Titanomachina: The View From Here

It's June 2023 and it's also National Pride Month in Canada, meaning that I can gather up the LGBTIA+ flag colour schemes I have and put them together in a group shot! Insofar as Titanomachina has a canon, Eos is non-binary, Tethys is bisexual, Rhea is lesbian, and Styxx is trans. There's a set of jokes and whatnot in there, and some serious things. One of the serious things is that giant robots are typically presented as masculine and are overtly sexualized when presented as feminine. I wanted to represent something a little different and perhaps a bit more butch. This ties into the weird giant robot trope where the giant robots represent, in some form, the inner emotions and self-representation of the people inside of them. Here the Titans aren't psycho-sexual puppets, but their own persons acting with their own agency, and that agency is shared by the crews of people inside of them. Instead of it being people building giant robots to fight some third-party antagonist, it's giant robots including people inside of themselves because of their own internal squabbles and politics have reached conflict. It's my attempt to apply Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman to the giant robot genre, to both satirize it and to use it to say something about identity, mind, and community. 

It's also hilarious to me that Tethys, the Titan that emerges from the oceans to try and take her crown back from Rhea, is a literal disaster bisexual. The politics, relationships, and conflicts of Titanomachina certainly need more development, and this is something I want to address at the outset. There's themes and whatnot, but it isn't written in stone, it's not canon, and no doubt my own limited perspective will require changes in the future as I learn and develop as a person myself. 

Currently the game, as hosted on Steam using Tabletop Simulator, has mainly seen changes regarding usability. I've tried to make it easier for players to understand and use the dashboards by making a player mat to help them organize play, and to separate out the layers of the dashboard. The latest version of the rule book is 16 pages of rules whereby each rule is ~8 words or less, and has a title or name and usually a diagram where it explains some spatial state of the game. I'm hoping this aids in comprehension and uptake for new players by chunking the rules into more digestible and flavourful bits. 

Some parts of the design have been rolled back, such as the four different shapes for each player habitat. Having a different shape habitat block for each player is perfectly feasible for a product selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and considerably less so for something that is still a collection of prototyped components in several totes. Another aspect is the culling of darlings such as the telemetry rule, something that usually improves the game-play by removing 'un-necessary' complication. I've changed the twist rule to simply adding 90° to the arc of all systems, changing the balance of sponsons and turrets, and requiring crew intervention to benefit from them rather than being a no-brainer. 

Similarly I've set capacitors to drawing more cards, although I'm beginning to wonder if that actually makes the game more fun because I've noted the player(s) with the capacitor certainly play more cards, but there disparity is a rough edge and playing cards to gain more cards isn't a great feeling in terms of a game where cards are supposed to change the state of the board. I feel, however, that simplifying the collision rule to enable Titans to hammer each other through entire blocks of buildings and effectively double the amount of damage done is a fantastic and impactful change that better balanced Titans' ability to destroy buildings vs their ability to return them to the board. 

I have an idea for a change to capacitors though, and not one that requires changing the round/turn mechanism, or the Capacitor cards themselves. Here's the idea: Players can return that number of cards played face-down to their hand. This avoids the issue that drawing extra cards from the deck caused, that of Titans both accelerating through their decks and potentially playing with a full hand of 22 cards every round as a result. Instead, you have things like Plasma Howitzers and Digitigrade Legs being played at essentially a discount, and not preventing a Titan from utilizing those other cards. Where a previous couple of attempts failed I think I'll test this (several times...) before implementing it, but it seems promising...