Head over Heels - Dungeonalia entry

Ok, let’s be clear – a one-to-one recreation of Head over Heels on the tabletop just isn’t going to work, for all kinds of reasons. The main one being…. well, it’d be a bit…. boring.
My main plan is that as you enter each room, you take a card from a deck and it tells you how to lay out the room before playing. If there are any baddies in the room, it tells you where to place them, and how to move them, on the baddie’s turn.

But Head over Heels (the video game) also lots of “empty” rooms that you just move your character through. Which is fine as a passtime on a video screen – but as a modular tabletop dungeon crawler, expecting players to clear away a previous room, set up a new room, then move their character through it – with no NPC interaction or anything else to do – then break it all down again and set up another empty room, and repeat….. well, that just sounds tedious!

And Head over Heels also contains some wonderful puzzle rooms.
But making every room a puzzler also feels a bit like hard-graft.
We’re recreating Head over Heels here, not the (already brilliant) game, Tipover!

So I figured we’d need a bit of a mix of the two – some rooms a bit “puzzle-y” and some rooms a bit more “action-y” (with baddies).

But on a turn-based game, interaction with baddies will end up either being completely random or completely predictable. Thinking about how the game plays (on the computer) most baddies have predictable behaviour. And tackling any room with a baddie almost always relies on you being able to predict their behaviour and move accordingly.

But if it’s a turn-based game, and you have all the time you want to think about things (rather than a video game which is more often about quick reflexes and manoeuvrability) having predictable baddies could be quite boring after a while.

But if the alternative is that baddies are always completely random, that too could feel like you’re beaten by random chance, rather than you’ve failed to master the game. Which is ok, every now and again, but could get tiresome if it happened in every single room you visit.

So I think I’ve come up with an idea.
But it’s really controvertial.
Really, really, controvertial.
I think a lot of people will hate it. So hear me out…..

Yep.
It’s roll-to-move.

Now before you slam the lip of your laptop down in disgust, let’s go through it. You roll to move. So some turns you get to move four or five spaces – some turns (if you’re unlucky) only one. So you can’t just predict where the enemy will be at the end of their turn and always move into a safe space.
There’s an element of risk and jeopardy on your turn.
But it could still get pretty repetitive if all you had to do was just roll more frequently, and take more turns to get through a room.

So here’s the second element to roll-to-move:
You only get so many turns to complete a move.

Whenever you play Head over Heels, there’s a general feeling that the longer you remain in a room (with a baddie, especially) there greater the chance of slipping up and being killed.
Even in a really simple room, with – say – a toaster you have to jump over: nine times out of ten, you’ll clear it with no issues at all. But every now and again, for no reason or explanation, on a really simple obstacle, you might mis-time a jump or walk into something you know you have to avoid!

So my tabletop game isn’t simulating moving the characters of Head and Heels around Castle Blacktooth – it’s more like a simulation of someone playing the videogame where they move digital avatars, in a simulation of moving the characters around the castle.

That’s pretty meta, right?

So the idea is that you roll-to-move. Sometimes you’ll get a few sixes and crossing a 7 x 7 room will be pretty straight-forward and the baddies can easily be accommodated. But sometimes, just when you need to move most, you’ll hit a one. That’s like the time you played and mis-timed a jump and had to go back a few squares and queue things up to try again.

And sometimes you’ll run out of turns to complete a room because you rolled a lot of ones and had to move to spaces you didn’t want to, in order to avoid the baddie in the room.
And that’s like the time you played the game and got trapped in the corner of a room, between the baddie and a killer-block and you just knew you were going to lose a life and have to start the room again.

So with all this in mind (it’s still very early days in terms of rule development, and these things might yet change) I started making some cards to help with playing the tabletop version of Head over Heels.

So every room has a number. This is shown in the top-left corner.
I’m not sure yet if wandering the map will be a case of simply turning over the next card in a deck whenever you exit a room (through whichever door you choose) or whether different doors lead to specific rooms (for a more consistent map).

We’ll have to see how it plays about – because there will be some rooms that only Mr Head can complete, and some that only Mr Heels can complete. And it wouldn’t feel fair if Head could no longer progress in the game because he’d drawn a “wrong” card. (maybe this could be mitigated against, but I’m also currently allowing for mapping specific exits to specific linking rooms).

Each room also has a “countdown timer”. Which is simple as turning a dice to the number shown in the top right, whenever you enter a room.
Place your character in square in front of the doorway they’ve just entered from, roll your dice to move, and at the end of your turn, reduce the value of the countdown timer.
When the countdown timer cannot roll down from one, you lose a life and have to reset the room.

If there are any special instructions (like a baddie in the room, for example) instructions are shown on how to move the baddie on their turn (in this case, roll a D6+2 for Charlie’s movement, and each time he hits an obstacle (or wall) and cannot proceed forwards, roll a D4 to determine his new facing (north, south, east, west). Some characters might use a D8 and a Blood Bowl style scatter template for direction, some only move up, down, left and right.

I’m sure that, as even these simple rules are play-tested, I’ll find all kinds of things wrong with it (or need to invent caveats or exceptions to rules) but so far, this is starting to feel like it could actually be something…..