Heavy Steam

In the blog I'll be sharing all about Heavy Steam and how the game when from and idea to creation!
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Heavy Steam - From Concept to Design - By Scott Kimball

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Howdy, folks! My name is Scott Kimball and I’m the designer of Heavy Steam, a game of giant fighting steampunk warmachines, that uses various mechanics ranging from resource management to card drafting to dice rolling to simulate epic battles in the 19th century. Because the game does use such a wide variety of mechanics I thought I’d write a blog post to try and explain both how I settled on a few core mechanics during the design process and how they mesh together to create what I feel is a fun and challenging game. The mechanics I want to talk about today in particular are steam management, and battle card acquisition and play.

For me, ideas for games usually start with a theme and high concept, sometimes even just a name, from which I begin to tease and pull the mechanics. When designing Honor of the Samurai, for instance, I started with the idea of a medieval or feudal setting in which players jockeyed for position and constantly shifted alliances vying for power and honor. All the mechanics I eventually designed for the game, assassinations, forced alliances, a passive Shogun, and more, all worked to fulfill that initial high concept of the game.

Not so for Heavy Steam. This time it was a specific mechanic that came to me first: moving resources (steam), in the form of game cubes, through a vehicle in order to enable activities that played out on a battlefield. And the idea came to me after I played a game of Vlaada Chvatil’s Space Alert.

Space Alert, if you haven’t played (and you should!), is a fantastic co-op game that creates tension between players by forcing them to coordinate the movement of energy through an embattled spaceship in order to power up shields, weapons, sensors, etc. Players are each limited in what they can do each turn, so they must quickly figure out how best to maximize their efficiency while being yelled at by a taped recording telling them aliens are about to blow their stuff up. It’s nerve wracking, stressful and wonderful. And things always, always go wrong.

It was during such a game, with the ship burning around my friends and I, aliens blowing bits off with laser fire, meteor strikes knocking out shields and guns, that I began to wonder if the game would be even more fun if we were playing against other humans, not against a programmed AI.

I’m a wargamer at heart, so to me blowing up my friends is always better.

The very first prototype of Heavy steam:
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First artwork prototype!
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It wasn’t long before I had designed out a system for moving energy through a vehicle (even at this early stage I was imagining the vehicles would be large mechs, and I’m glad I stuck with that). I didn’t want the tension in the game to be figuring out how to move the energy, like in Space Alert but rather when to move it, how much to move, and to where. I wanted it to take time to move energy where you needed it, forcing the player to not only think ahead to when they wanted to take an action, such as firing a weapon or moving, but also require players to coordinate multiple activities many turns in advance to maximize their performance.

I knew from the get-go that I wanted the players’ focus to be on their vehicle board during play, and not necessarily on the board where the battle was represented by tokens or miniatures. I wanted the players’ skill in anticipating where the energy in their vehicle should be now and X turns in the future to have more of an impact on how he fared in battle than any maneuvering or decision making on the battlefield itself.

Therefore I decided to keep the representation of the battlefield very simple and abstract. I eschewed a map made of hexes for one made of linear range increments. This narrowed decisions on movement to be simply whether to move forward or backwards, not, as you might typically find in a minis battle game, how to move around on a detailed map.

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Simplifying the battlefield and movement does not mean removing from the game the tactical considerations that make armed conflict interesting. Instead, those decisions have been shifted from the battlefield to the vehicle board itself, to keep the focus there. To that end on-map terrain and tactical maneuvering has been replaced with a card acquisition and play system that is tied directly to the management of steam.

Cards in Heavy Steam give players control over all the vagaries of battle, from finding good cover terrain, to calling up reinforcements, to finding the perfect angle for a killer shot. To gain cards, players must buy them from a set of revealed cards using steam drawn from their command section. All players are competing to buy the same cards, so the pilot who has prioritized sending steam into his Command Section over moving that steam to weapons or shields is going to have an advantage in buying those cards.

Once acquired, cards can be played with no further cost. Players can hold as many cards as they like, saving them for key moments in the battle when well timed card play can shift the balance in their favor.

Using a card system like this where steam allocation determines if you can do things like call for reinforcements or order your infantry support to charge the enemy, again keeps the focus of the game on the players’ vehicle boards and puts pressure on players to not only priorities moving and shooting their Steam Titan, but to also think about trying to minimize battlefield chaos, gain an advantage in card acquisition and deny their enemy vital cards they may need to fulfill their own strategy. And it is pressures like these that add to the tension, excitement and fun of the game.

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The synergy between steam management and card management is at the very core of what makes Heavy Steam an exciting and intense game. Other mechanics plug into this synergy of course, such as the combat system, initiative and steam pressure, adding to the original mechanics and creating their own dynamics that players must master. But those are topics for another day and another blog!

Until then, have fun and never let your boiler burn low!

Scott

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