Worms

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Khaos
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Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 3:18 pm

continued from: https://mtglitch.com/forums/viewtopic.p ... 0&start=60
Khaos wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:53 am i was thinking how to turn worms (basically multiplayer snake) into a board game and i was thinking the best way thing to replace the dexterity aspect of it would be to have some sort of delayed movement. so if someone cut you off, you couldn't just immediately turn away unharmed. and you could be rewarded for predicting enemy movement

so i was thinking, a big board of hexagons, and your worm head would have a direction pointer on it. you have an infinite amount of the following move cards available: move forward, turn 60deg right and move forward, and turn 60degrees left and move forward

you would start the game by queuing 3 cards (place them face down on a track in front of you, but then on following turns, everyone would simultaneously resolve the first movement in their queue (turn it face up, do the thing, then discard the card), place a worm body token in the space they just left, and then add a new movement to their queue

then for actions, i was thinking you could have both, queued actions and instant actions. queued actions would be played face down with your move action, and slide along and resolve the same way. maybe they would be things like "hairpin turn, rotate an additional 60 degrees in the direction this card moves" or " speed boost, move an additional space after resolving your move card"

offensive actions would be, like in your game, "dig, deal 1 damage to things in range 1 of you (worm heads, worm bodies, rocket spikes, etc.)

the questions then become

how do you get action cards
how do you incentivise players to use them and not hoard the good ones
how do you score points and encourage players to engage each other, without having people suiciding into each other or just hiding as the optimal strategy
trying to resolve turns/queue actions as fast as possible to make the game not super slow is probably the biggest issue

so to simplify things, i think you should just have 3 different hexagon tokens, and then you place those face-down in your track. that way when you resolve the move and action, you don't have to think or search for tokens. you just place the token on your track onto the board. and resolving actions should never involve making another decision. the decision making should be limited to queuing actions/move tokens and that's it.

to prevent hoarding of good cards, i'm thinking, every turn you must play exactly 1 card, and then you draw a card, with a small maximum hand size. maybe 3 cards max? then instead of "basic/common" actions we could just have two different decks to draw from (your choice): a deck of offensive actions (that deal damage or kill things) and a deck of defensive cards (mostly movement actions)

potential win cons:

- straight last man standing player elimination. maybe being close to the center would give you some sort of card advantage, and also provide healing? we could also consider making it hard to get rid of worm bodies so people HAVE to go to the middle eventually, but i feel like the start of every game will play the same that way. could also consider board compression ala gridlord.
- ouroborus mode: everyone has a different "target" they have to kill to win. when one player is eliminated, the game ends. could be 2-6 players
- point system: dealing damage gets you points somehow. the damage you deal goes into a baggie so no-one knows your score unless they're point-counting. this works for games like evolution; where technically you can just track all the points and it's in your best interest to attack the leader, but no-one really does because who can be fucking bothered

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 7:19 pm

-potential win con: grow the longest worm. every X turns, get points into your bag based on your length. defensive cards could include things like "harden" to prevent damage to your tail or regenerate to fill a hole in your body. maybe if you eat something or someone, you can grow your tail longer from the other end.

here's the cards i made up for this. green speed cards can only be played 3rd in your queue, yellow is for 2nd or third, and red is fastest and can be played anywhere

Image

these cards are designed assuming the game is either 1v1 or FFA (with player elimination). they might also work with point collection, i dunno

ideally there will be little to no text on cards, just symbols showing the AOE of abilities, etc.

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 7:23 pm

i think i understand how the action cards queue (things move to the front of the queue and then resolve, right?) but how does that tie in to how people turn? what order do things resolve in - e.g. if i am hurrying into the AOE of blow, does blow happen first and i don't get hit, or does hurry happen first and I do?
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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 7:37 pm

so your move token is either, move forward; or move forward and turn direction. when resolving actions/moves, you do the action first, then the movement.

i haven't thought about how to resolve priority between actions, but i think it would be - put a number in the corner of each action, and resolve them accordingly.

(move) reconsider, halt, hurry, reversal: 1
(turn) inhale, blow, wiggle, hairpin: 2
(damage) everything else: 3
(damage and move) bore: 4

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Re: Worms

Post by Rylinks » Mon Apr 08, 2019 7:54 pm

spit is op :gft:

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 7:58 pm

the other thing you could do rather than simultaneous resolution is to just just have standard turn order. then you can just throw out the priority nonsense

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 8:04 pm

so i like playing a card and drawing a card each turn being mandatory, but i'm not sure how it would work if you play a faster action on a future turn that already has an action assigned to it. should you be able to do actions in one turn? or should you have to discard the action that is queued? or maybe return it to your hand instead of drawing a card?

i'm thinking it should just override whatever you have in the queue currently.

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 8:43 pm

when you talked about queueing originally, my thought was that every action just entered the queue in the same place
i think that plus maybe things that don't use the queue or let you modify the queue could be better than having things that insert at different positions in the queue?
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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 8:45 pm

Khaos wrote:the other thing you could do rather than simultaneous resolution is to just just have standard turn order. then you can just throw out the priority nonsense
definitely easier to resolve things that way. i feel like it could be a bit weird to need to be super aware of, ok here are the players on the board and i'm trying to plan out my queue in advance, but this person goes before me and this person goes after me and that matters a lot
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Re: Worms

Post by mindwarped » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:02 pm

yeah that definitely sounds better

I'm imagining that you still want to have players "queue" their moves by selecting them at the end of their turn (before the next player goes)? then you still get the prediction gameplay angle. and since you're working with less information there's less pressure to play perfectly, which hopefully would help with the pacing too

you could have some cards that let you audible, either split cards or ones that reorder themselves (when you reveal, swap order with one of your other cards), etc.

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:08 pm

the bad part about that is that now everyone is in the think panzer at different times, which makes the whole thing slow down greatly. as opposed to having everyone think at the same time.

and that's the tea

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:08 pm

these filters are making my posts unreadable, fucking arti

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Re: Worms

Post by Rylinks » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:11 pm

Khaos wrote:these filters are making my posts unreadable, arti is a great admin and a wonderful person

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:17 pm

my instinct is simultaneous as opposed to turns if all you're handling is moves + actions and you do the priority thing that you were suggesting then it shouldn't be too too hairy?
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Re: Worms

Post by mindwarped » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:19 pm

yeah, damnit arti :trey:

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Re: Worms

Post by Rylinks » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:19 pm

what happens if two people are moving straight into the same square

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:22 pm

head bonk, neither moves and they both take a damage

if you ram into a worm segment, same thing happens as well (unless it is damaged as part of an action, then that worm segment is removed first)

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Re: Worms

Post by mindwarped » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:25 pm

Khaos wrote:the bad part about that is that now everyone is in the think panzer at different times, which makes the whole thing slow down greatly. as opposed to having everyone think at the same time.

and that's the tea
yeah. I think what's appealing about this approach is that you don't need to work out what happens after every action—each player resolves all of their own actions and then it passes to the next player, which seems much less fiddly

which I guess you can handle in other ways, like having turns resolve in priority order based on lowest initiative score. actually, isn't that how robo rally does it?

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:27 pm

Crunchums wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:17 pm my instinct is simultaneous as opposed to turns if all you're handling is moves + actions and you do the priority thing that you were suggesting then it shouldn't be too too hairy?
yeah i will test this first, and let people have 4 HP or so, with all of the cards above included

i think that covers everything

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:34 pm

Khaos wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:22 pm head bonk, neither moves and they both take a damage

if you ram into a worm segment, same thing happens as well (unless it is damaged as part of an action, then that worm segment is removed first)
removing worm segments seems weird with tail stuff like reversal and grow
i'm not connected to my tail, but things still happen with it?
or is the idea that if i cut you in half, the end of my first half is my new tail?
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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:37 pm

Crunchums wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:34 pmor is the idea that if i cut you in half, the end of my first half is my new tail?
ya

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Wed Apr 10, 2019 10:59 pm

Khaos wrote: i will test this
i am excited :)
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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Thu Apr 11, 2019 1:32 am

im the process of making cards and could put it on tabloro

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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:32 pm

Image

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:52 pm

looks nice
things resolve like green/yellow/red/movement ?
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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:55 pm

no, the resolving order is at the bottom (move, rotate, then combat)

the colours determine where on you track you can play the card

green in slot 3, with your move token; yellow in slot 2 or 3; and red in any slot

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:09 pm

ah. the screenshot doesn't show the resolution order for the bottom row. hairpin and halt are rotates?
"rotate" feels like a name that could be better (just a thought; ofc this is a somewhat silly thing to think about at this stage)
do move actions replace your move, or are they in addition to it?
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Re: Worms

Post by Khaos » Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:18 pm

they're in addition. the only rotate cards are inhale and blow.

each turn you play 1 action and 1 move token.

here's the track (one per player)

Image

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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:23 pm

i still find the red/yellow/orange as opposed to "just always put at end of queue" to be initially counter-intuitive. so like I put a green, next turn it migrates to the yellow, then I can put a yellow and do two things on the same thing? which is actually fine except in the case where they're both on the same resolution step (e.g. they're both move actions) - probably to avoid it being a decision you would have them applied in some consistent order (probably oldest (i.e. was put down first) first?). i guess it's probably more interesting to not just have all of your actions be planned 3 turns away
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Re: Worms

Post by Crunchums » Thu Apr 11, 2019 7:26 pm

also feels like having two rotate cards is like, if that's going to be such a first-class-citizen of a step then shouldn't there be more than just two
(all of this is again just thoughts; obv just playtest it as-is first)
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