Sleepover! aka Game Designers of the Future

[eurydicebound]

The boys have a friend, Junior, over tonight for a sleepover. They're currently playing a game in the middle of the living room that involves Heroscape terrain, a chessboard, some heroscape figs, lego figures, tons of d6s, damage markers, and arcane rules that they're largely inventing as they go, with a # of lives, "redos," recharging, "gambling," attacks and defense, and a significant portion of trash talking along with limited RPG/story elements. In theory there's a limited number of redos, but in practice it seems to be "as many as it takes for us to win over the bad guys."

Additional notes:

1) It's a cooperative game, with defined "bad guy" characters that they're all working together to beat. GMing duties to move the bad guys are shared.

2) They seem to agree that one of them should roll most of the time, since he's "the master of rolling." That would be Junior. He's giving dice rolling lessons to Will.

3) Oh, and they just found a Decepticon cube.

It seems to me sorta like Calvinball crossed with Lego D&D Battletech or something. I'm greatly amused.

Comments

[thatcash.livejournal.com]

They'll do the exact same thing when they get into college... I did.

Security was used to the group of us hanging out in the hall's lounge so they weren't surprised when they saw a bunch of us, terrain, dice, and tubs of Lego's lying around. :)

[innocent-man.livejournal.com]

Awesome. :)

Still haven't gotten that picture, BTW. You might want to ask da kiddo to do up another, if'n you wouldn't mind.

[anaka.livejournal.com]

Done, in an envelope, stamped, addressed, and put in the mailbox on my way out.

[oldmangrumpus.livejournal.com]

So, as a game professional, what's your opinion of Heroscape?

Me and irrationalrobot and I were in Toys 'R Us a couple weeks ago when I saw this and was intrigued by it ( I'm man enough to admit it was the little pieces ). Another friend referred to it as "total crack" but that it was easily configurable.

[anaka.livejournal.com]

1) It makes AWESOME BattleTech terrain.

2) The underlying game is actually not bad for a basic minis game. Or probably for D&D, assuming that you fudge a bit on that 5 ft. square.

3) I can't say my kids have ever played the actual game on purpose, though they're cribbing more from it than they used to when going off and making their own things. It's amazingly easy to pillage for other stuff.

[metallian.livejournal.com]

Neat! It sounds like something I'd have done if my mom had happened to be a professional game designer and introduced me to complex games at a young age. ^_^

[oakthorne.livejournal.com]

Make no mistake. They are not the game designers of the future.

They are doing right now what every game designer hopes to somehow recapture.

[anaka.livejournal.com]

It's just fascinating to me because I never did this. Granted, my nearest companions growing up were my brother and his friend, and they were 3+ years younger than I was and didn't care about board games.

[adamdray.livejournal.com]

Man, this sounds really cool. Can I come over and play? =)