Tactical Assault Games » Our Philosophy

Creative Ideas

ROLE PLAYING AID

It has been brought to our attention that both the Combat Cards & the Fantasy Cards can serve as useful aids in running role-playing campaigns - especially to resolve combats that do not directly involve the player characters, but may still have an important bearing on the campaign.

Who hasn't played in a role playing campaign where the heroes set out on a mission or quest along with a company of the king's guard or a platoon of colonial marines escorting them?

The extra troops are not there do the heroes' work for them, but rather to support the heroes in some important role - such as keeping the escape route open from marauding orcs while the heroes explore, or by holding the alien monstrosities at bay while the heroes search a wreck site.

Unfortunately, playing out a side battle that doesn't involve the heroes, at the level of detail that most role playing games do, may prove impractical and tedious - and result in too much precious game time being taken away from the action involving the characters.

Yet the success of these troops and their mission is important to the story line and will eventually affect the heroes, so some attention should be given to their struggle and its outcome.

That is where the Combat Cards & Fantasy Cards can really be a life saver. With the simplicity of generic unit types, the speed of play, and the ease of teaching the rules to newbies, they can be an efficient and effective way to resolve those important side battles - without taking too much time away from the main adventure.

The narrative nature of the Cards also allow game masters flexibility in determining how important aspect of the battle will mesh with the role playing action as well with the role playing system being used.

(Some examples being: How many rounds went by before that alien nasty broke through the marines' lines and went for the heroes? Has an Eliminated unit truly lost all of its "damage points" or is just unconscious and clinging to life?).

Combine the core games with the appropriate expansion sets, and the feel and flavor of just about any role playing system can be emulated on the Combat Cards or Fantasy Cards battlefield.

So the next time your heroes are about to set out with an escort in tow, give some thought to how the Combat Cards or the Fantasy Cards just might prove to be a real help to you the beleaguered game master...

Our Philosophy

Simply put, our philosophy is to produce games that are fun. What is fun? Well, that is where it gets a little tricky, as fun is subjective to each person. For us a “fun” game has five successful attributes:

Easy To Learn
A game must be easy to learn. Most of us gamers see a game that we like and want to give it a go as quickly as we can. Rules therefore need to be straightforward, clearly laid out and easy to refer back to. Any difficulty in understanding or applying the rules only serves to detract from the players’ enjoyment of the game.

Intuitive
When a game is intuitive your are almost able to play it without knowing the rules. Surmising from your own experience and common sense you can see what actions should be available, what outcomes can be expected, and so on. If a game requires the players to be intimately familiar with the rules before they can really make sense of what is going on, or if it results in a lot of head scratching “that doesn’t make any sense” moments, then it really isn’t intuitive.

Challenging
Even though a game is easy to learn, it should not be easy to master. Our favorite games are those which have no “best deck” or “perfect army list” possible. Instead players should all have the same basic resources and options available to them, then only through their flexible strategies, creative tactics and clever recognition of opportunities will they prevail.

Flexible
Flexibility to us is one of the cornerstones of a truly exceptional game. Flexibility is the ability to adapt and utilize the game in ways that keep it fun and challenging for the players, and even allow for players’ ever changing interests. The rules of a game should serve as a toolkit by which you can craft your own perfect game through scenarios, the use of different genres, exploration of different historical periods, the addition of new models, etc.

Engrossing
When a game is truly engrossing, you can never quite stop thinking about it even after it is done. You are always rolling around in your mind what your next game will be, what should be in your next army, how you might better utilize your game assets, etc.

So as we design our games we try to pay close attention to these attributes, because if we find it to be a fun game, there are bound to be other folks who will like it too. We invite you to give our games a try and see if we have been successful in creating “fun” games…

Home of Easy to Learn, But Hard to Master Games

Creative Ideas

Our Philosophy