- The rulebook, which will hopefully be short when it is complete.
- Fleet Sheets, one for each player. These are kinda like the ship sheets from Star Fleet Battles or the mech sheets from BattleTech, but they printed on legal-sized paper in landscape orientation. About one third of the sheet is used to detail your flagship, while the rest will be used for tracking your fleet.
- Miniatures or counters for all the ships involved. At some point I'll do a tutorial on how to make pretty decent counters using MS Paint, colored paper, cardstock and poker chips.
- A hex map. If you want to use rulers and protractors that's your business, but I'll stick to the simplicity of hexes and the kick-assitude of this sort of thing.
- Dice. This game uses D&D type dice, especially d4, d6, d8, d10 and d12. Maybe other dice too. I dunno yet.
- Turn counters. Chits or tokens marked on one side with arrows (turning right, turning left, straight) or a stop sign. Ideally the other side would be relatively unobtrusive but still detectable on the map. You'll need a quantity of these, as each ship will use one every turn.
- Pencils or somesuch.
- A pack of ordinary playing cards.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Fleet Captain, part 2
Equipment Needed
While it might distract you from your project, if you're interested in a videogame version of what you're calling "The Admiral's Game", check Gratuitous Space Battles. It combines massive explosions and pew pew pew lasers with an entirely intellectual, 0-twitch, play experience -- you design ships, you give ships general tactical orders, you choose ships for the battle... but then the fight plays out entirely automated, with you seeing the consequences of your choices but unable to stop mid-battle and change orders.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like lots of fun. Can't wait to see what you come up with.
ReplyDeleteThat's a pretty ingenious concept, giving the player one detailed ship and additional vessels at a more abstract level--the best of both worlds.
ReplyDeleteIf possible, though, you might want to keep the fleet sheets to regular-sized paper, which is more common and easier to store.