Hal-con 2023 Deck Presets

 

I'm getting ready for Hal-con 2023 and one of the last things on my To-Do list is making sure I have a list handy of the way decks should be set up when some people interested in becoming players sit down for a demo game. One of the design pillars of Titanomachina is that players have a deck of cards which they can cunningly order before the game as part of their strategy to win. It makes the game interesting for explorers, competitors, socializers and killers alike. The explorers have a massive system to explore thanks to the combinations available with all the systems and their cards. Competitors get a lot of levers to optimize. Socializers have something to discuss, like army-building in other Wargames, and killers have a way of tripping other players up with counter-play.

For beginners, however, it's important that the decks be preset because beginners have neither the time nor the interest nor the context for understanding the deck-building aspect of the game. The idea is that preset decks will give them direction on what they might be able to do in the game, and what they might be able to do with the cards in a different order. In addition, the preset decks need to be recorded so the demo sets can be reset at the end of the demonstrations by the demonstrators that aren't me. Hence the lists, such as in that picture at the topic of this post. 

The general notion is that players have a crew member and a limb in each draw so as least they can keep moving and operating, those being some of the most important actions in the game. I also tried to space out the offensive and defensive options, and to align support systems like sponsors and capacitors with cards that would benefit from their activation. The first draw is intended to maximize the options available to each player without overloading those options, and leaving players with a reserve on round 2. 

I'm definitely going to need to revisit my demo script because I want to also use these decks to do open-handed round 1s, so that players can see how they should be thinking of the cards.