Ok, so things are a hair brighter than they were last week. Well, to clarify, things aren’t any better, but my outlook has acclimated. I’m pulling myself out of the shock now, one phalange at a time. And this week, I do actually want to write about BURN.
As I alluded in last week’s installment, BURN is a 2p inspired by ROOT. Well, really - it’s inspired by a movie I saw as a teen that, near as I can tell, left virtually no cultural footprint beyond the impression it made on my own memory. That film is Spy Game - starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. I’ve never seen or heard reference to it since it came out, and I think it truly was fairly forgettable fare; in all likelihood it only found purchase with me because I was young and had no real prior experience with spy/espionage media. I’d never watched a Bond film all the way through (and still think of Pierce Brosnan as Bond), and the Bourne films had either yet to be made or I’d not been allowed to see them. I hadn’t seen any of Harrison Ford’s famous entries in that genre, nothing adapted from Le Carre, really, just a spy-thriller-sized gap in my knowledge.
So Spy Game made an impression on me, or at least planted a seed that bore fruit a couple years back when I was thinking about ROOT and an old challenge (from Grant Rodiek’s blog back in the day, perhaps?) about repurposing components from an existing game to make entirely new ones. I thought about Battleship as a co-op, and envisioned one player alone, outgunned, desperately trying to get out of a situation that had gone completely to Hell, and their counterpart, sealed away in safely, whose mad dashes were from behind one desk to in front of another, the only one invested in trying to save the asset. The Asset could see the small picture and the immediate dangers; the Handler could see the big picture but was ensnared in bureaucracy. Come to think of it, maybe my hazy memories of Spy Game were kindled by seeing Spy (with Alison Janney and Melissa McCarthy) a few years back. That’s probably it. Anyhow, that was the experience, the relationship, the story.
And surprisingly, a lot of it fell into place over the last couple of years. The battleship boards fell by the wayside, as I realized that the players could share one board and still be bound by hidden information. And Leder Games (along with Android:Netrunner) gave me a lot of insight into how I could merge American and Euro sensibilities to make a unique asymmetrical experience.
So yeah. As I did with a couple of other games, I’ll probably spend the next couple of weeks doing Mechanic Mondays focusing on different pieces of the design. I never did quite get an alpha of this one together, but maybe the quarantine will be the chance I need to get one together. And maybe writing these will help! Alright, let’s get started.
Tri-Directional Movement on a Hex Grid
In BURN, the Asset starts at the center of a hex grid, compromised and trapped in a city abruptly undergoing regime change. The Asset stands at and moves along intersections of hexes, not on or through hexes themselves. As such, the Asset always has three axes she moves upon, comprising three directions she could move. These directions also correspond with the three bordering nations she could attempt to escape to; Rabbit, Mouse, and Fox Territory. Each turn, the Handler advises a direction she thinks the Asset should go in, based on the information available to her; the Asset, in turn, knows her own secret information, and ultimately chooses which direction (Rabbitwise, Mouseward, or Foxagonal) to move her pawn on the map. Once the pawn has been moved, both players reveal which threats are in that clearing, and take their respective turns to try and survive another turn.
What are the threats revealed? That’s a subject for another week, so let’s focus on the map. I really am quite proud of this, as it was a sort of cascading simplification that came out of my messing around with geometries and shapes. The whole reason that I wanted two boards to begin with was so that both players would have an incomplete understanding of what threats were at which location. But once I dicked around with the maps for long enough I realized that individual locations on the board mattered little; what was important was the locations that were accessible options for movement. And on a hex board where you’re moving between intersections rather than spaces, you can do exactly this.
Really, you could do this with the spaces or intersections of a square grid as well, and just treat the four cardinal directions as your suits/determiners instead of the three axes. I’m just chuffed that it corresponds so neatly with ROOT’s suits, and has a feel similar to ROOT’s maps. Cute mechanics can go, of course, if they must, but for now it’s a fun tool, and a fun way to think about movement, location, and safety. Feel free to appropriate as you see fit for your own hex grids.
See you next week! Stay safe.
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