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Battle for Brikopolis - Lego Warfare [Playtest Thread]
Skullo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Battle for Brikopolis? Lego Warfare? What's this you say?
Battle for Brikopolis, or BFB from here on out, is a miniatures skirmish played with small figures on a small table top. The game is designed to be used with building block minifigs and blocks (obviously, LEGO(r) being the optimum choice).
BFB centers around two or more players creating and battling with minifig Superheroes (or Villains). The game is designed to be light hearted and easy to learn.
Superheroes! I'm all for it!
Yes! While there are plenty of games out there focusing on robots, knights, or space warriors, BFB is comic books and super heroes in building block form. If you need any more incentive, the basic rules come with 50 super powers to choose from! And a bunch of weaknesses, if you're into that sort of thing.
Well good sir, you've piqued my interest. What do I need to play?
First off, you're going to need some building blocks.
Next off, you're going to need minifig parts...
to make your super heroes...
(Icy Hot, Mr. Mysterious, and Heroic Hank are examples of the characters you could create!)
super villains...
(Evil Doers such as Block-Head, Clayboy and his Claymates, and Parrot Pirate are common in Brikopolis.)
and plenty of helpless citizens!
(Minifig citizens are actually quite used to wanton destruction.)
Is that it? Minifigs are cool and all, but I want more!
Would you read a comic book, or watch an action movie, that doesn't have any stuff being blown up? Super Heroes and Villains wreck everything. Ever. Breaking stuff is cool and exciting!
In BFB, you can do just that. Grab your bricks, and build some buildings, because in BFB you're going to breaking stuff left and right.
A modest section of Brikopolis:
Wow! Will I need anything else?
The only things left to get are a copy of the rules, and some six sided dice. Being the Critical Failures forum, I'm sure you all have a ton laying around, but if you don't, go raid some board games for about 6 or so.
Other than that, you'll need to make BRIKSTIKS (pictured below, and explained in the rules) to measure distances, but if you're lazy and boring and don't like to be different you can use a ruler.
Hmm. This is all very cool, but WHY should I play BFB?
Remember back when you were a wee child? If you were anything like me, and almost everyone else I've talked to, you can remember building things just to break them, creating battles with all sorts of toys, and every action figure you ever owned had force fields, could fly, and shot lasers.
BFB is that, but everything is with bricks. It's senseless fun. It's your inner child released in concentrated form.
More importantly, if you need more reason to play it, it was because Battle for Brikopolis was designed by yours truly. My brother and I found our huge stash of Legos (thats ours stash, plus a whole other giant tub thats still down in the basement, pictured above), and we heard about Lego games like BrikWars and Mechaton. But there are a sad amount of games out there focusing on Super Heroes. So combining my love of Legos and comic books, I created BFB over the last three days.
So, let's get down to brass tacks. My brother and I have tried out the rules a few times, and we personally think it's pretty easy and very fun. But that's not enough for us. I got permission from Thanatos to make this thread, since it is riding a fine line around being whoring, and I would really love some input from other people on what they think of the rules.
Okay, so how do I do that?
Just get the rulebook and play! I'm not charging anything for it, and I don't think I ever will. Games are more fun when they're free.
After you've played, let me know what you think! I'm an adult, so I can take criticism (as long as it's constructive of course), and I WANT it. What works? What doesn't? Is it ACTUALLY fun? We can use this thread to talk about it. And since it's basically a Lego(r) game, we can share our creations!
DOWNLOAD THE FREE V.02 RULEBOOK HERE
Or if that doesn't work, PM me and I can send a copy your way.
SO DOWNLOAD THE RULEBOOK AND GO BREAK STUFF!
(LEGO is a registered trademark of the LEGO Group. They do not endorse or support me in any way.)
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I always get disappointed when I realize that despite owning like a hundred pounds of legos, I don't actually have enough matching pieces of any given color to make anything that looks cool.
God, if I see another sunglasses head I'm going to break something.
Also, be sure to check the blog, as I've already errata'd a few powers.
Collects all the changes that have been posted on the blog up to today, including power rewordings, grammatical error fixes, and some restructuring. I've cleared up some of the more confusing or unclear powers.
You can grab it here!
Did you guys get a chance to try it out yet?
Any idea how I can show what Im doing? I could draw some minifigs but I have to figure out how to post the drawing here.
I suggest photobucket.com, it's free, easy to use, gives you a lot of hosting space, and once you've hosted the image it comes down to simply choosing the proper link to post in a reply.
You could use virtually anything to play, I just chose a lego theme because it's easy to be silly with, I love lego, and we have a ton. But action figures, models, or miniatures from other games work too.
Ach, not yet. He was totally good for it but our mum seemed to think that we needed to focus on organising stuff for my 21st...pft! In a way, I am kind of glad that we didn't give it a go then, since now we can use your updated rules. We'll definately give it a try tonight though, promise!
is nigh indistinguishable from
You may want to clear that section up a bit I think.
Azulan Saul Tigh
Maybe next time I go back home I'll try to dig up the ton of legos chilling there.
Reading through the rulebook now.
Well, all the measurements and stuff are more general and based on estimates, it's more about playing then it is getting everything down to a T. But yeah, when my brother and I were trying it out again, we actually forgot to take hiding behind stuff like that into account. I think I'm going to move cover and stuff like that into an "optional rules" section, since it doesn't really add anything critical to the game.
Character Pack 1 includes 14 Pre-Created Character Cards:
5 Heroes, 5 Villains, 2 Assistance Cards, and 2 Structure cards.
It's available for free from the blog, or you can download it directly here.
I'd love to see what you guys have to say about these.
First off, is it legitimate for sidekicks to have minion powers like Animal Empathy and Brikomancy, or are they similar to Assistance? On that, any suggestions for how the turn-order of minions should go? We couldn't find anything in the rules and so decided on grouping them with superhero they belonged too.
SoogaGames Blog
A few questions of my own: Do you mean 3 minifigs versus 3 minifigs, or 3 players versus 3 players?
If it was your first time playing, then I can see why set up was long. The next game should go much faster!
Also, did you use Lego or something else?
Okay, now for some answers:
Animal Empathy
As far as we've tested, the only powers we limited sidekicks from having were Assitance and Sidekick. This was for a few reasons: One being that if you think about it, with a sidekick allowed to take 2 powers, they could infinite combo Assitance and Sidekick (1 SK takes both powers, which gives him 2 friends, and a sidekick that can then take 2 powers...see what I mean?)
Animal Empathy gives you two allies, but they're very weak (only 1 AD and DD), so we didn't limit them. It's perfectly fine, as the rules are now, for a sidekick to take Animal Empathy. On the subject, Animals CAN rescue civilians and rob the bank. If a giant, flying, magical Shark strolled into your Bank and demanded money, would you say no?
Brikomancy
I never actually thought of giving a sidekick Brikomancy, but since structures are hit automatically, they can be taken down relatively easily.
Did you feel that a sidekick taking those powers threw off the balance of the game? If I find someone to play today, I'll test out a Brikomancy sidekick.
Turn Order:
Page 3: "During each turn, a minifig can use 2 actions per turn. Once a minifig has used all their actions, you may move on to another minifig and do theirs. Once all your minifigs have done their actions, it is the next players turn."
As long as one player activated all the heroes they chose to before the passing the turn, you didn't do anything wrong. But to clear things up:
Minions/Sidekicks/Animals/and Brikomancy'd Structures each go seperately on the turn of the controlling player, just like regular Heroes. The only thing that matters for order, as with everything, is that they do both of their actions before moving on to the next figure. So it's perfectly acceptable to have your Hero with Animal Empathy use his actions, and then go on to a different Hero, and save the Animals for last. This can help you prioritize your targets.
Other than that:
I'm so happy that you enjoyed it! If you have any pictures of the battle, would you care to post them? Or perhaps take some pictures of the teams you used/your city? I'd love to see what other people are coming up with!
So far, we've done 3 minifigs vs. 3 minifigs, with each minifig controlled by a different player. We also tried 9 vs 9 today, with each player controlling a team of 3. The games seem to be averaging about two hours, partly I think because we have so many players, but also because we can be infuriatingly slow with our turns. And yes, we're using Lego.
After playing, neither Animal Empathy or Brikomancy seem to be a problem when used by a sidekick. Animal empathy, in fact, seems extremely weak—in one game, one of my hero's assistants killed both of them without taking any damage himself—we don't have any particular suggestions, but it seems like they could use an effectiveness boost. Brikomancy is fine and, more importantly, fun; my friend used it to great effect, moving it along the field as cover for his ranged heroes and then finally smashing my brikmobile to pieces with it.
No pictures yet, we keep meaning to do it at the outset of the games, but it gets forgotten in the excitement of the moment; I promise we'll get some to you soon. Coincidentally, I just found the BFB photobucket account and my villain, Captain Crush, looks almost exactly like Doctor Darkness! I don't know if I was subtly influenced by your latent telepathic powers or what, but the resemblance is uncanny.
Now then, onto weightier matters:
We've been having trouble with the speed powers, Super Fast and Charge in particular. One of our heroes, the Assassin, has these powers, along with Super Speed, Super Strength and Ninja Training, giving him a potential attack of 7 dice. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem as it leaves him with 1 defense, but using Super Fast, he has been able to get into melee range, strike a target for massive damage (he's yet to fail to kill) and then speed back out of range; on the 3v3 games in particular, he has been devastating. In our last game, we tried to level the field by making the free move given by Super Fast long distance instead of huge. This seemed effective as he no longer had the potential to attack without repercussion but could still move very large distances. We were trying to find a compromise that wouldn't destroy the usefulness of Super Fast. We were especially curious if you had a similar experience because we're still debating whether or the Assassin's power is due to the tactical situation he has been in—often fighting isolated from the rest of the team—or if the powers are innately unbalanced.
Another issue is that of Yellow Briktonyte. This has been the almost universal choice for a Briktonyte weakness; the only other to be used is No Powers. We created an energy based hero specifically to test whether the +2 damage struck a good balance, but the results were disappointing. In one instance, the extra damage taken by a hero over an entire turn was exactly equal to the extra studs he had from taking Impervious as his fifth power. Again, we don't have any specific suggestions, but at this point it seems like an extra power is too good to pass up.
Other than that, there were a few sundry questions and comments:
When it says that sidekicks must have the same briktonyte weakness as their partner, does that mean they inherit the advantage as well: would say a Yellow Briktonyte sidekick get three powers?
What do you think about the dice roll to break Transmogrify taking an action? At this point, it seems a bit strange that you can successfully hit someone and yet have no actual effect, provided they roll well. For example, why would someone choose Transmogrify over Freeze as it has exactly the same chance of immobilizing the enemy, plus damage. Really just curious about this one. If you meant it to be a bit of a gamble, that's cool, it's just kind of disappointing to have it hit and then have them break it at the start of their next turn. :P
Lastly, one player wondered if the distances were chosen with a particular logic. He was curious why you didn't do things incrementally, as in short=12, long=24, huge=36. Just throwing it out there.
Well, I think that about covers it. Still enjoying enormously. I try to remember to take pictures next time and I'll write down any questions the boys have. Thanks again for writing up the rules and making them available.