Vanguard Mesh, Part 1
A design I've been working on
#gamedevelopment #tabletop
So I've been working on a tabletop game recently.
Many years ago I had a pile of blank cardboard hex tiles. I find them so satisfying. If you poke through my Instagram you'll find things like this, which I remember was some sort of exploration/deity game. But the portraits were fun.
A couple of years ago (2024) I started playing around with the idea of using hex tiles as an input/output pattern, with the top edges being input and the bottom edges being output. I got to play around and find quite a variety of routes.
It soon became a mechanic without a game, and while the concept I came up with was okay, it didn't grab me.
The game was a combination of a couple of mechanics — programming and betting, where you played as city council members trying to both fund your special projects and get voted in again. I thought the aesthetics of the game — stark and clinical, while dizzyingly difficult to plan ahead — matched the cynical bureaucracy of the gameplay.
Recently I've been playing quite a lot of Arkham Horror LCG (here). It's an excellent game. Top five for me. So naturally some of it has permeated my game ideas. Finding the hex tiles again, I started playing around with combining them with some sort of crisis/narrative engine like AHLCG.
After a couple weeks of poking around, the idea that had the best grip sorta looks like this:
Tune in next time for more details.