Robotic Factory: deck builder board game

Since I first discovered Dominion (BGG) I am huge fan of deck building games. I am also a fan of tactical wargames like Massive Assault. When I discovered Cogmind I soon became obsessed with the idea of creating a board game that combines elements of deck building and tactical wargames and building robots from parts.

Let me use Dominion to briefly explain how deck building games work. You start with a small deck of basic cards. Every turn you draw a few cards. You can use your cards in different ways. Some cards (like Silver shown here as an example) generate gold that allows you to buy other cards. When you buy a card it goes to your discard pile. The cards you played also go to discard pile. When there are no more cards in your deck and you need to draw you shuffle your discard pile and use it as your draw deck. The key idea is your deck
grows as you play and with each reshufle the cards in your hand become more powerful.

Some cards allow you to attack the opponent, for example inserting harmful cards to his deck. Some cards provide victory points but do not provide any benefit before the end of game and only waste a slot in your hand.

Seriously if you love games and do not know what is a deck-builder make yourself a service and watch some youtube.

There are many games, including digital, that followed suit. Ascension and Star Realms are examples of deck building brought to it's purest form. Slay the Spire has strong deck-building elements. Even some tavern brawl modes of Hearthstone are deck-builders. Digital games provided fancy mechanics that are impossible in cardboard form. But it is Dominion that started it all.

Not much can be said about tactical wargames. You carefully choose your army composition to respond to enemy army and terrain. You carefully maneuver your army to gain territory with minimal loses. There was a post (in Russian only) from developer, who is among founders of wargaming.net, that original prototype of Massive Assault was "analog" board game which gives me hope that my idea of doing this in cardboard is not doomed.

Cogmind is a clever roguelike videogame where you build your robotic hero by placing destructible parts into very limited slots. And you cant just slap all the fancy big guns and fire them at once because usable have weight that slows you down heat generation that requires cooling (and you will melt without it) and require energy .

The idea of building units from parts is not new in board-games. For example Eclipse has starships with components and you can not fire your big gun if energy requirements are not satisfied.

In future blog entries I will show how my game is supposed to work and how I expect to balance it.