Titanomachina: Hal-con 2022!

Running demo-games of Titanomachina at Hal-con this year was fantastic. I managed to mainline more Titanomachina in one long weekend than in two months of play. I take back several of the comments I have made over the years about this being methadone for Warhammer. Mostly what I want now is more. There is something fantastic about introducing people to a game and watching as they begin to engage with it, and with each other through it. It certainly revealed things I personally need to work on when interacting with people, and I hope that my carelessness didn't irk people too much. 

Interestingly I received some feedback that rather nicely validates some ideas that I've been having about where and what to improve. I had planned, for example, to implement the change that the crew members that have their Operate bonus in play would not be sorted back into the bottom of the Titan deck. Doing so helped the players remember the bonus, and perhaps it provides a sort of break to the advantage of being able to hold over a bonus. Players also expressed an interest in Deflectors and Shields having a pro-active option and a reactive option, rather than two variations on a pro-active option. This is something else I had considered, giving these systems the ability to put a shield token on a target before the attack is resolved. Like blocking, it affects the target of an attack, and makes for some economic tension as the player decides whether soaking the hit is better or worse than giving up a card that could charge some other, pro-active action. It also helps with their implied defensive function...

I do feel like I need to re-visit collisions, yet again, to clarify them. This sort of thing is kind of why I resisted the concept from the outset, because it's hard to explain. Rather than changing collisions, along with the Impact and Grapple traits, I think it's just something to clarify how it works. Specifically that each point of Effect spent entering a square causes one point of damage to the closest target(s) in the square, and that Impact and Grapple both move a Titan with Effect 1. I don't feel like I was clear or consistent on collisions during the games, particularly in the last one where I believe I had sold the idea that moving through a building merely had a cost in damage and not in the effort required to move through that much building. In my defense it was hilarious to see a player zig-zag through buildings. 

This brings me to jumping collisions. There's a certain fore-sightedness that's required to resolve a jump into a tile full of buildings or into another Titan. You need to be able to either destroy all the buildings, or push the Titan off the tile. Building-wise I think it's more of a matter of emphasizing that not smashing completely through the building is like smashing the Titan into a building. The problem being that jumping Titans can go over intervening buildings and Titans. It might be something to disallow being able to jump over things if you're going to jump into them instead; different flight-path and all that. 

Right now I'm going through the copies of the October 2022 rule book that I brought to Halcon to check the notes and then I'll update Tabletop Simulator with the November 2022 rule book.