1

Introduction:

So, I have decided to undertake the creation of a board game based on HoN. My goal here is to create a fun, team game, with a high level of replay value. I want to get to a point where we can make a print and play version, or maybe find a way to set it up digitally to test, but in any case it’s mostly about the journey and trying to apply the things that make both HoN and board games fun together.

I’m going to attempt to document my design process, but honestly there are way too many notes and ideas and such to throw out there, so I’m going to try and write nice little summaries like this one.

Big Picture Baby:

There seems to be a distinct lack of competitive team based board games, think 2v2, 3v3. There are certainly cooperative games (Pandemic, Arkham Horror, and Shadows over Camelot), there are also games where players compete against a master player or two who fills a fundamentally different role (Last Night on Earth, Mansions of Madness) but very few games that fill any sort of team vs team game on even footing. There are exceptions, like the (out of print?) Warcraft 2v2 game, or rules that modify duties between two players, or rule variations, but it’s not exactly a saturated market.

So that is our first goal, competitive team based game. The particular flavor I’m interested in exploring is applying a mostly deck building approach (Dominion, Nightfall) while using a board to serve as a very simple way of displaying some important information.

Deck-Building Competitive Team Game, with lots of HoN flavor and feel.

Keeping the HoN Theme:

So one of my big points was what mechanics, or ideas, from HoN to actually carry over to the game, we want this to feel like a board game based on HoN, not a game with some HoN names in it.

Things I want to keep:

Primary stat division, a certain feel for Str Agi and Int heroes that make them feel vaguely similar within the stat, but distinct enough from the other stats.

The feeling of leveling up, unlocking abilities, slowly becoming more useful and more of a badass.

The flavor of items, and building up your hero based on them.

Hint of Mechanics to Come:

So I actually have a lot of mechanics and such worked out that I want to play with to achieve these goals and such, so lets just quickly review some of the game mechanics that we will cover more later, and really see if we like them or if they fit:

Two resource systems, Action Points (AP) and Gold (G), Action points are used for casting abilities, using attacks, using items, lane movement, etc. Gold is used specifically to buy items.

Action points will increase as levels go up, and as you purchase items that increase them, this gives the feeling of just being able to do more shit as you level up, and build your hero.

Gold is earned by killing heroes, or using excess AP to kill creeps, there will be a pool of items each game, perhaps a few core that are always in there, and then a selection of items that are chosen randomly, although the pool should be rather large, this will also occur before hero selection so that you can try to tailor your team to the items in the pool.

Choosing a hero gives you that hero’s base deck. This includes a default set of attack cards, as well as hero specific abilities cards. These cards are used as attack cards until you reach the required level to spend AP to use their abilities.

Adding item cards moves them into your deck, and into your possible hands, slowly building up a deck on it. Ideally we will have decks that are lean enough that you aren’t forgoing your heroes abilities by over stuffing your deck, leanness will matter (unless the strategy doesn’t call for that!).

Each primary stat will cause the hero to gain slightly different bonuses from leveling, these may end up being consistent among the stat (All str heroes gain +1 hp per level) or be similarly themed but tweaked between heroes.

Game will have distinct lanes, probably scaling based on the number of players, movement between these will cost action points, with items allowing big/free discounts on this, rotating turn orders will mean that interesting decisions will have to be made whether you should spend your AP efficiently during your turn, or saving them for potential movement/ability usage during another one.

Towers exist and, as in HoN, serve to have a real cost to neglecting your lane. The game is still about killing a shrine.

There is of course a lot more mechanics we could talk about, as well as far more details on each one just briefly laid out, but of course those are for another post. I think next time we will dive into some of the concepts behind turning HoN items to be functional and interesting within our framework.