Page: GameIdea.GameIdea-DarkSorcerer - Last Modified : Mon, 20 Sep 21 - 2771 Visits

How much do you like this idea? Not rated yet Already Exist Very bad Bad Fair Good Very Good
Very Good	(10/10)	The game is very interesting, make it as soon as possible.
Good	(8/10)	Great idea but some modifications are required.
Fair	(6/10)	Interesting but a lot of things are missing.
Bad	(4/10)	Would need to completely redesign the idea in order to work.
Very Bad	(2/10)	It will never be interesting, abandon the idea.
Already Exist	(0/10)	Do not waste time on this game idea.

Status: CLOSED

• Works as a single player game
• very innovative game
• Could combine ideas with spellcraft sorcerer's adventure
• I had some ideas to make it a compact game. But it the end it's just too abstract to be immersive.
• Again another solo idea that would work better as a video game.
• A new approach for one of the theme is to make it a war only game.

Progress: Raw Idea
Priority: Medium
Number of players: 1 player (with optional multi player
Expected Play time: 60-120 minutes

Description

Once upon a time, there was a wizard living peacefully in his tower. Meanwhile, a huge war was being waged between all surrounding kingdoms. One day, the wizard being bored inside his tower decided to finally put an end to this useless war and decide to attack these kingdoms in order to rule them all. The kingdoms on the other hand, suspended their war and joined forces together to prevent the wizard from winning.

Wrath of the dark lord: This is an alternate game that takes place into space which is inspired on starwars. You control an empire and you have 2 characters with special powers: the Dark lord and the apprentice. You try to repulse the outer world invaders and place your characters at the right place to use their powers optimally.

Objective

The objective of the game is to make 1 player very powerful spells wage war against many opponents. The basic game is a single player game where the wizard at the centre is fighting kingdom around him which send continuous waves of troop according to a certain path.

I might be possible to design a more flexible map system to allow playing against real player or to have a 2nd multiplayer game that can reuse the same components to make sure that the game is not only a single player game.

Inspiration

A bit of inspiration has been take from tower defense games for the way the AI behave. Some mechanics could be borrowed from wizard kings especially for combat resolution and hex movement.

Priority Evaluation

Theme vs Mechanics: I have a vague idea of how the mechanics, could work, it would be similar to a tower defense with invasion path. Ideas are there but need testing.
Video vs Board Game: Could be implemented as video or board game.
Single vs Multi player: This is very much a single player game.
Rating = 7/12

Digitizability

- Cartography: There should be an hex map.
? Scripting: It's more a war game, and units could probably be designed without special powers.

Mechanics

The current board design is a 2 hex radius hexagon circle, the wizard tower is in the middle, and the kingdoms are located on the edge hexes. The kingdom draw unit tiles which are placed on their home land, tiles already on the board move forward on the hexes to the tower. Some unit type can use shortcut if they can fly or cross a bridge, but theses are generally more limited.

The goal of the wizard is to capture the capital city of each kingdom. When capturing a capital, the wizard gain a new artifact and a princess that can keep to gain special powers. Only 1 princess can be used at a time. Other kingdoms becomes more powerful as the kingdom falls.

For the wizard, he use a series of spell cards to attack enemy units and use spare mana to summon monsters that will roam the board to attack kingdoms and defend the tower. The wizard troops does not follow any path, he can move them anywhere.

The game ends when all kingdoms has fallen or when the wizard is destroyed. For multiplayer games, either players control kingdoms, either a 2nd wizard tower can be available in the game. The wizard which destroyed the most kingdoms wins, while the kingdoms wins if they destroy both wizards.

Problems that prevent development

The board I intended to use was more an abstract board. The problem is that there was little variety and it would have made multi player gameplay less interesting. Now I am trying to find a different modular map shape that would allow various kingdom invasion path for different behaviours that would allow various map setup for multi players.

Since this game has player elimination, in case of playing multi player, maybe some kingdoms would use an AI and when a player is eliminated, he now takes the control of another kingdom. It could be possible to a player to control multiple kingdoms especially if they are easy to manage.

The third problem is that in a multi player game, if the AI is so easy to manage that little decision are required, then it must not be too dumb to play for a player. The first strategy for the players is that they do not need to follow path, so they will have more liberty, but they cannot enter other kingdoms territory, so their mobility is still restricted. Instead of drawing units randomly, there could be a cost on each unit and player might have a resource limit to place them into play.

News, changes and updates

September 29th: I had an idea of how the board could be designed. I had another idea of a master of orion game that put every player on a large hex tile. I could use a similar system and give each wizard and kingdom 1 hex tile where the wizard is in the middle and the kingdoms are around. it would also be possible in a 2 player game to place both wizard size by side, or place the kingdoms in the same of an "8" with wizard in the holes.

The only problem is that the kingdom hexes takes space. In theory, only side of the kingdom hexes are used. My idea would be to make the hex rotatable for more variety, but if that creates board too large, I could cut down the exterior part to only use 1 side. So the wizards will get a full hex while the kingdoms would get a portion of the hex.

May 10th, 2014: For the space theme game, I had some ideas to make it like some sort of rise of the sith game. You start as 2 character, gain influence and power. Then eventually overthrown the republic and now manage an empire with troops to conquer the galaxy. So it's like 2 levels of gameplay when you must plan carefully when to overthrown the republic.

July 29th, 2014: What ever the theme, I had new idea to make the game work. The concept is basically to tear the empire or kindgom apart by creating various kind of trouble in order to take power. There are various ways to take power: Influence, Military force, Manipulation, etc. To improve the thematic immersion, the game would use event cards like in card based war game where you trigger the events and the game tries to recover the damage through and AI script. Ideas from spellcraft sorcerer's adventure could be combined together.

October 18th, 2014: There is 2 options for this kind of game. Make it a detailed open world sandbox game, or make it a more abstract small game. The small game would only have 18 or 36 cards a small board and tokens with maybe a die. It will be inspired on twilight struggle mechanics. Additional theme could be used, for example the Dracula conquering transylvania is another option. In fact anything that imply being 1 person against an empire can work.

December 28th, 2015: A neat idea mechanic idea is to make a solitaire deck building game with it. It could be playable with or without a map, some event cards would be opportunities given to the player to acquire assets or cause trouble. All assets of various type ( military, political, resources, Characters, etc) would go into the deck and get cycled. Players could eventually sacrifice cards to claim stronger assets. There could also be city cards, or locations under control that would increase the hand size of the player. AI might be easier to build in a game like this as there is no tactical movement required.

Development Log

Date	Type	Description
29-aug-2016	Idea	I just found a game called "Legion of Honor" which is a story telling game with some similarities to my ideas. Now the game does not seem that good and has little strategic decisions, but there is a lot of things that can happen or that needs to managed, and I think it could be a good source of potential ideas, so it's worth taking a look at the rules for inspiration. Else the game is basically a survive the deck of cards game.
17-jun-2016	Idea	I am working on a completely new idea when you are dracula trying to take over the world. It's more like a war game and much more simpler, but it will be part of the "Wrath" series.

Play testing

September 19th 2021: I made an improvised playtest which was not really the objective to test for this game in the first place. The results ended up that it was close to this game idea. It's one of those play test that I call toy play tests. I took Vinci for army deployment, and conquest as a system. I gave 5 different civilization special abilities and made them grow and attack each other every turn. I used the growth system of Britania where mountains and forest only yield 1 point and the other yield 2 point of growth. Every 6 points you gain a new unit.

Then for the main player, there was no special power, but I used Wizwar spell cards to improvise mechanics and results. Like I could destroy unit, create rose bushes to defend certain areas, fly to attack further or attack mountains without penalty, etc. The player would still be able to grow and attack like other civilization.

I would say the the result was a success. It was very interesting to play and casting spells to disturb the opponent was fun. I am not sure if I would better implement the system as a video game or a board game, but it could be interesting to develop. The only drawback is that the enemy turn could be long as there would be 6 opponents. So the opponent's turn must be resolved fast. Vinci proved to be a good system for that. Still, I would prefer to have die rolls for combat resolution.

Some new ideas could be to have a number on each unit and roll a die vs that TN to hit. Afterwards, the player with the most unit control the area. I liked the point system of Britania for growth. I thought that food could spawn units and ore, could spawn more powerful unit (better score, special powers) Maybe flipping the unit could be an easy way to have multiple unit types with little components. As for the wizard player, I think having spell tokens to mark enchanted areas is essential in this game. It requires more components, but less abstraction and more tactics instead of having global enchantments.

The AI would simply spawn units on the edge and move toward the center. There could be some skirmish on the edge by bleeding to adjacent kingdom under certain condition. Each hex should have 2 path to move to with maybe a script that handles movement. Take note that vinci has no unit movement, you regroup and expand. This is why it was relatively easy to handle. Using units in a chain of movement is likely to consume a lot of time. So the AI script will have to evaluate the best area to attack first and send how many unit.I could also restrict the number of attacks to 2 per kingdom.

For the magic theme, I am not exactly sure what to use. Maybe a 4 way or 5 way (chinese) elemental spheres.

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