ABSOLUTE ASCENDANCY

Commencing operation . . .

Overview

The end of year is fast approaching and I am frantically at work trying to finalise the development of Black Metro. During the past couple of months I have had some questions thrown my way regarding the inspiration process behind Black Metro and why I decided to undertake this project. I figured as the penultimate article for this year, I would try to address some of these questions, and I might carry some over to the end of year also. Anyway, let’s get cracking.

Why ‘Black Metro’?

I have some fond memories of roaming the cities of Melbourne and London at night. The dazzling glow of a city in the evening makes for an alluring scene of beauty. I used to play a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! back in the day and the most powerful card in my deck was Future Fusion.

I had an ultimate rare version of the card so it was basically a dark city in the future which is effectively what Black Metro is. I wish I had kept my copy, it’s worth £40-£50 now. More recently, Final Fantasy VII remake sparked a lot of inspiration behind the overall design of Black Metro. Specifically district 01 the Shadowforge Factory, but also district 11 the Astral Tower.

Black Metro can also be considered an alternate version of neo Gotham City from Batman Beyond. The Dark Knight is one of my favourite heroes and loved watching the show as a kid.

Finally for those familiar with Pokemon Black and White, you can enter a place called Black City which is a dark themed city set in the future.

Why worker placement / area control hybrid?

Black Metro takes its inspiration from a variety of board games I enjoy playing, the most influential of those likely being Lords of Waterdeep. Worker placement is probably my favourite board game mechanic and area control is my favourite game concept. In other words, Black Metro is a game where you utilise worker placement mechanics as a means toward establishing area control. Conceptually, this is very similar to Blood Rage; another game I enjoy playing.

Basically, I decided to combine my favourite aspects of board games and created Black Metro as a result.

What I personally found lacking in other worker placement games is the inability to directly attack other player’s workers on the game board, barring a few exceptions like playing specific cards or whatnot. Also the one-dimensional aspect of utilising workers to get ‘stuff’ can lose its potency toward the final round or so when acquisition and conversion of ‘stuff’ can potentially yield lesser returns (due to the imminent end of the game).

Black Metro solves these problems by assigning a strength value to all personnel (workers) and including an overwhelm mechanic. Dominating a specific district (location) with a certain amount of strength can overwhelm other player’s personnel and force them to ‘run away’ from that district; losing them the ability to use that district’s abilities for the round.

What typically ends up happening in a game of Black Metro is that the early rounds sees players spreading their personnel far and wide to utilise as many district’s abilities as possible. In later rounds, players need to start considering assigning more personnel (and therefore strength) to districts and bunching up their forces to increase resiliency against other player’s personnel; thereby utilising less districts overall but increasing the chances of being able to use the districts where they have bunched up their personnel.

In this manner, as the game progresses, strength becomes increasingly important and the utilisation of districts diminishes, in a fairly organic manner. Which means that in the end game once players have built up their strength and resources etc, players don’t feel like they are ‘wasting’ actions assigning personnel to districts to get ‘stuff’ they don’t need. Instead, they can focus on battling other players to acquire more power (victory points) while simultaneously denying their competition those potential points. Or at the very least, players have the option available to them to prioritise attacking other players with their personnel rather than utilising districts.

There are many board games which utilise an area control and resource acquisition dynamic, but the majority of these do not use worker placement as the means to get units onto the game board. They will use a dice system or some other kind of movement system to determine how many units can move from A to B and so on. Throughout my gaming experiences, I noticed that there was an underdeveloped area for worker placement games utilising combat mechanics and area control dynamics.

It is my hope that Black Metro breaks some new ground in this underutilised area of gaming and brings something fresh to the table for all to enjoy.

Conclusion

I think that will do for now. I’ll have a couple more questions answered in next month’s article so stay tuned until then!

Mission complete – Overlord Drakow signing out.