Skip to main content

Mechanic Monday: Pass-Through Action Tiles

Happy Monday fam! Sorry about missing a post last week, it’s been busy at the theatre company, and those issues came first.  Streak broken, but time to start a new one!
Not gonna do the long rambling “my earliest memories of my grandmother were of flour-dusted fingerprints showing stark against the dark wrought iron of her teapot” intro today, just gonna dive right into this floating mechanic.

Jumping Across Action Tiles
In GREEM, a grid of Action tiles is laid out in the center of the play space.  Each player starts in a different corner, their pawn covering up that corner’s tile.  On a player’s turn, they move across as many tiles as they choose, provided they pay the energy cost on each tile.  That can either be a fixed starting amount, or it can be accumulated, or it could come from an Action Wheel.  But to move over a tile, you pay its cost and take its action.  The tile you land on does not require energy, nor does it grant its action.  Only tiles completely moved through are activated.

So basically, I envision this grid of action tiles, and each turn, a player carves out their own path through them, perhaps gaining new temporary energy for future turns, building up their base energy, drawing scoring cards, rearranging tiles, repelling other players’ pawns or dropping mines, removing tiles entirely, scoring points, whatever.  Now, there are a lot of ways to mess around with this - as I mentioned, you could have energy, or you could use Action Beads on an Action Wheel to pay.  You could also just use coins or VP or any other currency.  You can restrict each turn to tiles that are in a straight line, or you can allow paths to turn.  It could be square tiles, or hexes.Tiles could have edges that act as walls, stopping further movement in that direction; you could have every tile that a pawn starts from disappear for a gradually crumbling board, or you could layer tiles on top of tiles for an ever-changing stacked/overlapping board.  Pawn interaction is wide open, and you could make some tiles straight up enemies that require some other currency to pass/defeat.  Instead of merely interacting with tiles, perhaps players can buy them and add them to a player-powers or scoring tableau.
Anyway, with all the possibilities, what this really boils down to is a movement mechanic.  But it feels fun and different.  Ooh, I just thought of another possible twist - instead of activating the tiles you pass through, at the end of your turn you activate every tile that your pawn’s tile touches.  Anyway, something fun to consider, a nice combine-and-subvert of a roll-and-move and a worker-placement.  Take it to your lab and tinker away!
Alright, til next week! When I’ll probably start digging more into Fantasy Fantasy GM GM.  Cheers all.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...

TTRPG Tuesday: The Secret Calendar

Welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! Have I done any this year? Looks like no! On pace to be a pretty low-posting year I guess. Today I actually have a full-fledged one pager TTRPG to share.  I was listening to a Ludology with Camilla Zamboni as the guest and was inspired by her collection Roll for Learning.  The Secret Calendar came to me pretty much fully formed as I walked and listened to the episode, though I do want to acquire RfL to get layout inspo. Anyhow, the first draft can be found HERE .  I think this could be a fun activity for students (was also thinking of Wolfenoot) and maybe I’ll publish it or submit it at some point. Okay I’m out of practice so that's it buh bye!

Building My First Deck in Tabletop Simulator

Well well, a new week.  How original.  I had an idea for a possible Mechanic Monday but it turned out to just be Stratego.  C’est la vie! (Although maybe it could still work if the forces weren’t all set in stone, and player’s had a limited number of reserve forces that they could secretly commit prior to each combat, and also instead of larger forces wiping out smaller ones, they would deal the difference in force sizes as damage) (Also note to self: Each player starts with a different hidden amount of VP/Currency that they have to pay (plus interest) at game’s end, as a way to truly hide who’s in the lead.) Anyway it’s Wednesday, so there’s no time for any of THAT stuff.  Today, I’m going to kvetch informatively about Tabletop Simulator. So, TTS is, near as I can tell, an incredibly powerful and useful tool.  It’s also absolute ass to parse, as someone coming to it cold.  The official guides are largely unhelpful for the designers whose experience is limi...