Boarding Party (working title) – Piracy in space!

[Hans Haase]

I’ve finally progressed far enough that I’m able to start discussing this one, and I’ve been typing like a madman all morning on various elements. There’s a LOT of things left to fall in place, but the core concept is forming up nicely I think.

Boarding Party is building out to be a two player campaign based game around pirates raiding spaceships. Why spaceships? Two reasons…. first is that I’ve come up with a lot of fun elements that play into a more sci-fi themed element. Second is that the mechanisms I’ve come up with to solve some key problems just don’t thematically work well with sailing ships.

The primary focus is going to be the actual act of attacking and taking over the ships of the opposing player. One player will be the attacking pirate crew, and the other player will be the defending corporate ship. This will be played out on a game board of various ship types, using miniatures to represent the crew, with crew stats provided by data cards. A scenario booklet will have a variety of different missions to provide variety and replay ability, as well as steer along a semi-scripted campaign.

Players will alternate between being the pirate crew or the corporate crew. The pirate crew will have RPG style elements where you can customize their equipment, recruit new pirates, change ships, etc. The corporate side will be more of a template defined crew in each scenario, with that template scaling either stronger or weaker depending on previous successes or failures.

I’m just about to build out the first prototypes of the game boards and start playtesting some simple scenarios. I really want to focus on the ship boarding actions first, as that is the core element of the game. I have some ideas on the game mechanics but I want to try out a few ideas first to see which one seems to play out the smoothest. So I’ll be starting with the simple early scenarios first. Just a couple figures per side, small ships, limited equipment. These will later become the ‘tutorial level’ type scenarios but it will let me play with the mechanics a lot without being bogged down too much.

[Hans Haase]

So, no fun visual updates on this one. I have done up a basic prototype and started playtesting to see how well the core system works. Unfortunately I seem to have streamlined things too much and the game just moves too fast. The first few starter scenarios that I envisioned are done in just a couple of minutes and with really no variability at all.

I’m going to have to find some methodology to slow down the system without any un-necessary complexities. That and some randomization either via dice or cards.