Spacey Hulky Design Thread

[rinelk]

I’m reached a point in my life at which I look at a $200 box of Space Marines and Tyranids, with the rules for Warhammer 40,000, and think, “Yeah–totally reasonable purchase.” Sadly, while the model-making and painting has been fun, I don’t think it’s worth trying to learn this game in my current circumstances. In a couple years, maybe I’ll look into local organized play or something, but as a casual thing to do with my son, War of the Ring is as complicated as I care to go. Recognizing that this may be a version of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, I’ve decided that, since what I was really into here was Space Hulk nostalgia, and I can’t buy Space Hulk, I’ll use these models (and some others) and make my own version.

There’s a lot out there about Space Hulk, but Games Workshop isn’t so into just putting their rulebooks online, so I can’t just make precisely what they put out in their most recent edition. And, honestly, my recollection of Space Hulk was that the blips and Terminators were cool, and the vibe was excellent, but I didn’t love everything about the rules. Since I’m going to be making my own tiles and tokens and player aids, anyway, using models which aren’t exactly what came with the game in the first place, why not make my own rules which do what I actually wanted out of Space Hulk, years ago? I’m not aiming to make a commercial product or anything, I just want to play something like Space Hulk, with only cruft that’s my own fault.

So I figured I’d start a thread and talk about what I’m aiming to do with my design.

[rinelk]

So, I’ll start with what I want to keep:

• Terminators feel slow, and their awesome power armor serves more to make the aliens seem like terrifying close-combat threats than to give them impunity.
• Flamers are awesome, and can affect the board, but have very limited ammunition.
• Overwatch is superb, but overuse of it slows down the already-slow terminators intolerably (yielding a push-your-luck element with degrees of bluff and temptation).
• Aliens are fast enough to adapt reasonably, and the bluff and unpredictability associated with blips gives you enough moments of relief or eye-widening terror to produce an overall feeling of unfairness and dread.

Stuff I want to change:

• Guns jamming. Boring, slows down the game, not necessary. The strength of overwatch can be balanced by the AP cost and adequate scenario design without this.
• Melee Terminators suck. My recollection is that they were only slightly better at melee combat than the fellas with the bolters. They ought to pose more of a tactical puzzle for the alien player, so that it’s worth trying to lure them into places where you can attack from behind.
• Heck, more generally, I’d like the alien player to have more interesting problems to solve.
• You know that moment in Aliens, when the alien blips are closer than it seems like they ought be able to be without being seen, because they’re in the ceiling and under the floor? I’d love to find a way for that to happen. It was emotionally powerful, and utterly absent from Space Hulk.

My current thought is that I’ll try making overwatch cost however many APs you want to spend, and that’s the number of shots you can take. Similarly, I’ll probably have the flamer start with 20 ammo, and when you fire, you can fire up to 5 of them at once, laying down a column of fire that long in front of the flamer (and I’m inclined to skip rolls to hit–anything in the path gets hit). I also think I’d like to make one corridor wider than one space, both so that we can see the Terminators cover one another the way they’d really want to be able to, and also so that the rest of the time it feels more claustrophobic–I think it’ll be easier to really miss the option to maneuver more flexibly if you have it on rare occasions.

If all that goes well, I’d like to add in more factions, and some different tyranid models for stuff like the queen from Aliens. I should probably watch the new alien movie, come to think of it.

[OhBollox]

Check out https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/137649/level-7-omega-protocol if you haven’t already.

[rinelk]

While I’m generally going for simplification where I can, its occurred to me that I’d like some opacity in goals. I don’t know if the game always had this, or had it in newer editions, but in my hazy memories, both players know both players’ goals in each scenario. I think I’d rather have some cards which randomly determine goals dealt out a the beginning of the game.

Mechanically, I can’t think of a way to make the sides more inscrutable to each other than this, which gets back to something I remember reading about how boardgames, because they have public, explicit rules, can never evoke the sort of uncertainty on which certain forms of horror depend. I’d love it if there were some way for the marines to hear skittering in the walls, and not have any idea what that could be. But I can at least have various goals which might reflect that these aliens need to protect a nest, or harvest some food, or capture a marine alive, etc. At least this would let me gracefully set up multi-objective missions; just choose 2, for example.

[rinelk]

With respect to physical components, I plan to use my laser cutter to make the tiles and tokens. It’s a pretty cheap K40 laser, with a cutting bed about 8"x12", so rooms larger than that will require a join in the middle.

I’ve looked at a lot of 3D terrain for Space Hulk, and I generally find it looks amazing, but it gives you a surface that’s so visually busy it seems like it’d cause a degree of cognitive overload during actual play, and might obscure stuff you need to see. Even the versions I’ve seen with half-height walls look like it might be easy to miss a blip on a casual glance. I’m thinking I want doors and objectives to be fully 3D, but otherwise I’ll stick with reliefs.

I’d also like to get a bit more visual variety. I feel like a lot of the homemade versions I’ve seen are designed to look unified, with a rusty, dirty look that does a great job of justifying the “hulk” part of “space hulk”. But I’d like to start from a base that looks a bit more like the glossy black floors of the Death Star for at least some of it, with areas that look like they have some of that alien crusty stuff, maybe some with a burst coolant pipe which covers the area in frost–with a visually simple approach to start from, I think it’d be easier to make that stuff pop.

I’m also thinking that I’ll want to be able to accommodate 50mm bases, but still make the narrow corridors feel claustrophobic for most of the terminators on their 40mm ones. My best idea for how to do this is have floor tiles of 40mm with 5mm between them. With 50mm units like captains or special aliens being relatively rare, it’s probably okay that everything fits fine so long as two of them aren’t adjacent, and even then, there should be enough slop elsewhere to fudge it.

I also think the whole point of a space hulk is supposed to be that it’s composed of parts of multiple ships, so if they don’t all match, that seems thematically quite appropriate.

[rinelk]

I’ve cut the first draft of some tiles:

This was 3mm eucaboard spray-painted black, and then coated with Quick Shine floor polish before it was cut out with the laser. My goal was to design them so that they’d sit on a grid and fit together nicely to make larger room, which has worked out, but means I need 10mm between spaces rather than 5. I plan to add weathering and have some tiles look frosty, and others look like the aliens have spread their gook all over, and cut some more tiles in other styles (I still need some T-intersections, for example). I love the idea of a little bit of relief in the decoration, but I do worry about storage.

The borders of the spaces are a little subtler than I regard as ideal, but it’s perfectly playable.

Coming soon: doors and tokens.

[rinelk]

Well, before doors and tokens, I want to get down what I don’t remember of Space Hulk, because I’m finding, in thinking about what I need and player aids and such, that I don’t remember some kind of crucial bits. While I’m not entirely clear on my motives, I’m finding that I’d prefer to remake the game I remember rather than just looking it up, which means I feel free to make things more suited to my preferences, but also means I might be failing to use good solutions the designers have already come up with (especially since there’ve been three editions since the one I remember). I expect I’ll change my mind and check out what the 4th edition rules say once I’ve clarified my own version, but part of what I’m aiming to do is leave myself room for expansion to other factions later (which is part of the reason I wanted the map to sit on a grid–looking at what units might make sense for the Necrons, I saw there was a wraith unit which can move through walls, which offers appealing tactical options). One of the dangers of this approach is that there’s a decent chance I’ll do something and feel clever, only to have simply re-created what the official rules already do.

So, my recollection is that genestealers have no facing and get 6 Action Points, while Terminators have facing and get 4. But there are also Command Points which are wild, and I think were about 2 per round, and only for the marines. Genestealers enter as blips, but I don’t recall how that’s metered–maybe a die roll? My recollection is that which blips are available is random, so the genestealer player might draw decoys or 3-unit blips. I don’t recall how heavy weapons worked other than that they had limited ammo, but my recollection is that melee combat was opposing die rolls, with the genestealers substantially favored (and I think only one unit would die–I don’t think they both could), and that there were melee-focused terminators, both lightning claws and hammers, with chain fists on the regular fellas and a sword with the captain, but that I found the melee-specific dudes little better than anyone else, and the distinctions among them seemed to exist to justify the different models, not to make them particularly better or worse. I think guns jammed when you rolled a 1, but I don’t remember if that was only on overwatch. There were psychic dudes in an expansion, and I think some bigger or more specialized aliens, but I couldn’t say anything about them.

So, plugging those holes:

• I’m inclined to have melee combat allow both players to roll, with genestealers rolling a D10 and terminators rolling a D6, and everybody hitting on 6+, so both units could die, or neither. Maybe Captains and Librarians hit on 5+. For the melee guys, I’m divided on whether to make them all the same, or more different from one another–maybe claws gives you hits on 5+ and advantage, while a shield gives your opponent disadvantage? I don’t know. I just remember feeling like melee combat was kind of boring–probably my intention to make good player aids will make that easier, because what I remember is continually referring to the manual to try and distinguish between claws and hammers. Attacks on Terminators from behind should be virtually certain to succeed; I’m inclined to start with it being an automatic hit, and see if it needs a die roll.
• Bolters have a moderate range (I’ll try 8), and hit on 4+ on a single die.
• I’m thinking the flamers will start with a number of tokens representing both ammunition and flames. They’ll be able to place these tokens down in a line starting from a space in front of them up to their max range (8 spaces sounds good, for consistency). So, if they only need to flame the space right in front of them, they can conserve fuel. 20 seems like a good number of fuel to start with.
• Similarly, I’d like to let the chain gun heavy weapon give players a simple decision. I’m thinking you can only fire it once per turn, but for each AP you spend to fire, you get two dice, which hit on 4+ as normal. So if you’re facing a whole column of genestealers, you can spin that gun up and absolutely chew through them. I like the idea of having an additional rule that if you ever roll two 1s, the gun jams, but it feels kind of unnecessary and clunky; the fire-once-per-turn rule seems like it does a pretty good job of making the chain gun feel unwieldy enough to be kind of a pain but powerful enough to be worth it.
• Command Points always bugged me, thematically. I might add something where the captain can spend their last AP to give somebody else a short turn of 2APs, which would both feel a bit more connected to the act of command as a way of chivvying people along, and also yield some tactical choices. And I kind of like the idea that this would be a pretty good deal, so the captain would just be haranguing his forces every turn, which would simultaneously make him seem like someone you want to protect, but also resent.
• I’m thinking you’ll be able to take a stack of overwatch for each AP spent, and fire once per stack.

[rinelk]

Upon further reflection, fuck range. Counting sucks.

[rinelk]

Okay, time for doors and tokens. Hah! No. The doors are actually taking a bit of time to paint. But I had some time to sit and think today, and, in a move which perhaps illuminates my tendency to finish virtually nothing ever, I started thinking about how to add another faction.

My thinking is that an environment in which regular Space Marines are too squishy to even be worth deploying and in which tall fellas and anything with a base over 50mm won’t fit pretty drastically limits my options. Necrons could maybe do something with reviving which makes it okay that they die, and I love the idea of the Canoptek Wraiths being able to move on the implied grid, off the actual board.

But what I’d really like to get to work is Tau. I just like classically-styled robots, really, and Tau in their metal outfits look more like that than Necrons. I bought Fireteam a while ago (one of those boxed Games Workshop games which is kind of tiny version of one of their larger ones; as Blitz Bowl is to Blood Bowl, Fireteam is to 40K but far mores), and one of the cool things they did was include two teams, but cards to add others if you bought the models. So I bought and painted the Orks and a set of Tau stealth battlesuits.

But the big Tau battlesuits won’t fit in a space hulk’s tight corridors, and the XV8s seem like their vertical mobility is kind of a big deal (plus the models are stupid expensive). So, I could get some 3D printed Tau-alikes which better suit the setting, or I could pile in some Breachers to be reasonably hard-hitting but utterly sacrificial in melee. But I feel like stealth is something the Tau can bring to the game which is new. The blips do some of that, but it’s quite limited.

So, the challenge: how to do stealth without adding too much faffing about with lots of components, and without allowing the Tau player to retcon later strategic concerns too much. What I think I like enough to want to playtest it is for the suits to have a 4-turn limit before they need to decloak, and firing automatically decloaks them. I have an idea for how I want to design a little order token holder with four square slots and a cover, and square tokens with an arrow on one side and a circle on the other. So, rather than indicating on your token holder exactly where each suit has moved, for each suit’s holder you put in a token showing the direction of its movement (or a circle for no movement, with overwatch presumed). Then, whenever you decloak, you get to move from your last known position in the ways indicated, up to your greatest possible movement with the AP you get, and place your suit in any facing. Component-wise, this only takes four tokens and one holder per suit, plus a last known location token. And I hope it’ll be advantageous enough to be worth doing, different enough from what the terminators and genestealers can do to be interesting, and easy to play.

[rinelk]

I made the tokens I want, and I’m perfectly happy with them. But I’ve been playing too much Dysmantle to take photos or think much about this project.

[warner]

That’s a fantastic idea! Creating your own version of Space Hulk based on your nostalgia and preferences can be a rewarding and personalized experience.

[rinelk]

My plan for rules is to have a single sheet which explains the basics, things like line of sight, doors, and the action point economy, and then have a separate player aid for each scenario. Partly, this is because I’m a big fan of player aids, and partly what I’d like to accomplish is that the aid tells you only what you need to know for that scenario. Because scenarios can have different units, for example, it’s nice not to have to hunt more than necessary for the rules you care about, and this makes it easy to integrate scenario-specific objectives or terrain feature rules.

The other thing it may let me do, if I get around to it, is include more varied factions without building in lots of rules overhead in the common rules. For example, I’m targeting Tau as a possibility, mostly because I like mech suits and robots But it’s occurred to me that if I include jump jets on the XV8s as a 1AP move option which moves them 5 spaces in a straight line, and then have Tau weapons get +1 to hit for each Tau unit that has LOS to the target, that might produce some kind of neat gameplay with limited rules overhead. I can imagine posting drones at intersections, stealth suits popping up to add bonuses or take advantage of them, XV8s rocketing around to combine heavy firepower with strong synergies, or to take chances defending flanks–that could all make up for most of their units being sitting ducks in melee. So, if I were to have them opposed by genestealers, I’d expect that melee would have different rules; for example I’m expecting that genestealers in melee against terminators would need a 4+ to hit, and terminators with just basic power fists would need 5+, and both units roll when either initiates melee (and maybe both die, or neither). But a genestealer in melee against a Tau drone, breacher, or stealth suit (which are the only units I’d expect them to deploy other than the XV8s) probably either auto-hits or hits on 2+, and the Tau wouldn’t get to fight back. The player aid would be able to reflect this difference and thereby give different matchups a very different character without requiring complex rules which need memorization.

All of which is just a prologue to the question I wrote this post to raise: how can we be thinking about structuring rules? I feel like I could instead write much more comprehensive rules, with all sorts of exceptions or special cases, and move all of this stuff that I want to put on player aids into a larger rulebook. I could unify the two sorts of combat, for example, by introducing a number for defense, and having a calculation in which they’re compared before each attack. That would make it easier to write up methods for creating custom scenarios, I suspect. But, more generally, I don’t feel as though I have the linguistic or even conceptual vocabulary to think about issues of presenting the same game with the rules structured in different ways (or how the options for structuring rules which have virtues for players might influence precisely what the game ends up being). I can fumble toward it a bit, but I wish I had more lenses with which to consider that, and more awareness of it.

[OhBollox]

Send me a rules doc? I’ll have a look at it.

[rinelk]

I’ll post the first draft here as soon as I write it.

[rinelk]

Finally, tokens!

I’m noticing that my laser cutter develops a tremor sometimes. Not sure exactly what that’s about, but you can see it in some of the writing if you look closely.

The blips are a nice, chunky 5mm acrylic, which I thought would both feel nice in a bag to shuffle and more substantial on the board. I don’t recall if this is true of the original game, but I figured flamers ought to cause fire which sticks around for a little while, so they’ll be put down “blazing” side up, then flip to the blank side after a round, and only then be removed. And the flame tokens themselves will serve as the ammunition tokens. The goal tokens are intended to fit nicely on the board, and are pointy so that you can place them facing each other to designate a whole row of goal tiles. I wanted to leave myself the option of making search scenarios or scenarios in which you have to do things in order, so they have numbers on the back. If there’s a search, they can be face up (either shuffled or placed by the opponent), if sequential, facedown/number up.

I kind of want to use actual 3D terrain for goals, as well–I have some nice bits, like a control panel and a sci-fi medical station, which would do that job well. So I’m thinking I’ll probably just put those on top of the goal tokens, which should make them visually more obvious while still letting me get the atmosphere benefits of miniatures.

Changing topics entirely, I noticed something which I wanted to write down so I don’t have to think about it anymore for now, because I think it’s an insight to which I may want to return, but isn’t helpful for the game. I think it may matter that my approach in this game is very much to present rules heavy on the scenario-specificity and light on universality. To some extent, that puts a lot of burden on the players to do some analysis when they first read the scenario, but what you get for that is fewer universal rules to remember, and fewer, simpler rules to keep in mind in any particular scenario. I think that fits well with large collections, and games which we expect to be played with many other games in between. But it’s also remarkably similar to how I think of ethics.

I am a consequentialist, which is to say that I think the morality of an act is determined by its consequences. The most famous consequentialist moral theory is Utilitarianism, which basically says that we ought to optimize for the balance of pleasure over pain. But one of the major critiques of Utilitarianism, which applies to all simple consequentialisms, is that it places a massive calculatory burden on people which we simply can’t meet. That’s not much of a criticism, really, because it’s basically just a way of saying that we won’t reliably know what the best thing to do is, which seems entirely consistent with people’s actual experience. But it does identify that there’s a genuine challenge of identifying heuristics which are more tractable, and do a pretty decent job of guiding us toward acts which have the best consequences.

If you think about a perfect simulation of what would actually happen in the situation a game intends to simulate, you can think of the rules as the tractable heuristic for calculating it. Like with morality, it’s best if this heuristic is transparent and easy to use, but also has high fidelity to the perfect simulation. But (and this is the part I might want to return to) what doesn’t especially matter is if the heuristic you use in one situation is consistent with the heuristic from another. Generally, we expect that the rules which apply in one scenario will be extensions of the rules from others–were you to simply concatenate all the scenario rules and eliminate repetition, you’d have a single common rulebook which would be essentially workable. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Maybe Terminators can hit genestealers more easily than little T’au drones, so against genestealers, the action for shooting is just a blanket “roll a die, hit on 4+”, but against T’au, it’s 5+, or uses a more complicated process altogether.

I don’t know how I feel about that. Certainly, there’s a strong bias toward avoiding blatant incompatibilities between scenario rules. But I wonder whether I should import my relaxation about this in the moral realm. I know that morality is hard, and I’m not well-informed or smart enough to do it perfectly, so I’m okay with heuristics that conflict–it actually comforts me a little to know that I both try to respect autonomy and also reduce harm. There’s essentially a set of meta-heuristics about playing different heuristics off one another, and I feel like it does pretty well, so incompatibilities can be valuable in dialog with one another.

[rinelk]

I’m rethinking the way flamers work. That’s a lot of tokens to keep track of, and a lot of flipping of those tokens, which just seems like a lot of faffing about. I wonder about maybe just doing a 4- or 5-space-long template, and making that the default length (with the corollary that if you aim at a wall or door that’s fewer than that distance away, it’ll blow back on you). That seems…moderately stupid. But I might prefer it to any other solution.

[SpiceTheCat]

I like the flamer token flipping idea to block the space for two enemy turns, tbh, and as the implementation is right there on the gameboard, the admin doesn’t sound too bad.

The template idea is simple, but the bounce-back rule sounds like one of those fiddly ideas for no gameplay gain. Rationalise it as the flamer guy dialling back the pressure.

[rinelk]

Well, once I actually get the rules and a scenario written, I’ll try it out and see if it bugs me; it might not. But we’ve had great weather for construction recently, so I’ve been putting in a lot of time on my porch project.

I tell you what, this is not the deck-building at which I’m most practiced.

[rinelk]

Here’s a first draft of the rules, along with the reference cards for each side for scenario 1, to give a sense for how much I intend to put on them vs. in the main rules. I’m sure I’m forgetting lots of stuff–remind me.

[rinelk]

So, I finally had rules enough and components enough to playtest. This post is just going to be my notes for myself on how that went.

Components: I should have entry tokens for the genestealers, and need to make some more T intersections and some length 1 halls. I figured those were usually pointless, and I could just design around them, but that’s foolish. I have a laser cutter and craploads of eucaboard, there’s no need to be penurious. I also don’t really like my boards–the eucaboard warps a little, and the connections are too tight. I could redesign the connections to be looser, but I don’t know of a better material. I suspect I’d feel like acrylic would be more expensive than I’d think worth it–because I wanted the spaces big enough to accommodate the captain from the Leviathan box, it’s a LOT of surface area.

Rules: need to spell out what happens when blips are revealed more. Intuitively, it’s fine, but I should clarify that the resulting genestealers start their turn with APs as though they’d spent the APs that the blip spent, and they all get to go with partial-turn-APs, even though splitting APs is normally not allowed.

Vibe: Excellent. It played very fast, which means that, when stuff is pretty calm, you feel like what you’re doing isn’t a chore, and when the shit hits the fan, it feels very abrupt and panic-inducing, which is stupendous. Balance-wise, that first scenario seems weighted toward the genestealers. They got crap pulls for blips for the first several turns, and still managed to murder all but one of the terminators. Having no CPs means that protecting your sergeant feels really important, but using his ability means he’s moving a little slower than everybody else, which is aggravating: just what I wanted.

There’s a flying squirrel in my house, and it just ran across the room behind me. That wasn’t really playtest-relevant, I just thought it was amazing.