Happy Independence Day to all my American readers! And happy “Putting Up With Americans Day” to everyone else!
Before I dedicate myself to the over-eating and celebratory explosions for which our founding fathers fought, I’d like to take a few minutes to revisit the economy of the Spider Siege board game. (The founding fathers have no recorded thoughts on the subject, but I’d like to think they’d be opposed to freedom-hating giant spiders.)
When we last discussed such things, it was in terms of how expensive different units should be. On that lovely “menu” of costs (see above), I also included a section for “actions,” but never explained how they work.
Actions
Actions are resolved pretty much the same as recruiting units. You spend resource cards from your hand to pay for them, and they do what they say they do. Only, instead of putting units on the board, they affect the board in unique and interesting ways.
For example, the first action, “Move,” is something we’ve discussed before: Spend Food to move units on a 1-to-1 basis.
The fun part about actions is that they vary by player.
Factions
Each player has his or her own faction. (Most of these are human factions, but remember that there’s a spider faction too, for which I still need to solidify the economy.)
Different factions have different types of units. One might have a bunch of archers, while another might have cavalry.
Likewise, they have different actions. The archer faction might have something like:
Arrow Barrage: Spend 4 Metal and choose a space adjacent to at least one of your Archers. Destroy all enemies in that space.
Or the cavalry team might have:
Charge!: Spend 2 Food per unit in a space to move those units into an adjacent space and attack all enemies there. All your Cavalry units get +1 Attack during that attack.
Okay, these are just off the top of my head, but you get the idea. Each faction has its own list of units you can play and actions you can take, based on that faction’s particular schtick.
(Hmm… maybe I should go ahead and design those factions next. It’s one more way to put off working on the spider player’s economy, which is turning out to be more of a headache than I’d expected.)
Enough spidery stuff for now! Go forth and declare you independence from something!
