Titanomachina: What's It About?

I first conceived of Titanomachina as a v2 of the 1989 game Adeptus Titanicus, published by Games Workshop and designed by Jervis Johnson, in 2011 when I was retraining to be a technical writer in Ottawa. I enjoyed the original game, and I was enthralled by Dan Abnett's novel Titanicus, as well as his comic Titan (illustrated by Anthony Williams), published by Games Workshop. Unlike its contemporary, BattleTech (published then by FASA Corp.), Adeptus Titanicus was fast and gave players toys like buildings and shields with which to play their games. It was less an exercise in book-keeping and much more a fun activity, supplemented by wonderfully janky modular plastic Titan models complete with rondel bases. It was my preferred giant robot game, is what I'm saying. 

Of course, the product was expanded into the Epic line which eventually ended with Epic: Armageddon, which streamlined Titans and other 'war engines' into big bricks with hit points (not particularly interesting on their own, but as part of the game it made sense). In each incarnation Adeptus Titanicus has really paid off its theme of Titans as 'walking battleships.' Games Workshop successfully published a second version of Adeptus Titanicus in 2018, authored by James M. Hewitt. It was the year of the giant robot, seeing GKR: Heavy Hitters, Giga-Robo, and Pacific Rim: Extinction all kickstarted. They all delivered too, and along with Adeptus Titanicus (2018) it was the year of the giant robot. 

My project, previously named Titanomachia, for the great Titan war of Hellenic Greek legend, was put up on Kickstarter twice in 2019 under the title Titanomachina. It failed, due in no small part to my own lack of experience. Perhaps I should have learned that I am terrible at sales in my aborted finance career. Needless to say, after the second time I received some very good feedback and advice from some very clever and successful people who had used Kickstarter to bring games to market. By that time I had run out of money, because Kickstarter costs quite a bit of money; you don't go to Kickstarter to get money, you go to save a few bucks on risk management for a pre-order. And I hadn't done 90% of the work required to produce a game, as I had merely designed and developed the game, priced out a deliverable product, and contacted some fulfillment companies for quotes. It would have been a disaster.

The problem, of course, is that being fun and playable has very little to do with whether anyone will buy a game; games are mainly sold on art, weight of components, and marketing (which isn't dismissive, as companies like Games Workshop, WETA Workshop, and so on are marketing behemoths for their products). There's a reason why so many games today look the same and do things like include miniatures and dice and cards, and it's because those things are familiar and hew to what, by and large, sufficient numbers of people with disposable income want. Beyond having a massive case of Dunning-Kruger, not even knowing what I didn't know, about production, I had decided to tailor Titanomachina to my own peculiar tastes. The result was that Titanomachina would have been dead on arrival even if I had put in the work on production and marketing, because what I was marketing was only appealing to me. I think I would feel worse if I didn't enjoy the game so much, so turning Titanomachina from a business idea (a terrible one) back into a hobby was the right answer. 

I mean, maybe it'll be a commercial product some day, but I have no money to put behind it, and where it's something I enjoy working on I'm loathe to flush it down some production firehose so that it's lost in a landfill somewhere with all the other unsold, unplayed hobby gaming products that are out there. The fact is that games, and especially board games, rely on churning product to keep ahead of those nasty times when your expenses steal a march on your income. Designers are encouraged to 'fail faster' so that they can hit on that nifty game idea they can sell to a publisher who thinks they can turn a buck producing it. It seems to be the way it is, because business and human flourishing don't really line up well against each other. Like I said, I suffer from an intense case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to the business of producing and marketing products, and I don't really know what to do with any of that. However, I do see products kickstarting, spending several years in production hell, and delivering long after people have moved onto the next game-of-the-week produced by a large company with all their ducks in a row. So nobody is going to produce anything revolutionary or lasting or even particularly interesting in a model that only produces what a large market (yet still niche) demands and established companies (or at least people with $100 to make $101) can deliver. If I can even claim to have made it. 

In the meantime, however, and since 2019 I have continued to develop Titanomachina, and the result that I have shared for free on the Steam Workshop is something of a 2nd edition of the game that was kicksharted. I first put it up in March of 2020 and since then have gained ~70 subscribers as of writing. I continue to spend time and money on developing the game and its components, thanks to a fantastic team freelance artists (Jason Miller, Ariana, Nate Phoenix, Kristina Amuan, Alice J. Fish, Tiny Wargames) who have helped me update components, and by cannibalizing the wonderful artwork of Loic Billiau, whom I hope to buy more from someday (perhaps via funds gathered under Patreon). Which brings me to the question of 'Why?' 

I mean, 70 subscribers when bootleg copies of Godzilla: Tokyo Clash typically have 1,000s of subscribers seems absurd right? Well, here's the thing, and the reason I don't think I'll bother with another Kickstarter: I like it. I really enjoy Titanomachina as a game, and I love playing it. I love working on it, and finding things that I can improved without all the headache and misery of trying to implement those in production all the while keeping an eye on production since several companies exist that can produce prototypes for me for the equivalent of a big GW starter set/boxed game that I'll never be able to play with anyone except by myself. I also enjoy the art, janky and poorly laid out as it is (graphic design is my apathy), from the Titan designs to the artwork on the building dice that I can't use because it's virtually useless as a visual signifier of ownership (integral to the game's design). I love taking gratuitous promo screen-shots of my Titan figurines using 3D Build or in Tabletop Simulator, and then manipulating them using Google Photo. I love taking pictures of my physical prototypes and looking at those pictures. I could play games like Adeptus Titanicus, or Tokyo Clash, or Giga-Robo, but those aren't games I want to play. I want to play Titanomachina. I want to share it with people, and run tournaments, and continue to develop and expand it. 

Part of my design brief for Titanomachia, as I called it in 2011, was to capture some of the magic of Warhammer 40,000. Some of the magic of that game, such as it was around 2011, was that players could spent a considerable amount of time between games not only building/painting model soldiers and scenery, but thinking about how to make the most of them in a game. It got to a point where many players believed they could predict a game's winner based on the army lists alone, the lists of models that players assemble prior to a game to ensure a relatively fair game (and, for competitive players, to make sure their thumb was as heavy on the scale as possible). And you know what? There was a certain magic to that, that players could plan a strategy in advance. That's why systems and buildings and so on have HR points in Titanomachina, so that players could chew on that fascinating problem of strategic advantage in a putatively fair fight, setting up intricate engines or machines designed to input the assets they had brought and output victory at the end.

The other bit of Warhammer 40,000 magic is in its dice, in that players roll lots of dice, hoping for lucky rolls, and doing their damnedest to hedge against unlucky rolls. The game has a surprising amount of constant tension because at any moment the dice can turn and bite you in the ass, or your opponent might make some improbably but entirely possible roll far out in the shallows of probability. List-building relies heavily on what fans call 'math-hammer' or essentially risk management, but there's still that uncertainty despite the 'best' lists frequently being countable on one hand. I got rid of the dice in Titanomachina, but with the players themselves bringing so much uncertainty to the game themselves, having them subject to the additional uncertainty of the dice meant the uncertainty in the game merely made it feel loose, or un-eventful. Without the dice, with the outcomes of actions certain, Titanomachina present players with a plethora of choices, nearly all of which will throw a wrench into your opponent's plans. The resulting back and forth, the struggle of trying to catch your opponent in the right position at the right time is, I think, fantastic.