The Digital Tabletop

We tackled a large scale game in Starcraft this past month (though not nearly as large scale as Twilight Imperium by far).  Starcraft is an appealing adaptation of an enormously popular real-time strategy game on the PC.  We thought this would be an interesting game to study (much like when we played Doom) since it is a tabletop adaptation of a digital game (and a popular one at that).

Mechanics

Players select a race & leader to play – there are the typical three races (Zerg, Terran, and Protoss) and two leaders per race.  Each leader has their own special ‘ability’ that changes the game for them in some way (e.g. different winning conditions).  Players take turns laying out the tile-based board in a grid fashion and then selecting two planets to claim as their starting locations.

Turns cycle through the following turns: planning, execution, and regrouping.  Planning involves players taking turns placing down order tokens that represent what they intend to do during the execution phase.  The tokens are placed in a stack on the targeted planet, so if Player A puts down a token on Planet Foo and Player B puts one down afterwards on Foo, then Player B would execute their action first before Player A would have the opportunity to.  Order tokens can be Mobilize(the moving of units and resolution of battles if units get moved to an area occupied by an enemy), Research (develop/purchase new technology), and Build (purchase buildings to build new kinds of units, strengthen base defenses, etc.).  Each planet is broken up into different areas that have gas, crystals, and points associated with it.  When an area is controlled by a player, they get those resources for the next turn.

Execution involves players taking turns lifting a token of theirs (if possible) off of any stack and proceeding to execute the actions associated with that token.  Regrouping is the clean-up phase where any event cards players have acquired (e.g. you can eschew executing a token in exchange for event cards) are turned over.  One event card is selected to be put into play, which typically buffs the player in the future in some permanent or one-shot way.  Harvesting units are repopulated to collect resources for the next round, hand sizes are checked, victory conditions are checked, etc.  The player who first reaches 20 points wins the game.

Why is this fun / interesting?

Starcraft is particularly for those who have played the digital game previously (and for many people, fervently).  It appears to be the same on the surface – there are crystals and gas to harvest, three races duking it out with similar advantages (e.g. Zerg are easy to produce, but weak), a tech tree, and similar units.  That is essentially where the similarities end, however,  The board game makers decided not to try and capture the rushed, real-time elements of the original game, which involves gathering / managing resources, building units, doing research, and engaging in scouting / combat all very quickly in succession.  They instead seem to have picked out the aforementioned core elements and make a game that involved turn-taking with a heavy stress on combat.  Instead of fighting over a single terrain, players are conquering whole planets instead.

The essence of the game is in balancing your medium/long term plans (e.g. which technology to research, which planets to move to / attack) with the short term decisions during the planning phase.  90% of the decision making in the game is done in the planning phase of each turn – it turns into a very game theoretic situation where players are trying to guess what orders (and where) other players will play.

Mapping to Computer Games

As pointed out, the game tries to have a distinct take on the Starcraft franchise that makes us of the board game medium instead of trying to mindlessly adapt the digital games.  The planning phase of placing order tokens in stacks is I think the key novel strength that Starcraft has compared to the digital games.  I can’t recall a game that has used this mechanic on the computer.  The key facet of it is the ability to block other player’s movements temporally.  Players DO get to execute all of their orders eventually, but when they can execute them is dependent on when & where other players have placed their tokens and when they have decided to execute them.  I think the reason we don’t see mechanics like this in games is that turn-taking is a definitely lesser used mode in games compared to real-time playing (e.g. racing games, fighting games, FPSs, RTSs, MMOs, etc.).

The Civilization franchise (and similar games, like Galactic Civ) makes used of turn-taking, but the decisions players make are so diverse and plentiful it is hard to envision incorporating this kind of game-theoretic mechanic into the equation.  Territorial battle games (e.g. Risk-like games) in general though can make use of this kind of mechanic to make a straight-forward conquest game possibly much more interesting.