Antares – Writing Scenarios

The Beyond the Gates of Antares community on Facebook is super active. One of the Warlord employees is constantly on there, and he recently put up a scenario writing contest.

Scenario writing is a good exercise. It’s very similar game design, but the parameters are really limited. You still have to build something that is readable, understandable, makes sense, and is fun for everyone. But you are limited by (some of) the actions already available in the game and by the theme or genre of the game. For example, I love the hell out of how Malifaux does scenarios, but I can’t just drop a Malifaux scenario into Antares, because (just for starters) in Malifaux units get 2 actions per turn and in Antares they get 1 action per turn. Antares already has the idea that orders dice denote an “action”. If we were playing in 40k, there are no “actions” at all — units in 40k are either standing near something or they aren’t, killing something or they aren’t. The language of the game doesn’t support anything more interesting than this.

I instantly had an idea for one scenario, and ideas for 3 more were conjured up days later. I wrote 3 of them out, and the 4th one was left on the drafting room floor, as it had too many moving parts for me to have time to finish. I haven’t included the files here, since I don’t know what Warlord is going to do with them, but I’ll try to put them up if they don’t end up using them in any official capacity.

The scenarios were:

1. What Does God Need With a Starship? A 2-player game where both players have a lot of mobility, but limited reach and so need to choose positioning carefully. I like games that have a lot of mobility, so that tactical positioning is really important, but because the game is still about “shooting that guy over there”, you can’t just be able to show up without constraints. I split the table up into 3 sections that couldn’t interact with each other, then placed objectives players need to shoot on each of them, and a “God” in the last one who was invulnerable until his shields were taken out, and who was shooting at players the entire game.
2. Hack the Shard. A 3-4 player game of lying while racing to the center. Players must choose how best to use their limited actions to earn victory points, vs killing their opponent to reduce their available options. I’ve always been inspired by the lying and bluffing of the Battlestar Galactica board game, and this game comes a little bit from there. 1 player is secretly holding the “Superior IMTel” and has different victory conditions from his or her opponents. Players are incentivized to run to the center because of the VP-holding marker there, but also have to use their actions to discover who has the Superior IMTel. You can lie about who has it, if you’re a decent liar, to put people off the track of where the real VPs are held.
3. The Antarean Trail. Race for 8 markers, each of which earn you points once per game. You can quickly grab a few points, but you’ll have to work harder to get them all. We didn’t get a chance to play test this one, but it’s the simplest of the bunch, so I’m more confident it’ll work as-is. >.> I like that in this one players get VPs as the game progresses, so you can keep a running total, and also don’t have to worry about your VPs. Once you have 2VPs, you’ll always have at least 2 so you can change your focus to the next goal. It’s kind a “checking off the list” game – “Ok, I got the medicine and the food but need the equipment still…”. I also really love the Oregon Trail reference. 😛

Here are some photos of our play test last night! Everyone really enjoyed the game, to the point that we’re still talking about the rules and how to best manipulate them today on WhatsApp!

We played Hack the Shard with 4 people. I choose a force of only 5 dice at 750 points to reduce the chances my opponents would be able to h4x0r my shard. At the same time, this reduced the number of dice I could use to h4x0r other shards. A trade-off that ultimately paid off. 😛 Drop Command with Medi Drone, Drop Squad, 2 Strike Squads and a Light Support with Batter Drone.

Clayton’s Freeborn are really cool. He had this 300+ point Command Squad that was blowing 18 SV0 shots per turn around the table. Downside is, in a game with a lot of trees SV0 isn’t good enough to make your opponent fail a lot!

Racing for the center to try to take the intelligence marker. I moved up my C3D1 drone to provide batter shield before I moved my troops up.

Next turn I moved it up again, pinned and/or killed the Boromites to my right so I only had to worry about the Algoryn to the front. Unfortunately, this strategy ultimately failed as the Algoryn had too many units still on the table and were very much able to kill my shit, then race in with his bikes and take it away!

Another photo of Clayton’s Freeborn Command Squad. This thing is a beauty!

Two of us had the same coloured dice, so we used my Orders Dice (Android) app to play the game.

This was a great game, that only needed a few numbers tweaks to make it better. I got what I wanted from it – at one point I believed every person had the Superior IMTel other than the person who actually had it. Well played.

We play tested What Does God Need With a Starship? last week, which went extremely well. It’s really nice to be able to have down to earth conversations about what is and isn’t working in a game!