 adding to the combat arena ambience. This may yet prove to be a work of great beauty as well as a work of dice carnage.
Edit: the preview copy arrived and with the exception of the ‘power die which are still sporting a ⚡️sticker, the other components are just staggering. The arena is well cut, fits together brilliantly and the art/graphic presentation is staggering. Just in prototype this game looks pro finished si I can only guess at how good the final published game will look.
Yes…because this is a slight deviation from the norm, I have played and am writing about a game that, at present, has no intentions of being multiplayer…I suspect that no matter how complex an AI logic flow chart is, it will not be able to emulate the throwing of a die…that said, maybe some AI logic flow chart might direct the way a die is thrown on behalf of the AI by the player… “if a player die is on X bonus location, throw AI die to hit said human die” etc…I don’t know but perhaps an area Jon & Dan can look into. Full contact arena combat may yet become a solo venture in some shape or form…we shall see!
Obviously, just as many hex & chit wargames are, the single player can play…and I hate this particular application of the word…”solo” by playing more than one combatant, trying to play to the best advantage for each. Not my idea of “solo”. For me an AI opponent needs to think like a person so providing a worthy opponent or needs to be a game mechanic that pits me, the so.oist, against the game itself…but that’s just my beef with wargames that say soloable…when they obviously are not.
On the back of many discussions with Jon, I discovered what plans there are in store for the progression of Masters of Gettown. This universe is destined to be more than a one-hit-wonder.
To compensate for a lengthy piece of meandering nonesensical doodah, another spot of ambient background atmosphere.
As for the MOG franchise, the solo play will undoubtedly take a bit of work. Currently play this first version solo as much as you could play chess or pool against yourself, but that won’t cut it for us. To get to the point where we can introduce a solo variant into the franchise, we are going to be developing around the arena in modular, expansion utilising fashion.
The first stage is to develop the core mechanics for Masters of Gettown and the components to achieve it. To me, this already appears to have been accomplished admirably, and successfully ties this in with the world and the lore of this newly created world/universe. Small beginnings see the choice to have the first Masters of Gettown game released that represents an actual tournament situation being held in the title named city, the city of Gettown, each year. This ill allow steady introduction to the world of full contact dice, as a mechanic for luck mitigation mixed with area control as well as being as close to actually coming to full bouts of fisticuffs with our opponent during combat as we could peacefully get. Having all this wrapped in a wonderfully visual experience has already created enthusiasm for player elimination as another part of the game.
(Lore Note: Between each yearly tournament, the city of Gettown manufactures 100 clone bodies. Each year any number of entrants are allowed for the tournament, but if it exceeds 100, the less confident will drop out of the running until it falls back down (for fear of actual death). Entrants that die in the arena are reanimated afterwards in one of these clone bodies (now processed to look like them) with the option of walking away or sticking around to watch how they died and learn from it for next year.
The first manifestation of the game ends thematically when a player wins the game and becomes the Master of Gettown. The fundamental win objective This player will now rule the megacity of Gettown for a whole year and as the master, not unlike Stephen Fry in laketown…if this is our fate, we have access to all the wealth and resources it has available. With everything ‘tournament’ related in Gettown available to everyone else, we, as master, chooses a team from the top finishers and sets out in to the wasteland surrounding the city, in search of ‘Past Masters’ of the arena to hone our skills against, as tracking down well as fabled, ‘legendary weapons’ and items that we can bring back with us to give us a better chance at winning the next annual tournament. His starts to lend its self to an extended journey or adventure. So in actual game releases terms, Earth to Games first expansion is planned to be A cooperative legacy RPG.
Jon has indicated that they are developing an evolving map system for a ‘choose your own direction’ kind of set up. The start point and the boss tokens will be placed into the map and the player’s must fight their way across it by pulling random Journey tokens out of a bag. As we will only start with one item each (taken from the original game), the mammoth task of us having to defeat creatures we find long the way, and use any collected/acquired items or weapons foes drop, ever strengthening our repertoire to eventually face the boss. With every encounter potentially ending in players being killed (and sent back to Gettown for cloning) we could just use a small amount of tokens to get to the boss quickly but the payoff here being that we may be woefully under equipped to deal with the Boss. Conversely, we could try to travel a longer path that uses all of the available journey tokens. This obviously presents the opportunity to gain more weapons and items (and even new playable characters), but also means we are more and more likely to lose one (or more) of our sturdy group to the wasteland dangers. (When a player drops to 0HP they will be returned to Gettown and that player may either choose a new character to play as (called for from the city) or skip the next battle in order to play as their original character again.
Discover an overarching story that details the relationship between Gettowners and the wasteland inhabitants.
Now stage three sees the emergence of a cunning plan to release an expansion that is actually set a year before the first game, during a shapeshifter rebellion (shapeshifters obviously being the original advanced life form on the planet existing way before grotty humans started arriving).
This will introduce the first ‘hidden information’ of the game with one player secretly beginning each match as a shapeshifter whilst all other players try their bestest to win the game without becoming the shifters host body (his could see the introduction of exchanging face down tokens during certain interactions between players with only one token having the shifter symbol on it). Conceptually each combatatnt will be trying to win as normal but there will obviously be some exciting new player interactions and ultimately someone falling pray to the shapshifter..taking up residence in the player character.
From this point on, we will have so many more components to work with to craft a solo player expansion (compared to only having the arena right now), that this will be the point when we make our solo move. A solo move to emulate the experience of the original multiplayer game release. So in essence r conceptual suggestion we, the soloist, will commence a game by generating a character from scratch that we will love and nurture throughout their journey from deciding to train for the arena, all the way to them getting to the centre stage arena.
Events will culminate with us fighting in the arena against an automated training turret and end as we are walking in to the arena tower about to fight for real (looping back to the start of this first game release). This may not be the only format for solo playas there is potentially another ‘spin-off’ adventure for solo players that use a card driven AI at this stage all is planned ideas and obviously may evolve with the game’s development but what is comforting to know as a soloist is that there will be ways for us to enjoy this game when everyone else has buggered off!
Winners and Losers: As this is predominantly geared up as a knockout format, there will ultimately be a winner and man losers. It is not a difficult game to play but most definitely one of those games that we will continually discover new techniques to add to our repertoire. Sadly players will find they are knocked out of the arena but the gameplay, especially with larger numbers, is so tense and invigorating that once a player finds themselves knocked out, it becomes an engrossing spectator sport.
Lucky Buggers: This is a dice fest to be sure. When ever we lob a dice into a container the godlets (micro-gods) of luck interfere dreadfully. But do not lose heart my fellow dice haters. We are throwing dice to physically contact opponent’s dice to reposition them or change their faces. We can influence this by practicing crazy rebound shots or adjusting the power with direct shots. Ultimately we have only the merest of control but our abilities, items, weapons all have the potential to effect the pips on a die so we can mitigate some of the randomness….but that said, this is a crucial element of the game’s entertainment. The luck factor most definitely adds to the tensio…and some of the shots we make can completely surprise us by their sheer stupendous brilliance. This game would be dull without an element of luck so, as much as I usually hate dice as much as they hate me, this is one of those perfect exceptions to the rule.
Highs