As you may remember, a couple of years or so ago, a large amount of my game design life was spent working on a "reverse colonialism" game with the working title, Invaded. The conceit is that you are tribes in a comparatively peaceful land, and have been invaded by a powerful colonial army that wants to settle in your lands and take all your stuff. Do you try to resist, keep out of the way, collaborate, or what?
The game has changed a lot from its early days, and works reasonably well, but the experience can be pretty inconsistent, and the game takes longer than I would like to explain, but it has some interesting features, particularly the way that players compete with each other and jointly control the invading force as it pushes forwards. Eventually I pretty much burned out on the game, and it has been nearly a year since last time I looked at it.
Back in the present day, and after my chat the other day about online game testing, I have decided to buy a subscription to Tabletopia. I don't want to get into religious wars, but right now it seems to be a better fit to me than the main alternative, which I'm sure I will also continue to fiddle with a bit. Anyway, I now have the capability to have a few games in my workshop, so I decided to start pulling Invaded's assets in to see how I do with setting it up.
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| Some of the Invaded components set up in Tabletopia. If nothing else, I think this tool will be great for generating prototype rulebook illustrations. |
I've actually been musing on this game for a while now, and a way forward has been bouncing around my brain. At the moment there is a system that ramps up the aggression of the invaders through the game, making them more demanding in trades and more likely to attack. The problem is that this required multi-part cards that needed to be read in conjunction with a score on a track, and this was a bit fiddly and easy for players to get confused.
The idea I am working with is that everything is done with cards, rather than my previous system of having the invaders controlled by card play but player tribe actions coming from a standard menu of options. Under the new system, each card a player holds involves an invader action and a tribe action, and you do both of these on your turn. The ramping up of the game can come from there being two decks of these cards, the first one being more benign, but as these cards are used, they are discarded from the game and replaced by the second deck which contains more powerful actions for both sides. This should remove the need to do all sorts of tracking and cross-referencing of status levels and action options, and make the game flow more smoothly. That's the hope, anyway.
It'll take me a little while to get all that set up as it is a massive overhaul of the game at a level that has not happened since its early days, but I think it will be at least worth trying.
