Workshop 5: Strategy/Territorial Acquisition game

Workshop5: Strategy/Territorial Acquisition game

In this workshop session, using experience from playing Battle of Moscow from the previous workshop, we were assigned to design a strategy or wargame with elements of territorial acquisition as the core mechanic. 

We were provided with a blank hexagonal map to design on. We then created a rough design and the game rules.

Game Map:

• Blue tiles: blue team
• Red tiles: red team
• Green tiles: unit spawner
• White tiles: occupiable space

Game Rules:

• A match consists of 2 players (blue and red team)
• A match lasts for 20 turns, where a turn ends when both players have already made their moves.
• Using a 1D6 to play the game
• We decide which player starts first by rolling the 1D6; whoever rolls the highest will begin the game.
• During a player’s turn, they can move their units to advance, leave some units to occupy space, or attack the other player if their units are within range.
• Initially, both players start with 1 general and 3 units
• All the units and the commander initially start within their respective team color tiles as shown in the map above.
• Players can stack units into a group
• Players need to leave behind at least 1 unit to occupy a white tile
• Occupy the green tiles to spawn more units
• The 1D6 roll decides the number of units spawned

1D6 roll value	1-2	3-4	5-6
Unit spawn	1	2	3

• When attacking the opponent, we used the Battle of Moscow game table to decide the battle result.
• Depending on the attacking results, the player can eliminate the opponent units and occupy the space; the opponent units can retreat, the attacker needs to retreat instead, the attacker loses their units or nothing happens.
• Winning condition: the general is defeated or has the most occupied spaces when all game turns end 

Playtesting

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The game ended in 3 turns because one player decided to take their whole army, including their commander, to attack the opponent and lose.

The map created gives the blue team a slight advantage. This is because the nearest green tile is closer to the commander than the red team.

We need to redesign the map so that neither player has an advantage. We must also fix the rule that the commander cannot leave the starting point until the conditions are met.

The updated map is provided below:

We also came up with additional game rules along with the updated map. However, we do not have enough time to playtest these additional rules.

Addition Game Rules:

• We included the beige tiles; these tiles were provided so that the commander of each team cannot go beyond these tiles.
• The commander can go beyond the beige tiles only if they have no more units remaining.
• The grey tiles represent spaces that are not covered in the game.
• The green tiles were not placed and that was fair to both teams.
• And the green tiles can now only spawn units once for the entire game to reduce the number of turns
• The number of turns has now been reduced to 10 from the initial of 20 turns.