Hello there! It´s been a while since a wrote something. May and June are a crazy period for me as all family birthdays are in a few weeks.
I keep working on the lay out (ungrateful bitch) of Super Space Knights but my head boils with new ideas all the time. I don´t want to create another behemot like SSK (at least until I haven´t finished it) but I have discovered that tiny little games can be very rewarding in both, design and playing.
Necroworlda, like SSK, owes it´s inspiration to miniature games and my usual problem: lack of time and space to play them. Necroworlda in particular is more inspired in squirmish games like Deadzone, Infinity, Mordheim or Necromunda were you control small groups of warriors and battle other players in longer campaigns where the warrior´s stats change as they grow in experience (or die!). Smaller numbers of miniatures make these games more manageable than big ones but still challenging to meet the other players over a number of weeks (I am sure other people can but me, out of the question).
Necroworlda is mini-game (the rules are ONE page long) that tries to simulate the feeling of this long campaigns. It includes six types of gangs, a territory generator and a number of actions that cover from simple confrontations to going to black markets or ambush other players. I have played it with up to four players and runs quite smooth but theoretically can admit any number. A whole campaign (a game, basically) can be played in 30 minutes, possibly less.
As usual, a lot of ideas have been left behind for possible expansions: more types of territories and gangs, special characters... but I will leave that for the future.
Have a look (it´s free!) and let me know what your think!
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A good thing about the game: it takes very little to play. I met some friends last night for a board gaming session and I managed to squeeze Necroworlda instead of the regular filler and we ended up playing for two hours!
The best part is the story that the game tells: two gangs fought for a weapon loot and the winner used it to conquer the village of another player. This one had to run away after heavy loses and spent most of the game wandering in the wasteland until by chance they discovered some tunnels they used to ruthlessly attack back their former village. Other player ended up with three weapon factories but every time he went to sell them there was a battle in the black market. He lost three or four gangers he had to buy back.
Eventually, the winner was the player that took the village and controlled two casinos that worked incredibly well. That same player didn't attack other gangs, just destroyed their territories. After destroying a couple of gangs, the other remaining one just couldn't stop him.
I tried really hard to avoid "winning formulas", that is, combinations of actions that always lead to victory.
So far, in the game testing, all four actions seem more or less balanced: Gang War is dangerous but rewarding, Undercover Operation is the "low cost war" option and Go Out Into the Wasteland is a nice option when you want to avoid others.
Have you noticed any imbalance?
One thing we have noticed is that if you start with only one territory it's really hard to progress as everyone is very poor and the tendency is to conquer other players' territories. This usually leads to a few squirmises fought to the last man obliterating all gangs but one (usually weakened). The option to generate a new territory is there but stealing from others is just better.
As a simple solution to this, I think that starting with more territories could help. This way, you aren't that bad if you lose one, everyone starts wealthier and that gives more options.
This looks great!
In my club they tried to play Necromunda a few times but Blood Bowl got in the middle. The last attempt of a campaign was interrupted by the arrival of Mordheim (come on!) and that was the end of it. The few gangs around were recycled into chaos and imperial guard armies.
I want to give this a go.
That's sad. I had similar problems: when I got the game, my old friends were moving on to other things and Warhammer 40k had lost a lot of it's former popularity among us.
I managed to give it new life in university with the rpg club and we used to play it over a door lying over two chairs and lots of rubbish as terrain. Still, the ratio gaming/preparation was still quite low and the game eventually disappeared.
I think what pushed people back was the amount of rules. There were so many details and exceptions and conflictive rules that was hard to organise games.
Apart of that, good news, I convinced my other half last night to try your game and my mutant gang, the Blistered Rats faced the Plutonium Chainsaws, his head hunters. We had a few squirmises mainly around his casino, wich changed of owners a couple of times. Eventually, the Blistered Rats ran out of money and weapons and ended up going a bit too often to the wasteland where my last surviving mutant was devoured by a bigger mutant. XDDD
We had good fun and we agreed the game would be funnier with more players. How many can play this?
That's fun! In my testing games there was as well a huge battle over a Mutant Casino that ended up with a single survivor keeping the place. Another epic battle was for the control of a Dead Zone between two players with no other territories or someone who was ambushed three times in the same turn!
There is no player limit, theoretically but common sense dictates that more than six people around the table might be too many.