Snacks? Tasty.

You know what else is tasty? 3d printed Lego bases 😉

I’m introducing a 10-year old to tabletop gaming – softly, softly now… he loves Lego and has heaps of minifigures. So we’re going to make a game where he can use some of his Lego characters as tabletop miniatures, giving them stats for attack and defence and so on. And build defences for the characters to hide behind, to break up lines of sight and so on.

As as not to frighten him off too early, and to use what is hanging around rather than spend weeks building a playing area (that’ll come later once he’s hooked!) we’re looking at a simple 8×8 grid and I need some easy-to-use but interesting-to-play rules that’ll keep a complete noob interested long enough to want to play again.

So far we’re come up with:

• Each player has six characters, on a simply laid out grid (walls run along grid lines, no diagonals etc).
• All movement is along horizontal and vertical lines (no diagonals)
• At the start of a turn, three characters are chosen at random (maybe by drawing cards?) and are given an action point.
• Action points can be conserved between turns.
• Characters can donate their action points to other characters. A character donating/receiving action points can do nothing else that turn (all or nothing, you donate all your points or none)
• Scattered throughout the map are tokens that give a player an “action card” which allows them to perform additional actions (either during that turn or can be conserved for later turns)
• It costs one action point to move one square ahead. Rotating costs nothing. Shooting costs one action point
• Characters must turn to face a direction, then can either move or shoot (we’ve yet to decide whether you can do both or whether to just limit shooting to only once per turn irrespective of moving)
• Different characters have different attack and defend values, diceless shooting (always a hit, always takes damage). So he has, for example, snake-headed dudes who could maybe spit venom for 2pts damage, ice warriors who maybe do double damage to the flame-headed guys… it’s really an exercise is getting him to think about giving characteristics a “points value” to use in the game.
• Cards could be along the lines of “shoot twice this turn” or “double damage this turn only” or a “shield that protects against fire” or “you can split your APs if donating” or that kind of thing.
• Winner is either last man standing, or we could put objective markers on the board that need to be collected, or something like that.

So far, so basic. But, hey, it needs to be simple because a) it’s for a kid to play and b) he’s never really played tabletop games before. The idea is to give him strategy decisions – constantly move a bit at a time, or save up APs and perform a chain of actions in a few turns time.

So the obvious question coming is…. how do we make this a cool, fun game to play (for both of us, because I’m going to be his opponent to begin with and I don’t want to be bored to tears either!) and, of course, are there any rules for a simple game that already exist that I can just lift and use Lego characters as counters for? 😉