A Game of Colleges: The Boardgame

[Jubal]

So I was thinking that GoC should have a boardgame as well as the RTW mod.

My plan was roughly as follows:

- The map has the colleges on it, with various marked routes between them.
- Each college can support one movable "unit" of students, and take one other action per turn.

UNITS
- At the start of the game, for each of their colleges the players select the unit type that will be spawned and placed there to start with.
- Arts units cannot attack other colleges but add +d6 to the defence of any college they are in
- Scientist units add +d6 when attacking a college
- Each unit can move once per turn. There is no limit on the number of units placed on a point/college.
- Colleges have a basic defensive value of five
- So for example I want to attack Cat's from Pembroke; Cat's has one arts unit therein, giving it 5+d6. I attack with two scientists. The arts unit rolls a three, giving Cat's a defence value of eight. My two scientist units roll four and one respectively. The attack thus fails and both are lost.

COLLEGES
- Each location or college has a card detailing its abilities
- In general players can use only ONE card ability per turn
- This may allow them to double the defence of a particular college, transport troops by river, make a double-distance move, or something like that.
- A few colleges have passive or unusual abilities, such as spawning additional bonus types of troop.

[Scarlet]

I just screamed and thew down my laptop onto the bed That was stupid.

In any case. Yes.

Would there be a distance travelled/ maximum attacking distance restriction? Or is movement not a thing?

(Do you know there was a University of Cambridge monopoly drinking game board in our JCR, Jubal?)

[Fish Priest]

(Do you know there was a University of Cambridge monopoly drinking game board in our JCR, Jubal?)

That would be Varsitopoly, right?

I'm wondering whether it's worth varying the defensive abilities of the colleges a bit? For instance, Churchill should be slightly harder to defend as it doesn't have a wall around it, whereas Trinity Hall should be more defensible as it's hard to find and has very few entrances.

Troop transport by river: Perhaps give some limited form of this to the Backs colleges, and a more powerful version to whoever controls the 2 Scudamore's locations?

Would non-college locations be mainly departments (producing special units)?

Your current combat system seems to have all combats end up as a massacre for one side. Perhaps an alternative system based largely on the one from Cyclades:
A combat round is resolved as before: Unit values, plus situational bonuses/rolled dice, plus defensive value for the defender.
Defender wins any ties.
The loser removes one unit. If the attacker loses, they may choose to break off the assault.

If the attacker has no units left at any point, the siege is repelled. If the defender has no units left, the attacking units are moved into the location.

This allows attacks to be repelled at a cost (so a future attack is more likely to succeed), and for Pyrrhic victories where the attacking unit is so weakened that they are vulnerable to counter-attack. I don't think it's overly complicated- it's a bit more time-consuming, but not massively so unless your battles have a ridiculous number of units on a side.

Potentially: Give a defeated defender the option to try to retreat if they have somewhere to go to, perhaps at the ristk of losing units.

[Jubal]

Hm, or maybe a compromise option could work - have losses based on how much the combat was lost by, say every three points lost by => -1 additional unit. That would speed things up whilst still not resulting in automassacres in large sieges.

Yes, departments (or at least sites, since that's a more obvious geographic distinction) would be the other locations, and a few others; to give you an idea, additional sites included in the RTW mod include Market Square, Sidgwick Site, West Cambridge Site, The Union, Downing Site, etc.

We could vary the defense value I guess, though we'd need to be more careful about ensuring the college card abilities balanced that.

Agreed on river transport.