Monsterpocalypse: Megaton Mashup

Privateer Press veröffentlichen diesen Monat einen Koop-Modus für Monsterpocalypse.

Monsterpocalypse: Megaton Mashup

By John Swinkels

April is here, and with it comes a whole new way to play Monsterpocalypse!

Just before Lock & Load 2019, we held a development meeting about the future of our games, and the topic turned to Monsterpocalypse. At that point, the game was nearly one year old, and we’d already been having casual conversations about new things to add to the game. New Faction discussions had become pretty locked in, but other things to do with the game were less certain. My two biggest priorities in that meeting were to determine a way for two people to cooperate against a monster controlled by game mechanics and to outline a way for a bunch of people to play in a campaign.

If you’ve been paying attention to our solicitations, you know that this month is the release of one of those and next month sees the release of the other. I’ll save the Smashville campaign for another Insider and just talk about Megaton Mashup in this one.

If you’ve played one of my previous games from Privateer Press, then you know I like designing decks of cards to control the actions of bad guys. Believe it or not, my first thoughts about an AI system for this product was not to do a deck of cards, but the more we worked through the basics of what we wanted and how complicated this product could be, the closer we got to making cards. So I sat down and threw thirty cards into a database for playtest.

Our first playtest game was a very thematic match up, Gorghadra as the villain versus Faye and me playing Defender X and Sky Sentinel. Things worked well enough to prove the concept would be fun, so I went back and refined the cards for more testing. Getting the mode in front of other players came next. It’s always important to see how other people read the words you’ve written to explain a game, and we got a lot of great feedback from our first couple of games about the core rules.

And as the core rules got solid, the cards evolved into their final form.

The biggest hurdle to overcome in designing a system for an AI is dealing with just how dumb it can be. A system can never be as smart as a person, and if you don’t build the system correctly, you can end up with infinite loops or other dead-ends that make the game no fun at all. It is also far easier to build a game from the ground up with a villain activation system, as we did for The Undercity. Layering a system on top of something fully formed, especially when it has been published for a while, presents other challenges. For instance, changing too many core concepts makes it hard for experienced players because the flow of the game is already locked into their minds.

We ended up with a system wherein the players take turns, following standard Monsterpocalypse rules, but in between each player’s turn is a villain turn. When the villain takes a turn, a card is drawn. There are three kinds of cards in the deck.

The Bully card is a Move card. Move cards do what you’d expect: they move the villain. But that isn’t all they do. We wanted to make sure that the villain was unpredictable but also didn’t just pop up next to you and body slam you into two buildings. We also wanted to make sure the deck had some interactions with units to make it feel more like a full game of Monsterpocalypse. The other thing you’ll notice about this card is it tells you that if nothing happened because of it, draw another. This makes the villain the most unpredictable in a game of Megaton Mashup. The order in which the cards are drawn and the state of the map when they are drawn combine to make a new experience every time. We also realized that things were more fun if the villain wasn’t limited to its printed Speed stat. When a card moves the villain, it has its own SPD stat. This better reflects that monsters often step during their activations to move farther than what their stats allow.

The Wave of Minions card is a Power Up card. These cards are a little less strict in what they do. They normally heal the villain or make its next card better, but some do strange things. This card was one of the last added to the deck. During playtests, we noticed the villain was doing a lot to the players’ monsters, but the units at the edges of the map were sometimes sitting in the same space for most of the game. Mixing that up a little bit felt a lot better, so there are two of this card in the 32-card deck.

The final type of card is the most important. Attack cards do a lot more than other cards, so they also have more information. The most significant detail on the card is the box at the bottom that specifies the target player for the turn. The first card you draw with a target at the bottom is who the villain is going after this turn. In the case of this card, it is the monster farthest from the villain’s current location. The other important info on attack cards is the dice. The villain’s dice aren’t tracked during a game of Megaton Mashup in the same way player dice are tracked in a normal game. The villain rolls as many Action and Power Dice as listed on the card but still uses its printed Boost Dice when making the attack.

The final part of this product is the most “normal”—in addition to the deck of cards and rule sheet that explains how the mode works, there’s also a monster from a brand-new Faction.

This summer will see the release of the Draken Armada, cool sci-fi space dragons, and I wanted to expand their story a bit more with this release. This led to the creation of Gallamaxus, who used to be part of the Draken Armada but died defending his kind from a massive Planet Eater invasion. As his lifeless body drifted across the vast void between galaxies, a truly insidious threat discovered him: the Necroscourge. This mysterious new Faction has not fully reached our solar system yet, but we’re learning more about it from our new Draken allies. It appears to be a nebula-sized swarm of nanite machines programmed to rebuild organic matter. Whether it is designed to conquer the galaxy or is a benevolent system gone haywire is not yet known. All that is known for certain is that Gallamaxus represents what could be the greatest weapon of the Destroyers, and soon you’ll be able to face off against him or use him in standard games of Monsterpocalypse as part of your Destroyers force.

Laut Fantasywelt liegt die UVP für die Monsterpocalypse Megaton Mashup – Gallamaxus – Necroscourge Monster and Co-op Expansion bei 49,99€.

Quelle: Privateer Press