Tweaking Ancient Games: Duodecim Scripta

For my ancient board game iteration, I chose to take Duodecim Scripta, the Roman board game, and make changes to it, specifically combat, as I found the original combat somewhat dull and uninteresting, also slightly unbalanced, due to the fact that only stacks of equal size could take one another.

For my first iteration of the game, I wanted to tackle the the stacks, and the issues I held with the mechanic. To do this, I simply changed the rules to allow smaller stacks of units to attack larger stacks, sacrificing themselves to remove an equal amount of units from a stack. My initial findings with this iteration was that while the game length increased, due to combat being easier on either side, the gameplay speed also increased, with players feeling as if they have more options. These were more-or-less the results I was looking for, so proceeded positively to the next iteration.

With the second iteration, to expand more on combat, I decided to bring dice rolls into combat with a smaller stack vs larger stack. Should a smaller stack attack a larger stack, they roll a dice for each attacker. Results of 1 or 2 resulted to the loss of an attacker, 3 or 4 a re-roll, 5 or 6 leading to both an attacker and defender being lost. This mechanic change meant that whilst smaller stacks could attack larger stacks, the outcome would rarely to never be the same every time. I also tried to balance it out so that smaller stacks would inevitably have to pay for combat against larger stacks, but still allowed a player to try and slow the advance of a large stack.

The third iteration was an attempt to expand more on the rules of the second iteration, while still keeping the balance of risk vs reward for smaller stacks vs larger stacks. To do this, I kept the dice mechanic, but expanded more on the rolls. 1 ends combat, with all attacking units being removed. 2 would result in an attacker being removed, 3 or 4 still resulting in a re-roll. 5 would simply remove a defender, while a 6 removed a defender, and gave the attacker an extra roll. I did this because, while an extra dice roll seems like a big deal in combat, there's always the possibility that combat will immediately end and result in a loss. Taking into account that this change to dice could result in both attackers and defenders surviving, I decided to have it so any losing attackers would be placed in the square behind the surviving defenders. This means that smaller stacks can take chances to still push forward, possibly damaging the opponent whilst doing so.

As I went through my iterations, I found that players enjoyed the combat a lot more, as they felt they interacted with it that much more, even though it was only through dice rolls, it also gave them a lot more strategic options. To counter this, there was an increase in chance within the game, that players found to balance it nicely. The length also increased as I went through the iterations, but at the same time the play speed also increased, as players felt that had many more options available to them.

Well, this was an outline of my iterations to Duodecim Scripta. Overall, I'm happy with how my iterations turned out, and found the process gave me a good insight into iterating games in general. I've learnt a lot more than I thought I would of from the assessment, and the design documentation that followed, and am very pleased with what we were set to do, and how I accomplished my goals.