Sentinel City, the Board Game

Coming soon-ish.

Status: Alpha

I have to run some playtests with a few close friends. After I fix the major leaks that reveals, I'll print out a couple Beta copies and do some more extensive testing. The day I order the Betas, I'll have a Card Art message board set up. From there, a lot of crossed fingers.

Developer's Diary #1 - Introduction

I kind of want to let information out slowly about this project. Partly to build interest and partly because it's still under intense development while the rest of my life is pretty hectic as well. The design will take as long as it takes, but once it's out of Beta, the pace should pick up.

Anyway, the quick, two-word description is "Superhero Boardgame." The slightly longer one is "2-8 player board game with cards, dice, and a whole lot of tokens." The original plan, and I've kept to it as much as possible, was to have a superhero game that didn't revolve around just the slugfests. One that took into account some of the other wonderful things about superhero comics. Deadly disasters, reality-warping super-science, and byzantine villanous plots.

As things went on, combat became more prominent than I had originally envisioned. But the heart of the game was still something else: the relationship between the Hero and Villain characters and the fact they have completely different goals. Yes, these goals tend to lead to a lot of punching, but that's just a side effect of the real action.

The combat itself is a mix of HeroClix and ZOMBIES!!!, with the heroes almost always greatly outnumbered by low-level henchmen. It's being designed for speed and drama.

But the real conflict, as I said, comes from the differing goals of the two sides. The Villains have various, self-centered goals. If they achieve any one of them, they win. The Heroes, on the other hand, have only one goal: preserve the status quo. As long as the city is not destroyed and none of the Villains achieve their goals before a pre-set time-limit, the Heroes, all the Heroes, win.

Because of this, the actions of the Villains drive the game. Their plots are what send the Heroes careening around the city. All of this is an attempt to model the types of storylines seen in traditional superhero comics. It gets cosmic at times, weird at others and is hopefully fun always.

More as it develops...

-nb

Developer's Diary #2 - The Great Art Hunt

I have a problem. I can't draw.

That's not entirely true. Given enough time, I can draw something that a third party would recognize as the thing I was trying to represent. However, I can't draw well enough quickly enough to produce all the art needed for this game. Which is where you, hopefully, come in.

Once the game has passed Alpha, I'll put up a board on here for people to post art to. I'll have descriptions, some detailed, some more open, for each card in the set. Anyone who wants to can post their own art for any card. Once we have a complete set, I'll pick my favorites in case of duplicates and send them off to the printers.

But what do you get out of this? Well, mostly exposure. You would be credited on each card that your art was used for, and you get a link here to your website (if you have one). But there would also be a royalty. I'm still figuring it out, but it looks like $0.02 to $0.03 per card, per game sold. Like I said, mostly exposure.

This whole part of it is still probably a couple months out, but if you'd like to talk to me about it in the meantime, e-mail me at neal@nealbohl.net.

More as it develops...

-nb

Developer's Diary #3 - Almost at Alpha

Every card has text. Not necessarily the right text, but text nonetheless. There's even a crappy looking map.

I'm currently in the process of transferring the information in the text documents to actual card graphics. While I'm doing that, and probably for a bit afterward, I'm cleaning up a lot of the stuff that didn't really fit because I was unclear about something while writing it.

The next major thing, and I'm really not sure how major it is, is pairing up Strategies and Deeds with Plots. It's either going to take 10 minutes or several hours. Once that's done, I can finish up with the card prototypes and do one last round of guessing on how I think everything's going to interact together.

Then the Alpha testing can start. Which I fully expect will require me to rewrite half the cards. When everything looks good there, I'll do the first printed Beta copies and start the Art Hunt.

There's still a lot of work ahead, but things are coming together nicely.

Oh, yeah, and there's been a name change from "Centennial City" to "Sentinel City". Thanks Jessie!

More as it develops...

-nb

Developer's Diary #4 - Alpha Plus EX Gold Hyper Edition

Whew... That was a long walk for a short distance.

The game is currently ready to play. Well, for testing purposes. I have no doubt that there are still massive balance issues that are only going to come out from playing it. If this were a machine, I'd be at the point where I'm flipping the "on" switch while keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that it doesn't blow up.

I hope it doesn't blow up.

But what I wanted to talk about today was a little more of the thinking behind the project. There was a video I watched recently (sorry, the link escapes me), where a lecturer was talking about game theory. The phrase he used to define the word "game" has been rattling around in my brain ever since: "an engine for making interesting decisions." That became one of the two guiding principles of the game. Cards were added and rules were tweaked to allow for the most interesting decisions. For example, should I rescue my helpful supporting character from a horde of angry, intelligent gorillas or would my time be better spent stopping a Villain from attempting to summon the God of Evil?

Hint: Probably the latter. But circumstances may make you lean toward the other. Hopefully, there's enough variety that you can play the game over and over again without ever coming up against the exact same circumstances twice. Either way, I've tried to design it so that every decision feels important and unique.

The other guiding principle was the genre of superhero comics itself. It's a world that carries its own peculiar logic. It's not realistic, but it is internally consistent. Something had to make sense both in mechanical game terms as well as superhero terms before I'd include it. Take death for example. I don't want to leave players out of a game (especially larger multi-player ones), so for the most part, you just don't die. Heroes end up captured or in the hospital. Villains end up in jail. However, there are... three, I believe... cards that can cause real removed-from-the-game death. There's also three that can bring you back. All of that is basically a translation into game mechanics of the comic book maxim: "Dead isn't dead unless you see the body. And even then, only sometimes."

The other thing I want to touch on briefly is the art. Making this available for sale is dependant on getting art for the cards. However, as I hear is common practice, I have representative art for the Beta (except for the character cards, those just have descriptions). Unfortunately, I can't show you any of this as it's all copyrighted materials dug up from Google and my personal comic collection. Which is too bad, 'cause it looks cool. Although, I think I'm safely in the fair-use category with the above-pictured card, just to give you an idea of where things are at.

More as it develops...

-nb

Developer's Diary #5 - Lessons Learned

Every time I come to look at these, I think I should've put dates on them. But, for the sake of my ego, it's probably best I didn't. Either way, it's been a while.

There are a number of reasons for that. The ongoing moving/remodelling project, occasional bits of for-hire work when I can get it, and the too infrequent truly relaxing moments, which I've learned to appreciate more than ever.

But, even with all that, I've found time to work on other projects. The real problem is that I sort of killed the game for myself. See, I recently moved a couple thousand miles away from most of my friends, and, more to the point, from all of my friends who would be willing to help me playtest. So, I figured I'd knock up a rough Flash version and we could all get together that way.

That was the plan. In reality, I got halfway through the "select game" page before breaking down on the project entirely. It bugged the hell out of me at the time, because I hadn't even gotten to what I felt was the difficult stuff yet.

Now I've had time to let that slip away. In the meantime I've encountered other projects where the goal keeps getting pushed back. Like one of those nightmares where you try to run down a hallway, but can't reach the other end. And that's what I did to myself with Sentinel City by adding something more complex than everything that had come before as an afterthought at the end.

That was dumb.

Lesson learned.

So... Where does that leave things now? Well, the game is still sitting there waiting to be printed. And, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to afford to do so soon. Meanwhile, if you have a gaming group, some spare cash, and you feel like playing with a buggy beta version of an untested boardgame, drop me a line.

More as it develops...

-nb

Developer's Diary #6 - Start the Presses

Not much to add here, really, except that the fine folks at The Game Crafter should be sending out a copy shortly. Yay!

More as it develops...

-nb

Developer's Diary #7 - Stop the Presses

Ah, learning experiences.

Because of a variety of reasons too personal and/or boring to go into here, the Sentinel City project is at an indefinite stand-still. Although, should some of my time free up, and I can get a group of playtesters together, I'd gladly haul it back from the grave.

More as it develops...

-nb

Sentinel City by Neal Bohl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.