Refined things a bit and updated the rough concept with a more thought out draft.

..and the main reason for that is that I've been doing WARDOGS artwork, getting the car maintenance up to date, and scratching my head about how to make a humanoid form look like fog....
:-)

Oh, I wasn't sniping about that - just letting the membership at large where we were with this...

I've actually done something like this myself, but the kids didn't seem to take to my version. "Too many rules", apparently....

I used OGRE as the basis for it, and another based loosely on 'Titan'. There's a thing on the net (well, there WAS, haven't checked recently) called 'Destroy All Monsters'.

Heh..found it...
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/articles/pyramid/godzilla.html

Here's something else, something to consider for the graphics:
http://forum.tcgs.de/showthread.php?t=65587

What's that site you're talking about?

I really LOVE the premise...

One question from a practical perspective. Is each hextile supposed to have but one hex on it? (i.e., is the hextile a single "space", or does it have multiple "spaces"?)

My original thought was a hex tile is a single space. The board continuously changes game to game...and during the game as the materia is harvested and the tile reverts to its 'true element'...providing terrain of a sort.   I'm not adverse to possible tweaks to this either...it just seemed the most versatile in concept. 

An 8 x 11 sheet can get 10 tiles on it.  5 sheets of tiles provides a 50 space board.  And as Mike was saying, it would be easy to do some map expansion sets....as well as add a few elementals more later on possibly.

Ephemeral...

Howdy:

The rules that I was reading were incomplete for some reason.  I'm glad I took a look at the 'current' playtest rules before making any comments.  Most of my initial comments were cleared up once I read the total rule set... Wierd eh?

Questions and comments:

1. Set-up:  The way it is worded, the game board will consist of 7 tiles since it states that it must be placed on 'any opened edge of the first tile'  Now I like the idea that the 6 initial hexes be placed about the starting tile, but there should be something about where the other tiles can go.

2. Initiative:  I think the roll for initiative and then move all your pieces could have some other design that would bring more strategy into the game.  As it stands now, the winner of that single dice roll is at a big advantage.  My idea:

Each player rolls a d6.  The person that rolled lowest may keep the number he rolled or exchange it for another player's score.  This continues until all scores have be kept or exchanged.  Once complete, the person with the lowest number may activate that number of elementals (attacking occurs after this movement and damage is *not* simultaneous).  In case of a tie, players alternate between elementals.    Will it work, in my head at 4:52am it does.  See example below

Example: Mike, Rich and Todd roll for initiative.
Mike: 1
Rich: 5
Todd:3

Mike switches with Rich giving him the most moves.  Rich decides to keep the 1 (he could have switched with Todd if he wanted to but not with Mike)

Mike: 5
Rich: 1
Todd: 3

Rich gets to move a single Elemental. Todd now gets to move 3 elementals and finally Mike with 5.  Remember in this system combat occurs during your action and damage is immediate.  This means that the player moving first will be at advantage combat-wise, but will not be able to move as many elementals as the later opponents.

If this doesn't sit well with people, there has to be something that make initiative more than just a die roll-off for victory!

3. Combat:  Does the Power/2 get rounded up or down? I'm assuming up, but you never know.

4. End game:  The way the current game ends, the game could be over at the end of turn 1 with no clear winner.  If each player take 5 cost 2 elementals and all elementals on the board harvest materia, they game ends in a 20 to 20 tie.  Now I admit this is improbable, but entirely possible.  What if you only add the defense + power scores for VP (leaving attack out of the mix).  Now players have a real tough decision on where to put their points when they advance their elementals...

Thoughts?
-Bren
'MJ12 playtest lackey'

I think I like the larger board idea.  A thought occurs to me, what if most of the tiles are random?  Each player gets to choose 5 tiles to place as their 'stating row', but the rest of the hexes are a random assortment of what is left. 

-Bren
[insert cool title here]

I'm gonna go with Elemental Materia as a working title for now.

Well...my nephews and I played two games in about 5 hours and found a few things needing work (of course)    But the good thing is it was pretty fun even in its current incarnation. (They're both asking to play again already.)  I took several picturs of both games which I'll post later.

The board set up worked well, though I think that a ratio of 20 hex tiles to 1 player will be needed as a minimum.  With 3 players, 50 tiles were flipped pretty fast.

During the first game, both Mike and Nick lost an elemental to the board. Mike mined a tile and it flipped up Magma, the opposite to his Ice elemental.  Nick wasn't paying attention and moved his Metal elemental onto an Energy tile.  ZZZZap! bye bye elemental.

The first several turns were spent harvesting power tokens and boosting the elementals.  I quickly poured harvested tokens into my power ranks followed by attack ranks.  The boys spread their tokens out across their stats and were unable to power their elemental's abilities effectively...or resist enough attack damage to avoid being fried by my Energy elemental's ranged bolts.  Power gained by the combat wins really made my elemental grow. :twisted:

Another elemental from each of them was lost when my water elemental used Tsunami while on a water hex.  This boosted the damage dice and power ranks enough that it literally overwhelmed both elementals.
The game was concluded with the elimination of their total forces. 8)

The second game was a draw.  They both took cues from what I had been doing the first game.  Power ranks were boosted up primarily until not enough hex tiles remained to be able to boost attack ranks enough to overcome the power rank, even after I used Tornado to toss one elemental onto an opposing element hex and fireballed it.  The boys kept being afraid to use the abilities of their elementals unfortunately. :?

Problems encountered:
1) Not a lot of action for a few turns while power tokens are accumulated.
2) Concentration on power ranks can lead to invulnerable elementals.
3) Keeping track of which elemental has been moved already.
4) Need to define available actions and combo actions.
5) Need to define action priority and time of use.
6) Further define win, loss, and draw results of combat.
7) Rolling the d6 for materia harvest success worked, but was also pretty pointless for the first turn. A 1 is all that was needed.

Possible solutions:
1) Make a 1 always fail for materia harvest, so the success roll would be Power rank +1.  Max. power ranks harvested then drop to 5 before only combat can make them exceed things.
2) Ranks cannot exceed a difference of 2 between them for any one elemental.
3) Change maximum rank level to 8. (closest I got was 7 power and that after three combat wins)
4) If an elemental harvests power from a hex with the same element, double tokens are gained.
5) start with a wizard using power tokens to summon elementals to fight for them, power elemental abilities, and having the elementals with set attack and defense scores.  The wizard would need to be standing on the appropriate element tile to summon that type of elemental.

Not much of a blow by blow...but I forgot my note pad when I left home.

What if it went into a random stat or maybe the lowest stat?  How an element gains power would have to be revised, but it should be a tiny fix.  Maybe state that the all stats must be within 2 or each other.  So a element could be say: Att: 1, Def: 1, Pow: 3 but not Att: 2, Def: 1, Pow: 4

I like the idea of each player having a wizard on the board and summoning Elementals to do his fighting.  Especially if a player chose 3 'schools' of elementals to be specialized in and spends less 'power' to create elements in those schools.

I see with each wizard having a certain amount of power tokens that can be used to create, energize and battle elementals (10-20 perhaps and the wizard can only regenerates when on a  tile of his specialization - maybe d6-2 or something).  I guess it would also change the victory conditions since the main goal would be to get to the opponent's wizard.

Sounds like it's coming along,
-B