The 12 Towers

There's no real "story" to it, the lore is all on the towers. The best I can give you is this thing I wrote last year while it was in early dev (crap just written all over a marble notebook)

"Long ago, a deity created a world, with all of his power. When his work was complete, he divided himself among 12 standing towers. Each one housed a portion of it's strength, to forever keep the world in balance. When the fire burns to bright, the winter comes. When the wickedness of man fuels their hated, light will shine."

TL:DR - towers keep shit in balance. Control the towers, control the world.

Each tower has a conflicting element, or enemy

Fire - Ice
Under - Sky
Iron - Gold
Emerald - Brass
Black - White
Shadow - Life

>Fire - Ice
>Under - Sky
>Iron - Gold
>Emerald - Brass
>Black - White
>Shadow - Life

I'm actually curious as to how you decided on those themes. Out of all of them, the Emerald/Brass is the most enigmatic.

This reminds me of that turbo-autist game Ben Wyatt made on Parks and Rec.

Which is a complement.

The first four elements are self explanatory. Emerald was originally Ivory, I changed it for several reasons, but the important one was I needed something to oppose a desert (Brass = Desert, Emerald = Green lush land)

Also, brass can be molded and shaped, Emerald is just a really, really hard rock. A lot of these ideas just kinda fell into place like, "oh, that works."

Also, shadow and life were originally "time and space", but I changed it to follow a more Life and Death kind of thing. Shadow is more along the lines of planes of existence, ghosts, phantoms, not like evil death.

That looks like something I'd get to play exactly once before my friends decided I wasn't allowed to play it any more.

Basically, I'd play it. Probably really like it, too.

Cool looking game bro.
There is some place on the internet where we can follow your game developement?

Glad I'm getting great reviews so far

Before I forget, one MAJOR aspect of the game, controlling more towers improves your cards.

Simply put, almost all of the cards in the game have a TC (Tower Controller) effect at the bottom. What this does is gives you an automatic boost to whatever cards you control.

For example, if you have a Melee fire weapon that deals 10 damage, controlling the Fire Tower boosts it to 14 damage. If you're lucky you'll see that snowball effect, and the game is yours.

Somewhat, just a crappy FB page I've barely touched, but if it gets some more attention I'll post more often.

facebook com /the12towers/

This looks like Enochian chess.

So I get most of them, but what comprises Black and White and how are they different from Shadow and Life?

Black and White are focused more on good and evil (Black being offensive, White is defensive)

Shadow and Life are more attached to the material planes. Shadow is actually really fun to play with, it has effects and abilities that really shift the game into almost nonsense, Life is more based on elves, wilderness and generally wildlife in general.

Thx. Could you give a quick rundown on the overall strategies of the various elements. (Not the lore, but how they behave in the actual game.)

Sure thing

Fire - Melee Damage focus
Ice - Ranged Damage focus
Under - Defensive/Armor
Sky - Movement/Speed
Iron - Stealth/Evasion
Gold - Greed/Theft
Emerald - Defense/Combine Armor
Brass - Offense/Combine Weapons
Black - AoE Offense/Drain/Vampire Effect
White - AoE Defense/Protection
Shadow - Stealth/Evasion/???
Life - Movement/Growth (++Damage/Armor)

Looks good. Since Shadow is basically death it could revolve around gaining buffs after killing things or self sacrifice.

I like that, the game cards are almost done, but I'll definitely include that into the Tower Cards (Basically like big monopoly cards)

>I won't be posting the rules in this one, my patent paperwork is still going through

Protip: You can't patent a game's system, only it's name.

Thanks. I'm just putting it our there because Shadow and Iron appear to overlap. Could you post some cards?

Yeah I know, just being cautious.

Finished this set a few days ago and got a test print of them. Not top quality, but it's getting there. Had these done at a local FedEx store.

Do you put flavor text on any of your cards? You should.

When the final ones are done, definitely.

This is all just the 2nd edition, everything finally has a nice shiny digital coat, but still not 100% box ready.

So are there creatures player can control in this? Also we can brainstorm some flavor in this thread.

bullet ball

With the quality of the board and the minis shown I would definitely buy and play it at least once.

I have more than a few questions here:

>-Free roam board, exploration and lore (D&D)
I love the lore of a game, so if you could fill us in on what the basic premise of the lore behind this game is I would love to hear it. The towers and soldiers in front of the towers all hint at a variety of cultures and factions involved, which has piqued my interest.

Also, Exploration, how does that work and what impact does it have on the game?

>Randomized Events
Do you have any good examples of what this is like?

Also another good question: If you release this board game, what do you think the price point will be, and what kind platform do you think you'll be selling through?

Yep! I'll explain Events.

Actually, before that, I'll explain Power.

Rather than have a wild amount of numbers to remember, like health, mana, money, etc etc, Power is the ONLY number.

Here's an example of a starting game. Each player starts with 1000 power. That number is divided between you, and your tower. For example, I want to be more offensive, so I'll have 750 for me, and 250 for my tower. Like I said, power represents pretty much everything; health, magic, everything.

This is how events work; Orange spaces allow you to draw an event card. Example, Crystal Golem, each event has three options

Passify: You don't want it, toss it, grab 1 free item card.

Control: You want it, so you pay it's control cost of 50 from your personal power. Card is yours.

Destroy: Don't want it, but you sacrifice tokens from your armor and weapon (as if you're fighting it) and you snag 2 extra item cards.

1.) Going waaaaay way back, I actually started writing this storyline for a server I was creating in the game Neverwinter Nights. Never took off, but I kept the paperwork.

1.5) Exploration also leads to strategy. With certain cards, like fortification, you can set up walls and barriers to prevent or reroute other players.

2.) I'll get a pic of some events put together

3.) I honestly have NO idea for a price, ballpark figure of about 65-80 a box (mainly because of the cards)

So is power also health? Could you buy yourself into death? Also how does armor and weapons work?

Correct, your tower is somewhat of a backup as well, but you can also drain your tower until it's destroyed. It's all a careful balance of keeping your power up, and bringing others down.

Weapons and armor are pretty straight forward, weapons deal damage, armor prevents it. The Break Effects is my custom mechanic design. Break effects are basically slow release spells. Each item has a limit of how many times you can use it (limit tokens). When it's broken, the break effect fires, whether it's your turn or not.

It's really, REALLY funny when someone attacks another player, and it backfires on them when the break effect hits them even harder.

This looks great op. Definitely interested.

>550 cards
How much place does it take physically? Or is that "about 45 per player color"?

There are 4 sets of 144 cards

Spells, Weapons, Armor, Events

So each tower has about 40ish cards (I have the numbers written down somewhere...)

If one player begins to take a commanding lead, is it at all possible to topple them? Or is it sort of like Monopoly where once you get a strong foothold of the board it's just a waiting game?

Also, may have been mentioned ITT and I missed it, but what about temporary alliances like in Diplomacy?

It's actually quite easy to topple the leader. Power is not infinite (There are heal spells and a select few cards that give a small amount of power per turn, but that's it). When a player starts spreading that power out, as a rule, the towers will become weaker.

To control a tower, you have to pay for it from your personal power. Same example as above, I'm running around with 750 personal power, and I want the Ice tower which is at 200. My power will drop to 550, but I have 2 towers now. This is where siege engines come in. Siege engines are basically heavy melee weapons, dealing upwards to 20-60 damage per turn, so that reduces the cost of a tower, but also it's durability.

Alliances and Diplomacy work amazingly in this game, I added an entire section to the Mods list just for that (Friendly fire, shared heal spells, Team victories, etc etc). With larger games of +8 players, entire teams will take their turn at the same time.

I really like that. What's your rough estimated completion date?

Well if I get lucky and win the Hasbro contest, they'll be making it sometime in November. If that falls through I'll jump on Kickstarter and hopefully get some sort of production going by July or August.

Please make sure and post here when you can, I'm very interested, my group is perfect for this.

Post more lore about the various towers.

>I won't be posting the rules in this one, my patent paperwork is still going through, but I'll provide the basics of gameplay.

AFAIK you can't patent, copyright, or otherwise protect a set of rules anyway. They're always covered by fair use.

The Cones of Dunshire. Seems like it'd be a blast, if a bit needlessly complicated.

Anyway. The 12 Towers seems fun. Looks neat, even where it is now. Several cool elements.

With the ~550 cards, which seem to be the driving force behind active play, is there any risk of "bloat," so to speak? Say I'm playing with just one other person. Are we just absolutely swamped with options/actions with so many cards available? Or are the cards accessed in a limited enough fashion that you'll only ever see a few on a given playthrough?

On a similar note, are the non-randomized cards (so the ones that look like items, rather than "Events") a menu of sorts? Do I grab either "Magma Bombs" OR "Crystal Shurikens," or do I draw and hope I get something that synergizes well with my Tower? If the first, how do you prevent the game grinding to a halt while players shop through literally hundreds of options? If the second, is there any kind of "bias" involved so that an Ice Tower holder doesn't end up exclusively with cards that are designed to benefit a Gold Player? I can already see some interesting combinations in the Towers (Getting some benefits from Ice, Sky, and Iron combined, depending on the actual mechanics, make you an elusive sniper type that destroys without personal risk, for example), so I imagine it's not a huge issue, but I'm curious nonetheless.

>roll to move

aaaaand dropped.

Get yourself a good copy editor, too, OP. I assume "passify" is supposed to be "pacify"? Or are you intentionally making a portmanteau with the word "pass"?

Is this the first game you've made? Seems ridiculously ambitious and excessively complex.

Have you shown it to any experienced game designers, or taken it to any conventions? How much have you playtested it, and with what kinds of players? (playing against yourself doesn't count!) You really don't know anything about a game design until you've played it 5 or 10 times with new people every time. Please, for the love of god, tell me you haven't been spending 100s of hours on this thing without ever having shown it to anyone besides friends/family! (Maybe this sounds like I'm being a dick, but you wouldn't believe how many people spend tons of time laboring on a game only to test it and realize that it's completely unplayable).

Anyways, just looking at what you've posted, I think you really need to work on the card design. It's very text-heavy, and a lot of it could easily be simplified. You might want to consider hiring a graphic designer. Also get someone to proofread the cards.

For a typical indie board game, the production costs are around 25% of the retail price (which is about half of the wholesale price). So, if it costs you $60 to print the game, you sell it to distributors for $120, and the retail price is $240.

Also, 60-85 seems really low if this game is also gonna include 12 large plastic towers plus miniatures. I wouldn't worry too much about cards, that's one of the cheaper components (around 1 or 2 cents per card). But if it's just 550 cards, a board, and a rulebooklet, I could see it selling for around 60 (depending on the size of the print run).

I like it, but I can already tell one of your main concerns is going to be making the towers differentiate enough to not be same shit different name, and then the whole balance issues of keeping twelve different factions \themes worth of shit balanced is going to be a god damn nightmare.

Good luck at all that, does look fun though.

>It might look complicated, but it's really not. The same process repeats over and over. During a players turn, they can
>- Roll to move
>- Draw an Event card, if they land on an orange space
>- Cast 1 spell
>- Attack a player with their Melee/Ranged weapon, and a Siege Engine.
>Those can be done in any order, or none at all. (With certain cards, skipping a turn actually benefits you) I've offered a lot of freedom of choice in this game.

Huh, reminds me of Dominion.
I'd play it.

So you have up to 12 players, but you've only play tested up to 8?

>you've only play tested up to 8?

So far.

It's called scaling - testing with every number from, in this case, 2-12 to uncover certain subtle dynamics which you can then either incorporate or address in the rules depending on desired outcomes.

Sure it seems pretty interesting. Got any more pics?

Can you make a vid of a game being played and post it here later?

OP here, I'm awake an answering Q's

I've gotten that a few times, while it might suck to have 1 six sided die to move, there's several reasons why I did this. The main reason is because there's so many cards that enhance and prevent movement, so it's a battle within a battle to keep players locked down. Towards end game you won't even need the die, you'll have enough active events and abilities to have +8 spaces per turn.

First game, and this project has been my life since last October. I'm from Buffalo, NY, and I've play tested it about 12 times at local game stores (Dragon Snacks, Dave & Adams), the only "bad" game night I had was my very first one with some old work friends, rules were a mess and the entire event was a disaster, but it helped with a lot of rewrites.

Definitely 100% I'll hire a designer once I get the money, ALL of this has been made by me so far, no team or helpers.

This, I've tested everything up to 8 so far. 1vs1, 4vs4, 8 person free for all, etc. Once the 2nd Edition is done, I'll be back in the game night loop and do more testing on a larger scale.

Is there any potential for politics?
Do you mind posting some better images of the figurines, board, cards?
Do you have a twitter or something so I can follow your progress? Or should I just keep my eyes peeled on Veeky Forums?

Definitely potential. I've already planned out a few expansions for the game, which will include an addition to the rules, set of cards and a new board. Politics and factions is one, in depth character lore and abilities is the other.

And on my phone at work, so I'll give it a shot

I do have a Twitter for the game, but I haven't used it yet, if I can get like 20ish followers or whatever, I'll start posting daily

Should be @The12Towers

Where'd the towers and figures come from?

The towers are my designs that I had 3D printed. And I'll say this now because it's caused problems before, the figurines are NOT mine, they belong to the game Talisman. Hopefully soon when I get the funds or technology, I'll make my own. For now they work perfectly, but I always make sure before every demo presentation that those are not my property

They look cool, even if I'm assuming they're not wholly necessary.

I don't want to crush anyone's dreams here, but this looks inelegant and bland.

550 cards is a waste of paper if the differences between them are "bonus" rider effects, and 12 factions is a waste of conceptual space if they have no interesting character, no internal conflict.

It's possible the rules we aren't seeing contain some ingenius interplay that would give this value, but from what you're showing us, it just looks like a big bag of mechanics and no reason to care about any of it.

Pretty much where I'm at, yeah.

I appreciate the enthusiasm and the lovely visual aesthetic, but even with only the broadest of outlines it seems likely that the mechanics are a total mess.

Of course it is. Its just getting attention because he posted pics of a semi-good looking prototype.

Also, you know he is a fucking faggot if he seriously is trying to patent this.

I thought you couldn't patent game rules?

You are correct, you can't. But that hasn't stopped the government from occasionally going full retard and given video and board games patents when they shouldn't have. These are often the basis for the ridiculous bullying and anti-competition actions you occasionally see pop up every so often.

In all fairness, I can't argue any of that. This is my first game, and I have zero knowledge on the board game industry from a business view, so that's why I'm here, you guys are the pros at what you do, so rather than hostility, I'd like to learn what I can do and do it right.

I honestly really do appreciate everyones input

wow, that was uncalled for

It's got a good look, a fine name (though "The Twelve Towers" would work better), and wants to settle things in between 45-90 minutes. That's enough to get me interested, even if I have a wide amount of doubts with this game.

Like the business of having to capture ALL twelve towers, when that's likely just a win-more win condition, and worrying about "modding" before the main game has been refined.

Regardless, it's still some guy on Veeky Forums trying to make a game, and it's nice to see someone be productive.

It's hard to be helpful when we don't have access to the rules. Anyway, when you're designing something it's important to focus on negative feedback. That's how things get improved.

You're off to a good start overall. You have an attractive prototype and you've done some playtesting with groups of various sizes.

What sort of feedback have you received from your players, by the way?

I recommend checking out the Board Game Design subsection of boardgamegeek. You'll find a lot of great resources and information.

boardgamegeek.com/forum/974616/boardgamegeek/board-game-design

>I won't be posting the rules in this one, my patent paperwork is still going through, but I'll provide the basics of gameplay.

Dropped. If you won't tell us how to play, we can't tell you if the game is good or not. Anyway intellectual property law doesn't actually protect game mechanics, only the format they're presented in.

I'm going to toss out a bit of criticism here so don't h8

I like power as a resource and it's simple enough for retards like me to understand, but the problem is the metric is high. When I read 1000 for starting power I was a little concerned. How is the player going to track his power? Some kind of recorder needs to be provided. 1000 is also really high, and disconnects the player from the cost. 200 doesn't sound so bad when you have 1000 but if you only had 100 power 20 sounds like a lot more. The ratios are the same but the difference psychologically is significant. Have you experimented with smaller numbers?

How the fuck do I even begin addressing this?
OP, either this is going to become some sort of niche cult game or it's gonna become the next answer to, "Well, robots can't play-".
Godspeed, OP. I don't know anything about board game design, but the scope of this thing is pretty damn impressive.

OP here, I'm convinced, when I get home I'll post the rules, I'm just very cautious about them in the sense that a group or team of gamers could take them, make the game faster than I am, then I'm the one copying:(

Alright, here again. If I were iterating your design, I'd be focusing in two areas:

>use of complexity

Complexity in board games is inherently *negative.* Think of it as workload that must be performed for a payoff, because for your players that's exactly what it is; even when it's outside the form of actions and choices, just having a larger system asks more mental space from your players. Every element of a game must justify its inclusion by presenting something interesting, or you'd be better off cutting it. In Magic, the correct strategy is to play with the smallest deck possible, because only a fool would play with the worst five cards in a deck he could cut five cards from. The same applies to game design.

In that spirit: do you need that many spaces on the board, or are they just inflating game time? Are all twelve of your Towers truly distinct from one another, or could you merge some into fewer, but more nuanced ideas? Is every single one of your cards doing something that is different and interesting, compared to the others?

If your players aren't saying "oh, wow" every time they see one a piece of your content for the first time, you have a problem.

Cont. after dog walk...

OP here, and home. I'll address posts gradually, got a lot of stuff to do first.

The main reason why I had 1000 power as a standard, is because it made the game last exactly 1 hour. Overall, every single beta test I held, the time limit reflected on how much power was given.

Also, there's a LOT more going on that reduces your power, rather than add. Right off the bat before the game begins, your 1000 is split basically in half (unless you've gone full retard and held onto 999, and 1 in your tower. That actually happened btw)

Controlling events, Casting spells, taking damage and controlling towers, your power drops pretty fast.

Attached is my Quick Play Rules (not official, these are still 1st Edition, and need some heavy editing. But it covers everything I missed.) I apologize in advance if you're not a fan of bullet points, it got the job done.

Hello from twitter

>Use of theme

So I'm going to use Magic again, as a comparison rather than as an analogy, because thematically your setup is very similar to the color wheel from Magic.

What makes each color interesting in Magic? It's not that red = fire and blue = water. The colors in Magic are interesting for the same reasons as characters in fiction; they are nuanced, with interesting flaws and internal contradictions they etruggle to resolve. Each isn't just an element, or even a handful of elements, but a philosophy, a world-view, and incomplete. Red is passionate but also short sighted and selfish, blue is cunning but also prone to inaction and hubris, green is nurturing but also inflexible and can be nihilistic.

Because each faction has a strong identity with defined failings thematically, the designers of Magic can translate them into mechanical identities wholly distinct from one another. Magic is at its best when, rather than giving each color a card that serves a critical game function identically and then differentiating them with extras (as you are doing), they instead find a different way for each color to fulfill each function. Red blasts its enemies with raw energy, blue sends them back to the aether, green forces them to fight its monsters. By giving each faction limitations, weaknesses, and distinct approches, they build the theme into roots of the mechanics instead of merely lying a veneer across what amounts to the same choices no matter which color you play.

That actually is how I designed a lot of the cards. Fire does focus on raw power, White is protective, Shadow is just weird, and so on. I'll delve further into that!

Also, pic related on how things are kept track. These are crappy laminated pages I call the Power and Equipment Trackers. These actually worked really well at the demo nights. I provided markers and such, so rather than wasting paper, it was quick math and erase. The equipment tracker has spaces for cards that are currently active, and what they do.

>need some heavy editing.

Damn right. A lot of the grammar I can overlook, but "Passify" hit me in a place I didn't even know I could be hit.

Aside from that, one thing I noticed is with your weapon break limits. Around how many tokens are we talking about, and have you considered using dice to track the number instead?

Right, you've got some of that, but not enough.

Taking your red and white bows as an example, they're statistically identical, with bonus abilities that boil down to "deal some extra damage if conditions are met." Those conditions are the only part of the cards' mechanics reinforcing your theme. You can do so much more.

Taking the philosophies of red and white from Magic as an example, you could have the red weapon really outshine in the damage department but suffer from a low Break value (if Break means what I would assume), and instead of giving the white bow a damage effect, let it make spaces impassible for a turn, making it defensive even though it's still clearly a weapon.

Tried making up my own word, Pass was too short, and Pacify sounded more like being some noble douche trying to be friendly.

For weapons, limits range from 3 (daggers) to 8 (high powered staffs), there's a lot of effects that boost limit tokens, but overall, since there's so many types, weapons and armor get burned through quite often.

Oh, I just thought it was a misspelling of Pacify.
Personally, "pass" alone seems fine, and the action itself seems something more like Looting or something to that extent.

Try "negotiate." "Passify" is always going to come off as a horrible spelling error.

Also, "Equipment," damnit.

Very true, I'll fix those.

Hopefully this thread stays alive for a while, I'd love to get some fresh ideas for the rules.

ONE error I'll address right now, that I know I messed up, fortification cards, only one active at a time. I know in the rules it says one of each type, but that was a horrible mess.

If you use made-up words, hyphenate them to indicate they're not actually mispellings of proper English ones. "Pass-ify" would be fine, if you're attached to it.

As others have noted 550 cards is a lot. Print costs will jack up the price of a physical copy a great deal when you decide to mass produce; you will have to to charge more for each copy of the game which in turn makes you more dependent on the hardcore niche.

From a design standpoint and a business standpoint trying to shrink your deck into a smaller and more efficient one makes way more sense. You'll be able to charge less for the game and still maintain a similar profit margin, and as a result more people might buy the game that otherwise wouldn't. Alternately you can invest the money you save on the number of cards into better quality cardstock or the like.

Gotcha, I've heard different stories, printing is cheap, printing is god awful expensive, I suppose it depends on the company?

Hopefully tomorrow I should have every single 2nd Edition card complete, then I can get my full test prints. Should come out to about 60$

Characters will come out in an expansion. I've been going back and forth for a looong time, as complex as the game is now, characters would add even more nonsense. It'll be more of a "Experienced Pros Only" expansion, once they tear up and play the hell out of the core game.

Also here's the crappy original logo I made, working on a new one tomorrow.

If you need a designer for the final card product, let me know. I've done work for Veeky Forums before as well as my own stuff. Here's a design I did for a wargame from Veeky Forums in artdeco-modernized style.

Yes definitely shrink it. Don't forget the MSRP needs to be 5x your cost.

How long till we see a kickstarter?

May 27th is when I find out if I'm a Semi-Finalist for the Hasbro contest. If I don't get it, I'll start it asap, so early June.

do you mean pacify instead of passify?

Technically I did, I tried making up my own terminology. I'll rewrite that

>printing is cheap, printing is god awful expensive, I suppose it depends on the company?

Depends on a number of factors. Quality of ink and cardstock can rack up fairly quickly; you want something durable for a board game but at the same time you'll need to shell out more for that. Custom or uncommon sizing can also raise the price.

You can also do cheaper by printing in China or the like but that also comes with it's own host of problems as you might imagine - the Kingdom Death Kickstarter for example nearly disappeared due to factory issues.

>Roll to move

Is that mechanic really looked down upon? I'm curious why.

Player A gets fuck all done because they keep moving minimal spaces due to consecutively bad rolls
Player B auto-wins because he keeps rolling higher

Unlikely? Yes, but super un-fun if/when

Most games are built around the illusion of skill.
People brag about how good they are at monopoly or Settlers of Catan.

>550 cards

Nah, probably not. That's just unwieldy and a pain to shuffle.