Facility: Game Pieces and Rules Overview

The work on Facility - A Wartech Boardgame is coming along. The last post about it showcased the tile and door pieces. The game is designed to be a modular boardgame simulating mercenaries or agents inside an underground facility or space station, working against each other for the same goal, whether it is getting a valuable objective, person, or just looting as much valuable stuff as possible.

My goal is to introduce RPG elements into the game, particularly character creation. You don't choose from a set of pregenerated characters, but you may build your own. The character creation process is as simple as distributing 9 points among 3 stats however you like, choosing a perk, buying a couple items/tech, and that's it. Then your characters can level up with a simple XP system. Whenever they gain a level, you get to choose an additional perk.

The above are experimental trackers for HP and XP. Everyone in the game (player or enemy mobs) have 5 hit points, unless they have the Toughness perk, in which they have 6. The hexagons are simply used to count down your health. The sides have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and T. Naturally you generally start at 5, unless you have Toughness, then you start at T. The black chevrons are designed to be sliders on the side of your character card, used for tracking experience and leveling. Again, all the pieces in this game are 3D printed, except the manuals, character cards, and mob cards.

Motion Trackers. Blips. You get the idea.

Basic gameplay is each turn you have 2 actions. Activate your character, and activate an enemy piece that is not in the same tile as your character. This way each player is acting their own, as well as the enemies on the board. The upper tokens are called 'blip' tokens. They are placed randomly throughout the Facility before the game begins, and can be moved as part of your 'activate enemy' action. Each token has a number underneath. When a character occupies the same room as a blip token, the token is flipped over and the number is referenced to a chart to find out which enemy mob counter it is replaced with. This represents players not knowing what is coming for them until they get to the same room. They can still try to hunt/avoid them because they have motion trackers, hence the blip.

The other tokens on the bottom are 'objective' tokens. They too are placed randomly but do not move. They also have numbers underneath. In most scenarios only 1 of those represent the actual mission objective, and the rest are red herrings.

The game uses unique printed dice. Each has two 'Miss' sides which look like )(, three 'Hit' sides which look like cross-hairs, and 1 'Crit' side, which looks like an explosion. Basic combat is handled by the attacker rolling an amount of dice equal to his appropriate attack stat, and the defender rolling an amount of dice equal to his appropriate defense stat, and the difference in Hits of the attacker over the defender is how much damage is dealt. Crits have special effects depending on the situation. This is pretty much the exact same basic combat system I have for Angry Miniatures, but without using Poker Dice.

There are a lot more special actions and fun rules I have planned, but that give you an idea of the game. Next time I will show off a few of the character pieces I've designed.