Grey Goo

Would it make an interesting tabletop war game?

Make war between competing Goos? Seems simple enough. Maybe.

Why don't you put across an idea OP and then we'll see what we can make of it.

I don't think so. The Beta, the Humans and the Silence are fine, but the Goo's mechanics just don't translate well to tabletop at all, they'd require having a ridiculous amount of models given the ability to morph in the right ones, and would involve a lot of monotonously painting samey blobs.

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It'd have to be campaign focused, I think.

Also, it's too bad they had to waste such a good idea on such a bog standard RTS. The Beta and the Human factions were boring as all hell.

I don't know, we don't get that many RTS these days, so a solidly decent one was okay by me. I enjoyed the human basebuilding mechanic.

I'd be interested to see a space combat game with a similar premise. Goo spacecraft might be more interesting visually than land-based units.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I played the entire thing through. And they did a good job making the Goo the last major campaign, since it was absolutely the best one.

But the other factions were mildly interesting but nothing special or new. Just feels kind of disappointing that a game with such an incredible faction also needed to include two other boring ones.

At the same time, if they were all as strange as the goo I can kind of see some people getting turned off as they were denied anything familiar. But both didn't need to be so similar, yeah.

Did you ever play the Silence stuff? I keep meaning to go back to it but never did, so I never did get to experience their playstyle.

This game needed a bit more development time. All the units except for the goo behaved basically the same, just dealing different amounts of damage at different ranges. Base building was really barebones as well. The robot buddy who gets eaten was a cool character though.

"So that others may live."

You could probably make a fun eurogame style area control and resource consumption board game with it.

Everyone starts as different goo, need to try and cover/convert as much land mass, other life forms, etc. as possible. Maybe a deck of cards with different NANOMACHINES themed special abilities that are one use to represent the changing form/adaption.

I did not.

I'm not familiar with the jargon, what's a eurogame?

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>A Eurogame, also called a German-style board game, German game, or Euro-style game, is a class of tabletop games that generally have indirect player interaction and abstract physical components. Euro-style games emphasize strategy while downplaying luck and conflict. They tend to have economic themes rather than military and usually keep all the players in the game until it ends.

Like Carcason, Web of Power, Java, Caverna, stuff like that. Little wooden blocks. The distinction is less clear than it was in the 2000s because there's been a lot of conceptual cross over between them and more 'american' style board games.

So like Catan sort of? That's the only one I've played that matches that description.

the Beta were such a cool idea for a race, but they were so basic, gameplay wise.
I really wish the devs gave this IP another shot, I think it is underrated

Yep. They tend to be fluffed with light descriptions of historical stuff, but it would work just as well with scifi things. Terraforming Mars comes to mind as a recent one.

I've never played it, but Offworld Trading Company comes to mind as a video game with similar design elements.

That checks out. It seems like there's been an increase in complexity in a lot of the more recent wooden block eurogames games, usually tracked on a data-card. It can be fun, but imo after a certain point, might as well get a computer to track everything for you.

Grey Goo is neither a name nor concept they came up with. Self-replicating smartmatter is literally a known sci-fi/transhumanism concept exactly under the moniker grey goo.

>It can be fun, but imo after a certain point, might as well get a computer to track everything for you.
That's what the Civilization series has become. Boardgames that are too complex to be tracked by anything but automation. But they've ironically become more blatantly boardgamey over time.

That... actually makes a lot of sense. Macro play revolved heavily around ensuring you were spending and gaining resources at roughly equivalent rates (-5 to +2 was usually where you wanted to be), while also spending them on meaningful development. The fact that most multiplayer games were decided in one or two combats, that eseentially revolved around "whose build and timing were more on point" than any large amount of micro beyond splitting and focusing, makes me think that the non-confrontational mechanics of a eurogame would actually be well suited. That's not to say that a wargame would be impossible, but it wouldn't be super close to the core play of GG.
I told Greybox so many goddamn times they needed to rework the tech, so many useless or meme options. Goo only needs two techs: healing arty and bounce or aoe destros. Everything else is optional, a meme (especially anything dealing with radiants), or provably worse than the alternatives. Humans always get one tank tech, and that's repair, because why WOULDN'T you get healing when your units are the most expensive of the OG three factions?
I was kind of surprised they didn't bring many of the interesting ideas they used in EaW and UaW. Could've made the Humans and Beta more interesting. Maybe keep the Beta as is, but either give more to do with Conduits or change the Human shtick.

It does seem like in the last decade there's been a lot more cross over as people who play games of one type also end up making games of a different medium. I think I like it.

I basically see it as each GG faction gets a data sheet with a few different upgrade types, probably like Blood Rage. A deck or two of upgrades and moves. Probably have the victory tracker also be the resource tracker so you have to use material to win to get material, which is where the balancing act would be. Could even have the resource blocks in the shapes of human cities, the goos as puddles and if you get enough of them in one place you can replace them with a wave-shaped-block. Map could be a planet or a city, really depends on what scale you want.

And?

I'm glad you're here to educate us on things we all already knew, but that wasn't what I was talking about.

Could one use an EMP to fight the goo? They're nanomachines, right? Can something be too small to harden against such a weapon?

>after a certain point, might as well get a computer to track everything for you.

A lot of them seem to have apps to figure out scoring etc already.

Like, I guess people like it. But that gets way past fun for me.