Thursday, August 18, 2016

Rules Discussion: Movement by Ruler or Template

Recently, I've been playing a bit of the X-Wing Miniatures Game, in which players move ships from point to point using pre-measured maneuver templates. For example, if you want to move a ship one ship-length ahead (it actually works out to be two ship-lengths), you use the 1-straight maneuver template to advance the ship by placing the back of the template against the front of the ship base and then sliding the ship base to the front of the template such that the back of ship base touches the template's front. In X-Wing, during the Activation phase of each turn, players move ships in order of pilot skill, which means that the lowest pilot skill moves first. However, after all movement and actions happen, the Combat phase begins and the highest pilot skill attacks first. Basically, this reflects the concept that the lesser pilots can fly wherever they want, but the good pilots hit first.

There are numerous challenges with this mechanic. One challenge is planning ahead to ensure that your ships do not collide with each other or opposing ships; in X-Wing, if ship bases overlap, then the ship that overlapped the existing ship is unable to perform an action, such as performing a barrel roll or a target lock on an opposing ship. This can be a major gaffe during a critical time in the battle because you may need that action to increase your chances of hitting a foe's ship. Another challenge is predicting where your opponent's ships will finish their maneuvers; in X-Wing, everyone decides what their moves will be in secret, locks their moves, but then announces and executes moves in order of pilot skill. This means that you don't know where your opponent's ships will end up. In my case, I often find my ships completely out of position to target anyone (which further reflects my inexperience with this game, while seasoned players would know how best to maneuver their ships to address the most probable attack vectors). Yet another challenge is the element of stress in X-Wing. Everyone uses a maneuver dial to decide which move their ships will execute; some moves are "green" maneuvers, which clear any "stress" tokens from a ship, but some moves are "red" maneuvers, which add stress to a ship, thus limiting the maneuvers a ship can complete during the next round to only green maneuvers. Stress constraints ships to a smaller subset of possible maneuvers, which makes your future maneuver choices more predictable. You have to balance stress clearing with stress accumulation, all the while trying to execute your own strategies and NOT be predictable.

Movement by ruler or template is nothing new in gaming, but what I have found to be most challenging is conceiving where my ships will conclude their supposed maneuvers at the end of each turn while trying to anticipate where my opponent's ships will end up. Of course, knowing the maneuverability of each individual ship type helps, as well as paying attention to stress tokens on each ship, but this level of two-dimensional spatial reasoning is one that is largely absent from board games. Typically, with most Euro games, pieces serve as markers or reminders of how much of each resource you have, or whether a particular action was taken or not, or of scoring. In miniatures games, though, the pieces are the attackers, with each piece possessing one or more defining and unique attributes; moreover, the position of one piece in relation to another determines attack range, hit probability, and damage intensity. There is also a fastidiousness to moving miniatures that further signals how important position is; in X-Wing, for instance, every inch counts because moving one way or another can be the deciding factor of if a desired target is in your firing arc. Even nudging pieces accidentally can trigger tableside heart attacks as all opponents argue over where your piece should really be. To me, it's a different way of viewing the tabletop... but it's a welcome difference because I am stretched as a gamer to understand and use game pieces with attention to table position.

The telltale mechanic of any miniatures game is movement by measurement, and it's a mechanic that I urge every gamer to dive in and experience at least for a few games. There are "easy" games that introduce gamers to spatial reasoning, such as Memoir '44 and Battlelore; though movement still happens hex by hex, range and position are crucial. Games like X-Wing, Wings of Glory, and Star Trek Attack Wing ratchet up the difficulty even more because you no longer have hexes -- you have to use maneuver templates. The ultimate miniatures game experience comes from actual use of a bonafide ruler, such as in Warhammer 40k. When you're measuring range by centimeters and being off by only a tiny few millimeters can affect an entire turn, you are truly feeling the headache and thrill of tabletop positioning. Of course, in a few months, I may change my mind and grow to loathe movement by template. I mean, I may rather place workers and accumulate resources than worry about whether I nudged my A-Wing accidentally or not.