Titanomachina: Hal-con 2023!

 

The second Halcon where I (and my fantastic assistance) was able to run demonstration games of Titanomachina to drum up interest, and I think the improvements (and changes) I have made to the game from last year. The addition of the player mats, the changes to the Capacitor system, the tuning of the Vulcan Gun/Gun Battery/Laser Battery (and its renaming), changes to the card layouts, the development of the board tiles, and even a few un-intended changes like the charge/cogs of the Master crew (1/3 instead of 2/3) have made the game better. 

There's still some changes I would like to implement. I still need to implement the new VPs for systems. However, I think that is best left for production since it affects dashboard cards and I want to put those costs back on the system cards to make scoring more transparent. I just don't want to do that until the numbers are very firmly nailed down. 

There is a question of using a board vs using the board tiles. A pre-printed quick-start board is probably the best idea, given the effort required to set up the board, despite the enjoyment I personally derive from setting up the tiles either as a quick-start or a competitive set-up. Getting players to the meat of the action first, and letting them consider how they would do it differently if they could set up the game tile by tile is probably for the best. Plus there's the round tracker on the board, which makes that more usable and transparent. 

One suggestion that came up, which I think may have come before, is that there should be a scoring bonus for having the highest habitat. Previously I think it may have been the tallest building, but having the highest habitat would encourage players to detect taller buildings rather than widely scattered one-story buildings. At least it would make it less of a no-brainer, which is a good thing.  

There's also the implementation of the Pass cards and simultaneous activation. So far it seems to work. I have yet to see any indication that there are situations in which it might not work. I think it's possible that wear-and-tear on the pass cards could remove their anonymity over time. Perhaps I should think of this like an opportunity to sell more cards, but I think the risk of people simply giving up on product because it wears out easily is worse. Certainly these cards are easy enough to include in packs of 54 cards where each pack doesn't require a full 12 different weapons, especially where the alternate configurations of Titans are essentially a weapon swap. 

There's still the question of how to implement the player mats, given that like the cards above a gloss finish works with dry-erase markers until it doesn't. A laminated version would be perfect, but I'm not yet clear on the cost of doing that. I do think that standees are a valid option until we boot-strap into producing plastic miniatures equivalent to the resin 3D printed Titans. I want to make sure I have the production and fulfillment details worked out before another attempt at crowdfunding in April. 

In terms of procedure, I think a change by which players look through their decks to find the cards for destroyed systems rather than wait until they're drawn is also a good idea from a book-keeping standpoint so they don't get forgotten. The problems I'd foreseen with players doing that just don't really happen, which is another point in favour of development. People are doing that anyways, and a good rule of thumb is to re-design the game to reflect how people enjoy playing it. I might also mention a few things like tracking whether crew have operated systems by turning the card upside down (and not flipping it over, lest it be confused for a card used to charge another system for the purposes of capacitors), and 

There's also a bunch of optional rules that I have in the development queue, pretty far down, to address things like being able to kick other Titans' legs when they're otherwise out of arc, being able to grab habitats with hands or claws and convert grapples to impacts by hitting other Titans with them, extending shields over buildings, and so on. As mentioned at the convention though, I want to make sure the core game play is solid before implementing by vast list of optional extras.