Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

Line-of-sight is a crucial part of the game/app.

It allows us to have true hidden movement, and does away with the clumsy “blip” tokens which are often used either by the alien player as decoys or by the Space Marine player to avoid areas of a ship during their movement.

With hidden movement, if you can’t see an enemy character, they don’t appear on the board! So we can really add to the atmosphere of the game by implementing “proper” ambush moves, hiding around corners, behind doors and so on…

Here’s a simple line-of-sight test; it’s just one turn, but repeated from “both sides of the board”. To begin with, it’s team one (Space Marines) who have a free choice of movement….

The marine player takes a shot at a genestealer with their first character, then runs away to hide behind the wall. The second player takes a shot and also runs behind the wall. They did a bit of messing about, back and forth, just to demonstrate that they are carrying out other moves, albeit out of sight of the alien player.

We then change the game to the alien players point of view, and replay the turn just completed by the marines player.

As expected, it prompts us to put down the character who is taking a shot (it does this so that when you’re playing on the tabletop with actual real miniatures, it’s clear just who is doing the shooting, without all your focus having to be on the video game playback).

The player is then prompted to pick up the miniature and put it down in the appropriate place. This repeats a few times. Then something funny happens…. the marine player “disappears”.

Of course, they’re not gone from the game – just removed from the alien player’s line-of-sight. So any additional movements are carried out in secret.

This is more easily understood when the second marine moves. During his movement, the marine not only shot at the genestealer, but then ran off behind the wall, and continued to run about in circles, hidden from view. When this is played back from the alien player’s point of view we only actually see the movement up to the point where the character disappears behind the wall.

All the other movement is still played out – just out of sight of the alien player.

When the marine player’s turn ends and the alien player moves their piece(s), the marines remain entirely hidden from view – right up until one of the genestealers can see past the end of the wall.

At this point the app prompts the player to put a miniature down on the appropriate square. When the genestealer steps forward, they are able to see more of the board behind the wall – so the app prompts the player to place the second marine on the board.

Apart from a few glitches with the camera during playback, the line-of-sight routines appear to be working quite well.

So it’s more than likely that I’ll have broken them again by this time tomorrow night, and will yet another thumping headache and yet more hair pulled from my scalp in frustration.

But for tonight, I’m calling it a win!