Actual Play - The Hive

So earlier this week, I released the playtest document for my game The Hive for anybody who wants to give it a try.  But today I figured it would be a good idea to run through a solo playtest to give a better understanding of what the game is and how it works.

Setting Up the Game

So the first thing I'll need to do is figure out which species my hive will be.  Being a bug nerd, I know a few, but I've yet to come up with one that creates a better narrative for this game than leaf cutter ants.  

Leaf cutter ants

Leaf cutter ants do exactly what they sound like - they cut leaves.  However, what they do with these leaves is pretty fascinating.  Rather than eat them, they actually use them to feed fungus that they cultivate inside their colony inside a large chamber.  So for this play through, I'll go with leaf cutter ants as my species.

I take three d6 and set them aside to represent my Queen.  These will be rolled at the end of play as needed to see if my colony makes it through the winter, but I might need them in between.  Now I roll 3d6 in turn to set my starting citizen die pools.  I roll in order:  3, 4, 4.  Not too shabby - this makes my starting totals as follows:

Workers - 3

Soldiers - 4

Drones - 4

Not a ton of Workers, but I've got a good number of Soldiers and plenty of Drones to replenish my colony as needed.

Now I'm ready to get started.

Turn 1 - Spring

To start the first turn, I draw six cards from the top of my deck.  I draw:

2 Hearts, 2 Diamonds, 1 Spade, 1 Club

Nothing terribly dire is threatening the colony to start with, so that's good.  I've got a small Food Issue (Hearts), a small Health Issue (Diamonds), and minor Predatory (Spades) and Environmental (Clubs) Issues.  So what's going on then?  I need to figure out what these Issues are and how they're affecting my colony.  Here's what I come up with:

It's early spring, and we've been feeding on our fungi all winter while waiting out the cold.  As a result, our fungi supply has been depleted, and we'll need to get to work right away on cutting some leaves to help it grow back to full strength.  The trouble is, the forest around us hasn't fully thawed, and so leaves are in short supply at the moment.  Worse yet, a spider has stumbled upon our harvest line, and is trying to make a meal of our workers!  

So there's how my Issues are playing out: the Food Issue is that we need to cultivate more fungi, and our Environmental Issue is that the late cold has stunted growth.  I move my Club card over to my Food Issue, since that's how it's working against the colony.  My predator is a spider - nothing overpowering, but still threatening.  And it's taken out a number of the workers in the colony, so there's my Health Issue.

So now we set about addressing things.  The most pressing matter is the spider, as we can't effectively find food or replenish our numbers without getting rid of that first.  I attack the spider with my Soldiers to start, and roll my 4d6 Soldier pool:  3, 5, 2, 1.  I roll my one success needed to vanquish the spider, but that 1 means that I've suffered some casualties in the battle.  I reduce my Soldier pool down to 3.

Now that the spider has been dealt with, we can recover from the damage it caused a bit.  I roll my Drones 4d6 in order to bring our numbers back up to snuff:  5, 4, 6, 1.  Three successes - enough to solve my Health Issue, but that 6 means I've lost a Drone due to exhaustion (Drones count only 6s as casualties, not 1s).

That leaves only my Food Issue to be dealt with, which is going to be tricky.  I have 3 Worker dice to tackle a level 3 Issue - not great odds.  My workers are going to have to bust their butts to try and solve this:  3, 3, 5.  They manage to knock off a bit of the problem, but not enough to cancel it out completely.  I decide that my soldiers are going to have to get involve.  They'll move some of the larger debris out of the harvest path to help bump up the efficiency of the line:  6, 1, 4.  Their help manages to help my Workers harvest enough food to grow the fungi back to sustainable levels, but the work was grueling.  More of my Soldiers have died off, and I'm in real danger of attack in the coming seasons.  But no Issues are carrying over to Summer!

Turn 2 - Summer

Here's how I'm looking going into the warmer weather:

Workers - 3

Soldiers - 1

Drones - 3

I draw my six Issues cards: 

3 Diamonds, 1 Heart, 1 Spade, 1 Club

Things are a little more dire in the summer.  I've got a pretty severe Health Issue on my hands, but luckily nothing else is really causing real problems.  Let's figure out what's causing all this:

In their haste to harvest enough leaves to bring our fungus back up to full health, it went unnoticed that a few of the leaves my workers brought back to the colony had spores of a fungus that feeds on ours!  These spores have started attacking our fungal food supply.  We've got to remove the predatory fungus and find more healthy leaves to feed on, but there's been a lot of rainfall as of late, so there's puddles everywhere.  This has caused a rival colony to divert from their usual harvest route, and they've started encroaching on our harvest territory.  We need to drive them back!

I move my Environmental Issue over to my Health stack, and we're ready to get rolling.

I'm going to get a little strategic here and address the rival ant colony first.  I send my remaining Soldiers out to drive them off: 4.  Bugger off!  (Pun intended)

Now that my Workers don't have a rival colony to contend with, They can focus on addressing the fungus issue.  They work to start removing some of the infected parts of the fungus from the colony:  5, 6, 6.  My Workers eliminate the fungal issue, but the predatory fungus is incredibly toxic to ants, and those two 6s take a big chunk out of my workforce.  This doesn't leave me in very good shape to tackle my remaining Food Issue.

I decide to get a bit creative.  I send my Soldiers out to raid the rival colony's harvest chain in order to scamper off with some of their leaves: 2.  Not much of a help.  It's up to my Workers now: 2.  Uh oh.  Looks like our Food Issue is rolling into Autumn.

Turn 3 - Autumn

Not in the greatest shape at the end of the workable year:

Workers - 1

Soldiers - 1

Drones - 3

I draw six cards for my Issues:

3 Diamonds, 2 Clubs, 1 Spade

I've got another bad Health Issue on my hands, plus a decent Environmental Issue to go along with the Food Issue from Summer that I'm still dealing with.  And barely any Workers to deal with any of these!

An early frost has set in, and between the extreme cold and the depleted food source the colony's numbers have dropped off dramatically.  Ants that aren't being knocked off through starvation or freezing are fighting over the remaining food sources as they prepare for the long winter.  The colony will have a nearly insurmountable task in trying to secure enough food to see it through.

Based on my narration of my Issues, I move my Environmental cards over to my Health stack (now a level 5 Issue!) and get to work.

A Health Issue like this one is one of the few problems my Drones can try and tackle.  Let's try and get the population numbers back up!: 6, 4, 2.  We've whittled away a bit of the problem, but lost a Drone along the way, and I'm still looking at a level 3 there.  My workers are going to have to try and dig deeper tunnels to escape the cold:  1!  Not only did they not succeed, I've lost my only Worker die!  I'm going to need to shore up the number with my Drones to have any shot of making it through the season:  6, 1.  I'm now down to my last remaining Drone, but I've got 6 Workers!  My last shot is to try and get creative - my Soldiers are going to use their bulk to corral the ants in the colony into a central area, trying to combat the cold with body heat:  3.  No luck.  My Queen is going to have to try and get us through that one in the winter, which doesn't bode well for our chances of survival.

Needing to give up on my Health Issue, I set out tackling my Predatory one.  My Soldiers set out with my Workers to act as bodyguards and fight off any competing colonies: 1!  Not only did they not succeed, but I'm out of Soldiers!  My Workers are going to have to try and fend for themselves:  3, 5, 6, 5, 6, 6.  Four successes more than what I needed, but unfortunately with a ton of 6s.  My Workers made it through, but took heavy losses for a task they were ill-suited for.

I now have no Soldiers, and only 3 Worker dice to tackle my remaining Food Issue with.  I roll:  5, 2, 6.  They scrounge up enough food, but the cold weeds the weaker ones out.  I finish with 2 Workers.

Endgame - Winter

So my colony prepped as best they could, but I'm still left with a level 3 Health problem that only my Queen will be able to solve during the winter.  I grab my three Queen dice and get to rolling:

2, 6, 2

My Queen made a dent, but she's weakened.  I roll again:

5, 3

She's powering through.  We might have a real shot:

3, 6

We made it!  The Queen nearly killed herself, but the colony makes it through another winter.  What the future holds, though, looks uncertain.

So that's the game!  Again, feel free to download the playtest document here and give it a spin.  Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

BEES?!

So I've been working on a game...

I've tinkered with game design a bit over the past year or so, with a couple of different attempts producing half-finished designs that will need to be revisited later.  But I think I've stumbled upon something that I wanted to share with all of you.  What's the game about?

BEES!!!!

Well, not just bees, but any type of social insect really.  The game is based around the idea of working through the various obstacles that would befall a beehive or ant colony through one year as they prepare for a New England winter.  The game took inspiration from Questlandia and also from a 200-word game created by Grant Howitt called Exodus.

I've done a number of solo playtests (the game functions perfectly well solo),  but I would love for other people who are willing to take a stab at running it and give me their feedback.  The playtest document is available here.

The game itself is, as mentioned, based on the idea of a beehive working through a year in preparation for their winter hibernation.  Play is broken into three turns, which signify one of the seasons - the first turn is Spring, the second Summer, and the third Autumn.  At the beginning of each turn, players draw six cards from a deck of playing cards to determine which issues they need to address to get their hive through that season safely.  Any issues that aren't fully dealt with in a given season carry over to the next.  At the end of the third turn, the survival of the hive depends on the strength of its Queen to power through any remaining issues.

The problems are dealt with by using the usual citizens of a hive - Workers, who carry out most tasks; Soldiers, who provide the muscle and defend the hive; and Drones, whose sole function is to mate with the Queen and reproduce.  These groups are represented by dice pools, but are very vulnerable, and so their numbers can dwindle quickly as they carry out their tasks.

If this sounds like a game you're interested in playing, feel free to download it from the link above and give it a spin.  Any feedback is more than welcome.

Life and Games and Such

So I didn't realize until today how long it's been since my last post.  Unfortunately, Real Life has not been kind lately, and I haven't had a ton of motivation related to gaming.  I lost both my dad and our dog within the same week, and so sadly I've been in a bit of a funk that's been a little tough to get out of, but there's enough good on the horizon to be optimistic.

So let's talk about some of that, shall we?

My home group finally had the conclusion of our multi-year Mouse Guard game before everything really hit the skids, which was wonderful.  The group ended up completing a coup of Elmoss, and our patrol leader ended up sacrificing himself for the cause.  It was all in all a wonderful game, and part of me is reluctant to let it go, but I think we were all ready to move onto new things.  Coincidentally, this has also coincided with the end of my Stars Without Numbers campaign that never really gained any traction, which is largely on me, and me dropping out of my online Mouse Guard game because of all my Real Life business.

So what other things to move onto?  Well, we originally talked about using Questlandia as a jumping off point to building a Burning Wheel campaign, which would be the ideal (at least for me).  I've also talked to my SWN group about possibly trying out Burning Wheel as well through Roll20.  I put together everything for running Twilight in the Duchy Verdorben, which is an intro collection of three adventures for Burning Wheel.  If I was more savvy about Roll20 I'd try and make the module available for people, so if anybody has tips on that feel free to let me know.  My wife has also been at me as of late to take another stab at putting together a weekend group with some of our friends who are new to roleplaying like her, so we'll see if I can get that going as well.  I'll likely keep that group to something in the Powered by the Apocolypse family for ease, although I do also have Ryuutama that I think would fit that group well enough.

While I haven't had much available scratch to throw down for new games as of late, there have been a couple of Kickstarter campaigns I've stumbled upon recently that have caught my eye.  One is Eden, a GM-less roleplaying game where players play either humans learning the ways of the world from their animal companions, or the animal companions themselves.  The game itself looks adorable, and appears to be that it would make an excellent roleplaying game to run with children.  The gameplay examples show the game to be designed in a way that the advice the animal companions give to their human friends is largely rooted in the instincts of that animal, making it both a wonderfully imaginative roleplaying game as well as a way to incorporate more science/biology into your child's play if you're into that.

The other Kickstarter I want to mention is a game called Rise Up.  This game, which I can't do justice to here, is a board game centered around protest and bringing about social change.  This is, from everything that I've seen, an incredibly profound design put together by The Toolbox for Education and Social Action, and is the first Kickstarter that I've backed at a non-reward level simply to help it see the light of day.  Please check them out, seriously.

Speaking of board games, I have Granite Games Summit coming up this weekend!  This is going to be a bit of an adventure for me, despite literally being less than four miles from my house.  I'm obviously much more of a roleplayer than a board gamer, but helping to support a gaming convention in my hometown along with being able to meet new gamers is quite exciting to me.  For whatever reason I tend to have some anxiety when it comes to gaming with strangers.  It's a very odd thing, considering I'm generally a pretty outgoing and social person in most other aspects of my life, but when it comes to gaming I tend to be very shy, hence the adventure of this particular convention.  I'm going solo, and outside of the wonderful people running G2S, I do not know anyone else attending that I'm aware of.  So how do I counter this?  With baseball!

Bottom of the 9th

Bottom of the 9th is a fantastic board game that was one of my first Kickstarters that I backed.  The game is based around playing one half inning of baseball between two players, one controlling the pitcher and the other controlling a lineup of hitters.  The game is pretty easy to learn and teach, so I'm planning on bringing it with me to G2S to try and run for some people to help try and bring me out of my shell a little bit.  Hopefully it will lead to me interacting more than I would normally at this type of thing.  Getting more comfortable with a setting like this is something I'm very keen on, and might lead to me being able to stretch out a little bit with online gaming.  I'm part of an amazing community of roleplayers online that I have as of yet played very little with, and with some more confidence from situations such as G2S I might be able to become more involved with that arena, if that makes sense.  At the very least, it'll help me play the game more, which is one of my favorites.

As always, thanks for reading my ramblings.