Play-test: Manic Mechanics

Alright, getting closer to being finished with this thing. Earlier this week, I sat down with some friends who have been helping me with the game to actually play it. Things went well enough. Judge for yourself.

So this is the basic look of the game. For easy printing, the lovely blue cards were made black and white. Also, the board here is just gray, while the final version will be drawn to look like a junkyard pathway. The boards are also a bit smaller here than they will be when printed. Anyhow, this was our setup about mid-game. The white player is on the right, I’m the orange player, and green is on the left. As you can see, he is quite behind, but this has allowed him to store up a whole bunch of tokens, a privilege white and I did not get to enjoy while we duke it out as tanks up front.

Also, green was hoarding all the plane tokens. But this paid off as he was able to move up quite fast with his very expensive but very fast car blueprint. This trade-off worked well in helping players who were behind not feel hopeless.

And here we have white’s righteous anger as his vehicle is destroyed. Destruction of vehicles ended up being really great, because you spent most of your time figuring out exactly which vehicle was best for your current situation. Having someone blow it up was as frustrating as he makes it look. Later in the game, green became the most powerful tank available, which makes him a threat to everyone on the board. In response, white became Carmored, which, as shown in the last post, has the ability to avoid destruction. It was a good moment in the test because it showed that vehicle picking and counter-picking was not random or shallow, but in fact had a bit of depth.

You can see in these pictures that the two players are very close to each other, so their vehicle choice was really important. The endgame was interesting. Because the board is pretty short, there had to be laps for it to be fair. We chose three, but I think that is still up in the air. Early on, green was way behind. Then orange was really far ahead, while the other two were tied. By the end of the third lap, all the players were pretty close, and white won barely. The game took about thirty minutes, which is not all long in terms of your average board game.

So yeah. That happened. And it pretty much worked. Some of the vehicles turned out to be totally useless, so that needs to be fixed, but otherwise a resounding success. Next time, it won’t be an update post, it will be a release announcement!

Manic Mechanics Preview

The premiere game from Reluctant Pirate Games is nearly here. Because there is a time limit on this, the art is less than spectacular. Although I have an artist at my disposal, the timing of this is just impossible, so hopefully my Illustrator scribbling is sufficient.

Without going into too much detail on the game, there is a small deck of cards that are called “blueprints.” With these cards you can combine the vehicle tokens you have acquired into complex junkyard machinery. Here are four examples, one from each vehicle type:

So yeah, there it is. Probably not winning the “best art” superlative. Maybe there will be a “most vector-ish art” prize. I think I have that locked up.