Infinite Dark - Design Blog 4 - First Playtest

Early playtesting isn't like playing a game.  It's work, not fun.

There's no mission, here.  No scenario.  There isn't even another player on the other side of the table.  This is just me moving stuff around and going "OK, so what if...?" and trying to see how it would work mechanically.

I've had to cut away a lot of early darlings.  Currently, 3-dimensional space is an almost-total bust.  I tried a lot of ways of doing it and, technically, some of them worked.  But they really didn't make the game any more fun or interesting.  I still think I can build in some of the more interesting features of 3-dimensional space, though.

Newtonian physics is a thing, but not - so far - a thing that should cause enormous headaches, because most combat vessels will be pretty manoeuvrable unless seriously damaged.

Power allocation has been rolled into the activation mechanics, which have been borrowed from Horizon Wars.  So rather than having two action, you have a number of power tokens that can be spent on commands (doing stuff) or allocated to systems (boosting stats).  Allocated power tokens are reminiscent of support tokens in Zero Dark.  So there's a strong element of forward planning and the allocation of tokens (which happens on the ship's control card (like a Hero card) rather than on the table) is visible to your opponents so they can see in advance that a ship is powering up weapons or diverting power to thrusters or whatever.

A ship has as many activations as it has tokens in its power reserve.

I've also found a place for a mechanic like Zero Dark's bonus actions, in that extra successes on manoeuvre tests can be used to re-organize your power token allocations.

Currently, the damage and repair mechanics are pretty much lifted directly from Horizon Wars.  I'm not sure that they'll remain that way.  But in many ways they suit the context of massive ships being slowly reduced by attrition better than they do battlefield warmachines (I was always a bit uncertain about the almost complete inability to "one shot" anything with A2 or more in HW.

There's a long way to go in this design, but I feel like I'll have, at least, a simple beta version ready for patrons by the end of the year so you can tear it apart for me.