Red 5

For several years I've been working on Downhill Racer, a game about the Olympic downhill.  It's a dice game whose central skill  is risk management.  You want to increase your speed to boost your score, but speed puts you at more risk of crashing.   The downhill course is represented by a series of cards, and each card shows you a "skier's eye view" perspective of the part of the course you're currently on, and you must make a single decision on each card.  This captures the feel of the downhill and I think it's very successful.

I had always thought of this as a solo game, but at the suggestion of John Velonis we tried a 2p variant years ago, and it has tested so well that I now think of it as the primary way of playing the game.  It's fun to try to stay upright as you race down the course, but even more fun when the other player is a little ahead of you and you're being pulled to speed up even if it's risky to do so.

But this had me wondering whether this same framework -- a two-player game, first person perspective, quick simple decisions -- could work in any other setting as well, and my first thought was the death star trench run scene.

Like the downhill game, each card will show a first person perspective of a section of the trench, with some gun turrets.  (Additional neat thing, visually, the cards are arranged in a pile, so the back-printing of the next card will show what's coming further down the trench, viewed from further away, then when you flip it you see it up close).

Unlike the downhill game, this one is asymmetric.  One player is the rebels (i.e. Luke) and the other is the imperial defenses and Vader.

In the downhill game, there are three skills, each card tests one of them, and you roll dice to see how many 'hits' you get of that card's skill.  In this game I think it will be more that you roll dice and pick the skill you want to use for that card.  For the rebels, I think it will be "fire", "shields", and "maneuver".  The idea is that if you can take out all the gun turrets on the present card, you can speed up, and speed makes you harder to hit as well as necessary for the final shot (it's a kinetic weapon or something like that).  But if you can't take out the turrets, maybe instead you direct energy to your shields, or you maneuver.

Why would you need to do that?  Because the Vader player also has three things he can do, fire the gun turrets, maneuver his tie fighter, or shoot.  Vader has a little card that shows his "targeting computer", and for him, maneuvering lets him move a marker closer to the center, and the closer it is the fewer successes he needs to hit you when he fires.  Thus, by you maneuvering, it moves that marker away from center and/or perhaps there's also a left-right thing that you can dance around to also make yourself harder to hit.  But when he has a clean shot and hits it, you lose one of your three X-wings.

Overall then it's something of a cat-and-mouse game.  My sense is that the climax should of course be the exhaust port, and obviously you should have to roll "fire" results to hit that.  Maybe as you get closer and closer the odds of hitting it go up, but the longer you wait the more you're risking getting blown up before you have a chance to fire.

Of course there are three things that the game wouldn't feel complete without, and I don't yet know how to include them:  R2, Han, and Obi-Wan/The Force.  My only idea here is that you have a special die that has an R2 face, a Millennium Falcon face, and one or two "The Force" faces.  Maybe you're limited when you can roll it or how many times, but if you do, R2 lets you regain a shield, Han takes out a Tie Fighter, and the Force gives you +1 to your shot at the exhaust port.

Lots to think about here and the key will be balancing it in such a way that, generally speaking, you're down to your last x-wing and Vader is close to targeting you and about to pull the trigger when you fire off your proton torpedoes.  But there's a lot to put in place before getting to the balancing!