Hunters vs. Gatherers The Board Game

My first thought for getting cards into people’s hands was pretty simple, but a bit dull, standard Euro game fare. I was going to have the option of 3 face up cards, or drawing blind from the deck. But I’ve got a new idea that’s tied more closely with the theme of friendly competition within the same tribe. This trick comes from one of my parents. In order to manipulate two brothers into sharing they would have one of us divide the given treat in half, and the other one gets to pick a half. I’m going to try doing the same thing with cards. When a player runs out t0hey draw a new batch and divide them up. I’ll throw in a bit of a wrinkle in that one card in each stack will be face down. Here’s a pass at the rules:

1. If a player has no cards at the start of a turn they become the dealer.
2. The dealer draws 3 cards per player.
3. The dealer creates one stack per player.
4. Each stack must contain 1 face down card, and 1 or more face up cards.
5. Starting to the left of the dealer and continuing clockwise, players pick stack.

The face down card is to give the dealer an element surprise, we’ll see if it’s more complicated that it’s worth. Or I may decide to remove it to penalize the player for running out of cards first, although since cards aren’t action points, I don’t think I’ll need a direct penalty, like in Entdecker.

Not ready to write about the actual game scoring yet, but I’ve been reading the Journal of Boardgame Design and have a lot of thoughts that need writing down.

I’ll need to avoid runaway leader problems with multiple people playing the same role; it shouldn’t be obvious who is going to win at any point, even near the end of the game. Some proportion of hidden goals will help on the gatherer side, not sure about the hunters. Also I need end game conditions for each role. Perhaps when either the resources or animal tiles run out the end game would be triggered.

The gatherer will have demand cards which don’t score until the end of the game, to prevent the winner from being obvious. But then the gatherer would have only to add up his/her points and know whether victory could be achieved, and choose to stall until he/she caught up or lost. That’s no fun. So I’m thinking that the end game would trigger one final encounter, an enemy tribe raiding party attack, that could cause a reasonably significant point swing. Given enough time to develop, the hunter could easily defeat the raiding party. But on the other hand, the gatherer’s production engine also picks up speed later in the game, with multiple huts granting many actions.

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Hunter scoring increases as 1) the hunter gets the abilities and equipment necessary to hunter higher scoring animals and 2) with greater speed more actions means more opportunities to hunt each turn. I’ll need to decide whether to have the hunter’s level increase at even point intervals, say every 10 points on a 100 point scale, or to have the amount needed increase at each level, gaining a level at 10, 25, 45, 70, and 100 points, for example, to have a more even rate of progression. Originally I had thought a more even rate would be better, it’s what RPGs do after all, but now I’m having second thoughts. If hunters gain levels more rapidly as they advance, that would be good incentive for a gatherer to trigger the end of the game earlier. Production engines like the gatherer’s always speed up in late game, so it’s obvious that the hunter will try to end it before the gatherer gets out of control, need to keep those fears balanced.

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Final note: I really need to deliberately control the length of the game. 45 minutes to an hour seems to be a sweet spot these days. Many games run 90 minutes, but it’s always easier to get something to the table that’s shorter. If I can pack this all in an hour that would be ideal.

What happens if the hunter misses? Instead of inventing some new mechanic (plenty of those already) let’s just let the gatherer decide, promote more interaction that way. It would also give the animals intelligence, and unpredictability. A rabbit would most likely run away, but a wolf might approach or slink off, it’s harder to say.

Here are some animal actions:

1. Run Away. Move the animal a number of “spaces” equal to it’s victory point value.
2. Stand Still. Do nothing.
3. Approach. If the hunter is not on the same space, the animal moves onto the hunter’s space. On the hunter’s next action he/she can attack the animal or try to run away. If the hunter tries to run away, the animal gets a free attack. If the hunter misses his/her attack, the animal gets to attack.
4. Attack. Here’s where I take a first stab an an Animal Attack System. The hunter rolls 2d6 and adds all ability scores. If that number is lower than the animal’s difficulty there are consequences. I’ll have to think about what those are later.

Let’s look at the odds real quick (I’ll have to do a probabilities table for 2d6 later). A 1st level hunter defending against a difficulty 17 deer would need to roll at least a 5, which is pretty good odds. That is:

12 (starting abilities) + 5 (2d6 roll) = 17.

As an aside, I’ve been thinking that I want to make each individual animal a little different, a big buck deer might have a difficulty of 18, while a yearling might have a 15. The gatherer would not flip over the tile, but instead peak at it and announce, “You have encountered a deer.”

1. Gatherer places Animal Tiles face down on the board in appropriate terrain*.
2. Hunter places Starting Hut.
3. Hunter places traders from Neighboring Tribes.

* Instead of having different artificial “levels” of animals for the Hunter to encounter, I am thinking about placing different specific animals in different areas of the board, that way the hunter can choose whether to head into the deep dark forest where there are bear and wolves and wild boar, or stay in the meadows where there are deer and rabbits. Of course the gatherer can move the animals, so a mountain lion may just come down out of the hills for a snack.

The gatherer will not be able to look at the Animal Tiles after the initial placement. This gives the game a memory aspect, and also a stategic element, trying to arrange the animals to manipulate where the hunter places the starting point of the game.

All along I’ve had this vision of the setting for this game as nestled in a valley, hills rising into high peaks on either side, streams feeding a river running through the middle. That vision came from a vague memory of reading about some little country on Rick Steves’ travel blog. Now that I’ve tracked it down again, here is his description:

Liechtenstein is a bowl in the mountains — high ridges on the east, milky baby Rhine River still giddy from its tumble out of the Alps running south to north on its west and the stout and classic Gutenberg Castle guarding the entry to the valley on the south.

from Rick Steves’ Blog Entry

June 28, 2008 update: new crafted items. descriptions added.

June 28, 2008 Updates: more hunting tools, new leveling idea.

Since the Hunter half of the game is mechanically a light RPG, I’m going to do conflict resolution using die rolls modified by ability scores. Here are the abilities I’m thinking of going with for now:

Speed

Actions per turn.

Prowess

Hunting skill, modifies ranged attacks, e.g. shooting a bow.

Strength

Modifies close quarter attacks, e.g. grappling with a bear.

When you create your hunter character all of his abilities start out as 3, plus 3 additional points to be distributed as you see fit. Every time that you go up a level (1 level = 10 points on the score track?), you get another point to add to the ability of your choice.

Leveling Update: Since the hunter will be able to get more victory points faster at higher levels, it makes sense that it should require more points to gain a level, the more points you have. This could be integrated directly into the scoring track. But that also means that looping around the scoring track should be avoided. Talk about this more when I get to scoring, but it shouldn’t be too hard to restrict the total animal tile VP to 100. Another side thought: need to work on end game conditions, preferably at least two, one per player.

Now how do you use those abilities? Speed is pretty straight forward, going to experiment with an action point system, gatherer’s get 4 actions and they can build another hut to get another meeple who will also have 4 actions. Hunters can improve their speed more incrementally, if they want. I’ll do another post on player actions, maybe start figuring out how this game actually plays.

Prowess and Strength are used when trying to hunt an animal. If you are using a hunting tool to attempt to take down game from a distance, use Prowess, if you are fighting something within arm’s reach use Strength. Here’s the basic formula:

3d6 + relevant ability + weapon bonus

Compare that to the resulting number to the difficulty rating on the Animal Tile, for example a deer might be a 14. If your roll plus modifiers is the animal’s number or higher your attempt was successful. Let’s do a sample attempt. If you’re hunting a deer with a bow&arrow (+3), and your prowess is 4, and you roll an 8, here’s what it would look like:

8 (roll) + 4 (prowess) + 3 (bow&arrow) = 15 which is greater than or equal to 14 (the deer’s difficulty), so it is a success!

This system diverges from standard systems like d20 in a couple ways. I’m ditching the entirely random twenty sided die roll in favor of the 3 six sided dice used by systems like GURPS. Go bell curve! (Here’s a good article on Dice Mechanics.)

The bell curve produces more predictable results within a familiar range. Common rolls like 9-11 are actually common, and extreme rolls like 3 or 18 are actually rare. The other divergence from RPG systems is that I’m using the raw ability score as a modified, rather than having to look up some chart that tells you that your strength 14-15 gives you a +1 bonus, and 16-17 gives you a +2 bonus (for example). This also removed the annoyance of improving an ability (say from 14 or 15) and not actually getting any benefit.

Here’s a table with the odds of making at least the given roll:

Here are the hunting tool bonuses I’m considering:

• +0 bone knife (arm’s reach, have at start of game)
• +0 rock (thrown)
• +0 arrow (useless without bow)
• +1 club (arm’s reach)
• +1 sling (throws a rock)
• +2 spear (thrown or arm’s reach)
• +3 stone headed spear (thrown or arm’s reach)
• +2 atlatl (throws a spear, also get spear bonus)
• +2 stone headed arrow
• +3 bow & arrow (shoots arrow)
• +4 stone axe (arm’s reach)

Now, I’ll toss some early numbers thinking around for animal difficulties. Needing to roll at least an 11 is 50:50 odds. Keeping in mind that hunters are going to have base abilities between 3 and 6 at the start of the game (with 4 being the safest even distribution of points setup), and hunters will have access to +1 throw +4 hunting tools, let’s say your average shot attempt has +6 at the beginning (+4 prowess +2 weapon), which means that the deer mentioned earlier at 14 is actually pretty easy to hit (83.8% chance of rolling an 8). Given that, I’d probably make something like a rabbit a 14, move a deer up to a 16 or 17 (need to roll a 10 or 11), and make a bear a 20 or 21, a long shot or nearly impossible for a 1st level hunter, having to roll a 14 (16.2%) or 15 (9.3%).

If players only score points when they bring food back to the Hut, hopefully they will be motivated to go back fairly regularly. But it would also be very easy for the game to become unbalanced if there is no limit to how much food a player can carry. A powerful hunter late in the game could stay out hunting and not return until he/she has enough points to win, whereas a Gatherer with a more complex production engine would be required to return. Now, I’m not a fan of complex encumbrance systems, I pretty much ignored those rules back when I played AD&D. Too fiddly. So I need to come up with a compromise.

With cards as hunting equipment, applying a fairly tight hand limit will prevent people from carrying 17 spears or 50 sling stones. But I’d like to treat the hunting weapons (Bow, Atlatl, Sling, Spear) differently from the projectiles (Arrows, Atlatl Darts, Rocks). Tangent: spears are tricky because they can be used at close quarters, thrown, and possibly used by an Atlatl, depending how technical I decide to be. An Atlatl is a spear thrower, but the spears are more flexible than the sort of weapon you’d brace against a charging bear, but it’s a more interesting game mechanic if a spear can have three uses.

Where was I? Right, food and weapons, how much can be carried? It may be time to introduce Player Boards. Sure, I could say the Hunter gets 4 cards in hand, 2 on the table, and can carry 3 kills (successful encounters with yummy animals), and the Gatherer can collect and carry 6 resources, or 4 items to be traded (yes, I’ll get to the Gatherer’s half of the game eventually here). But I like having a particlar place where everything goes. It’s easier to remember how many resources you can carry if there are 6 little squares the size of resources on a little board in front of you. Also, a player board can act as a player aid, with the turn sequences on each role’s unique board, and whatever else of the rules I can jam on there. Player aids are awesome. They make teaching games easier.

To shortcut the boring “walking home” part of adventure games, I’ve noticed designers allowing players to “teleport” back to the start when they’re done with a quest. Candamir and I believe Fire and Axe both do this. While I absolutely agree with the sentiment behind this rule, it has at times pulled me out of a game. When teaching Candamir, there’s that part where you say, “now you teleport back to the village.” Pulls me out of the mood

The reason I bring this up is that I’m thinking about how players get to score the points they’ve earned by collecting food (whether it be gathered nuts or snared rabbits). I think that points aren’t scored, resources aren’t fully secured, and ability scores don’t actually improve, until you go back to a Hut. My hope is that the Trail Blazing^TM movement system will allow for fast, but realistic, return treks. This makes me lean towards the alternative version where you move faster as the path gets wider. That would also lead to a nice simulation of paths turning into roads with repeat usage.

Any place that either player moves on the board a trail is formed. A line is drawn to mark the path (see my entry on drawing paths). Movement along a pre-existing trail is doubled.

Alternative: each time any player moves between two points a line is drawn, up to 3 lines. One line does not modify movement, two lines doubles it, and three tripples it.

Thinking about the concept of encounter range. That’s one advantage early humans had, that they could throw projectiles, right?

Encounters are face down on the board, known only by the gatherer until the hunter comes within visual range. When a hunter is one “space” (board might not have grid) away from an Encounter Tile, the tile is flipped over. At this point a couple things could happen,

1. Hunter and gatherer vie for initiative (probably skip this, but could be fun cards vs. dice),
2. Hunter tries to shoot the animal (what about friendly or non-animal encounters, do we even want those?),
3. Gatherer picks animal’s reaction, approach, flee, etc. The choice could be random, or require resources to counter default behaviour.
4. Hunter gains points for successful kill.

Then, depending on the animal’s reaction, or if the hunter is able to move more, they might end up on the same “space”. In this case the encounter would proceed in much the same way, but with greater risk to the hunter.

Another thing this brings up is what happens when an animal flees to the edge of the board? It may well be lost, having moved outside of the hunting range. Which brings up the question of how and when (if?) encounter tiles are replenished.

For starters I’m going to try having a draw deck with 3 cards face up next to it, giving players 4 drawing options (one random, but secret from the other player). Starting hands of 3 cards, and drawing 1 per turn. These will change as we go, but fewer options at the start will give more weight to each card.

For the hunter my first thought about the cards is that they could be hunting supplies and equipment, arrows and such being a finite resource that take time to make and repair. If the game is about a transition between periods within the stone age, I don’t feel bad presenting a range of technologies. Here’s a first pass:

hunting weapons

rocks

spears

sling

atlatl

atlatl darts (or just use spears?)

bow

arrows

traps

snare

deadfall

pit

A thought regarding the board, to really capture the feel of exploring this untamed wilderness the board could consist of a map with a number of points of interest, rather than a grid. Slap a piece of Plexiglas on top of it, and the hunter could actually draw paths on the board with a dry erase marker (somewhat like a crayon rail game, although I haven’t actually played one to be sure).

One idea for the theme of the game is that we are in a transition between periods within the stone age. The hunter player represents the old way of doing things, while the gatherer player is making a transition to agriculture.

The game would begin with resources on the board for the gatherer to collect, but at some point they will need to make a transition to planting and harvesting (harvesting could happen at end game for final scoring), hopefully before those resources run out.

As part of this transition the gatherer could begin settling, placing huts on the board. One thought (and this may not hold up) was that the gatherer’s movement could be restricted to areas visited by the hunter. I’m worried that the gatherer’s movement, especially the first couple turns, could feel really restricted. But the gatherer controls the encounter tiles, so the hunter’s movement could be manipulated.  And the game is cooperative in the beginning, right?

Board games aren’t exactly known for their historical accuracy (take a close look at the Ticket to Ride map), but I might as well make at least minor (wikipedia) attempt at it. First decision will be what early humanoids to represent in the game, Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, Homo erectus, etc., to determine what sort of tools would be appropriate. Actually, I think I’ll go the other way around. I want to have the Atlatl in my game (which I made in high school) so I’ll read up on who used those to make my decision. Hopefully they also had some form of snares or traps, though likely not. Sounds like I may be deciding to go historically inaccurate right from the start anyway.

Update: found a page with an awesome overview of periods in the stone age (scroll down until you see a table) Paleolithic on Wikipedia.

OK, we’ve got Rounds and Turns. A turn is when a single player actually does stuff. There are two Rounds, a Gathering round and a Hunting round. Each player gets to do stuff during each round. The primary player (Hunter on a Hunting round) gets to do the most stuff (action point based for Gatherer, movement die roll for Hunter?), and the secondary player “progresses evil” to borrow a term from Shadows. Basically just running interference.

I don’t know what happens on a Gathering round, I’ll need Cybil’s help with that.

On a Hunting round the Gatherer gets to move Encounter Tiles. How many or how far I don’t know yet. Then the Hunter rolls a movement die and runs around trying to kill stuff to get food (points) and maybe equipment (cards).

So yeah, it’s all still pretty vague. I’m not to worried about making a Hunter role that I will enjoy playing. The Gatherer is more daunting, it being strategy and all. But I’ll get help. Balancing the two roles, that’s gonna be the bitch ’cause I’m no Reiner. Playtesting and more playtesting.

The Hunter gets a miniature, the Gatherer a pawn (at least for now, see if Cybil objects *grin*).

The Gatherer places Encounter Tiles face down on the board. The Gatherer in turn gets wooden resource tokens.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten with that, and even then I’m not so sure. Except that I do like the idea of Encounter Tiles because the Gatherer could get to move them.

Cards will be drawn either from 3 (or maybe more) face up cards, or blindly from the draw deck. This face up configuration injects another couple layers of strategy, you get to pick instead of relying on luck, but your opponent knows what you got.

This also has game design implications for the values of the Split Cards. If a card is weak for both players it will just sit there and require a reset mechanism.