Entropy City: Making a Wargame

One of the big factors that really inspired this idea was the fact I am actually a rider, as my every day ride. I’m not in any gangs nor do I have a desire to be, thats a game mechanic but the bike feel is something I wanted to get right.

So what sort of factors did I feel were important to get that right.

The Feel of Danger:
If you’re riding a bike, you already know there are some inherent dangers involved, it doesn’t truly matter who’s fault they are they exist and thats the first thing about the game I felt was important. If you make a mistake or something goes awry there should be a chance your biker comes off. With that there is obviously the chance that this means theyre gone from the battle. Now of course you could just say that is what the Wounds are for but that didnt feel as authentic to me, if it was just wounds then they could just be walking.

This was the first problem I faced, extremely early on in this games life I had the idea to take templates (at the time this was inspired by X-Wing but obviously Gaslands has come out since then. But take them a step further, making allowance for acceleration some sharper turns would become risky, turn to quickly or too sharply and it could all go wrong.

If I want people to play a new game it needs to have something about it that plays differently, a point of difference and I felt this was the START of an important game mechanic. It would develop more as time went on.

Bikes vs Cars:

A car turns as you would expect in an arch all vehicles do, however a bike can be more manouvrable, a bike can swerve around objects much easier (though this can be a much more advanced technique, one exploited in incorrect times often). Does this need to appear on the game table well no but I could think of a fun way to represent it having happened.

Different bikes would have the ability to swerve, the slower your going the more you can move, placing the template down, in this case a straight, you have the abiluty to swerve to the left and right a total of lets say 3 inches to represent either avoiding something OR setting yourself up for your next turn/activation.
This idea in and of itself would obviously need testing to ensure it works the way I think it does.
Some bikes are more manouvreble than others helping create more diverse characters.

Tricks:

A simple one here, what if we had ramps for bikes to make jumps or what if light bikes had the ability to do stoppies and the likes, how would you factor in the danger, would you perhaps need to limit which characters had the skills for these?

Something I can see being implimented, maybe something to help better define one faction over another.

This is a concept I’ve been working on for a much longer time that I really should have, I put it aside and come back to it but I still feel its an idea with merit. Im going to try and do a better job of keeping this project updated, I do have more to discuss but I am going to save more for next time..

Do you like the idea of a tabletop game of motorcycle gangs against one another? Do you like the idea of a bike feeling like a bike on the tabletop, or does it sound complicated for the sake of being complicated? Let me know in the comments how you feel personally about what youve read.