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We Advanced in the BGDL Design Challenge!
Character Board
This is the current state of what each player will have sitting in front of them. The middle area is the 4×10 inch board that you put markers on and use for reference. The instructions above and below are just here now for convenience but will be printed elsewhere when the game is published.
Combat – Defense Basics
The graphics shown at this stage in development are still in the works. These will change for the better at release.
You, or someone you are playing with, plays the part of the Bad Guy during your turn. Oh no! You are being attacked by A Nun on Spring Break! Let’s look at her card:
- Red: This is her POWER. Not much to be scared of here. A smart Waple (like that would ever be true) would try to position himself into melee range so she would have to fight with only one die.
- Orange: Her ranged DUMB LUCK attribute is much higher so she’d be attacking with five dice in ranged combat. Notice her Tactics say she will try to position herself that way.
- Green: Always trying to avoid a fight, Waples often deploy this tactic. Not everyone is able to be bribed. Most bad guys will have a low-ball price that is harder to roll for and a high price that is easier to roll. She just has one price and that’s pretty high. Looks like she’s sort of forced into taking it though. Probably for the orphans.
- Escape: This shows what a Waple needs to roll to chicken out from a fight and run away. That’s not a bad thing though, you’ll grow a chicken feather.
- Movement: The larger number shows the number of moves she makes per turn. She will generally follow the path on the tile. The green and red numbers, however, indicate if she is going to be passive and ignore you on this turn or if she will advance toward you and try to attack. You roll one die to determine that at the beginning of her turn.
Alright, time for her turn. She is walking on the path that is shown on the tile. If you are playing solo, you would roll for her. If you are with other Waples then one of them will roll for her. To determine if she is going to continue on her merry way you roll one die: and it’s a six! Of course, the one red one.
Let’s look at the board here. Biff, your Waple in this example, is standing there on the right. Surrounding him are different colored squares shaded in red and orange. These colors aren’t normally on the board, they are just there to illustrate where his circle of death is. The red tiles show where the bad guy would have to be for a melee attack. The orange ones are for her ranged attack.
Her move score is two. If she had been passive she would have continued walking to the left and then up the board. But since she is now being aggressive she takes whatever way she can that leads to your position. She is able to move two spaces to the right and look where she is, in an orange ranged tile.
Let’s update that tile, shall we?
Alright, now Biff is in for a shock! She is able to roll for her attack. Since her DUMB LUCK is five she will roll five dice. The good thing is that, unless otherwise noted, she only gets to roll once.
Let’s say, since I don’t have Biff’s card done yet, that he has a defense of three. This means that any threes that she rolls will miss Biff. However, he also has a special ability that if the bad guy rolls two sixes, Biff is able to run away. The nun rolls… 5… 6… 3… 1… 6! The three misses since that’s Biff’s defense score. The one and five hit for six damage to Biff. The two sixes mean that Biff can choose to escape from this fight.
Does he run? Well, one way to gain points to level your Waple is to chicken out and run away or beg for mercy. Waples have a small amount of chicken DNA with a small amount of gluten, and this causes a chicken feather to sprout in such a case. Biff only needs one more chicken feather to be able to train to level three, so you bet your butt he’s going to run. Level three, here I come!
Combat – Melee and Dumb Luck
Combat in WAPLE worlds is chucking up to 10 6-sided dice based on each character’s strengths or weaknesses. Please keep in mind that this is a prototype and may change. The cards will look better later.
I’ve included two different examples here: Wally “Walla” Wapleburger, the giant manager of wrestler Biff Waple, and Spiff Waplespunk, the teenage son of Spanky, the Waple’s marketing guru. These graphics are WAPLE “HERO” CARDS
You can consider Wally to be somewhat like an ogre or troll. He’s big and slow, has a huge defense and a slow but strong swing. The first stat, in red, is his BASHING skill, which is for MELEE attacks. At level 0 it is a five, which is the highest you can start with. The one below that is DUMB LUCK, sort of like dexterity in other games, and is used for RANGED ATTACKS. You’ll notice his is only a 1, the lowest you can have. The third, in blue, is DEFENSE, and again he has a five. The next two are ESCAPE and MOVE but that’s for another day.
Each of these stats can be leveled up to modify your Waple. The white boxes show where Wally can put extra points to increase the base stats. The grey boxes show that he can’t go any higher. So Wally can get up to 10 in bashing or defense but can only have a maximum escape of two.
Waples start at level 0, so let’s assume that for now. If Wally wants to hit an opponent, he will start with five dice, Unless otherwise noted, Waples always roll at least five dice for BASHING and DUMB LUCK. You can roll up to three times and freeze the numbers you want to hold.
Looking at the dice chart on the bottom in red you can see that Wally, if in melee range, needs to roll fives. The first row is how many need to be rolled for the initial hit, followed by the points of damage that hit does. Since Wally swings his two-pound turkey leg slow but hard he has to roll three fives and has three rolls to get it. If he doesn’t get three then he misses. If he does get three he does 15 points of damage to his opponent. If he gets any fives beyond the first that are required, he will do more damage. A total of four fives means 15 for the initial hit and then 10 more damage for the fourth five that was rolled. He then gets five more points of damage for any fives beyond that.
Let’s assume Wally is level five and has put all his points into BASHING so that all of the white spaces in the BASHING row are filled. He can now roll 10 dice. You always roll five dice for an attack but then add one more for each space you fill in for that stat. Rolling the initial three fives is now much easier, as is the next five and any thereafter.
The last die shown in his attack is a red six which is an exploding die. Each time Wally rolls a six he does an additional five points of damage and it can be rolled again. You can freeze sixes and add their damage and re-roll but remember that they don’t count at all if the initial hit, in his case the three fives, isn’t made, so be careful when you freeze these.
When in ranged position, further back from melee, Wally can try to roll three ones. Again, he has three tries to do this. If he gets the three ones he will temporarily blind the bad guy, who will have to roll two less dice on his next turn.
Now let’s look at another Waple, Spiff. He’s younger, weaker and faster than Wally so he has completely different rolls to make. You can see his melee BASHING stat can only go up two more times, allowing him to roll seven dice, but his dumb luck can go to five which, when added to his default roll of five, means he can roll up to 10 dice, if he chooses.
Looking at his BASHING rolls he needs ones and twos. The first row shows what he needs to make the initial hit with his rubber sword: a one and a two. If he gets just that he will do two damage. After the first one and two are frozen, any additional ones and twos are added up to show additional damage. Therefore, if he rolls 1,1,2,2,4 you could reorder them like |1,2| for the first hit of two, then another |1,2| that sums to another three. The four doesn’t count. If he added two to his BASHING level and rolled seven dice, he could potentially roll 1,2,2,2,2,2,2 which would be |1,2| two for the initial hit and |2,2,2,2,2| summed up to another ten for a total of 12 damage.
Additionally, if he rolls any sixes he can freeze them until after the third roll, at which point he adds three more damage and re-rolls that six to see if he can get another one or two to add to the total, or another exploding six to add three and re-roll again.
If Spiff doesn’t want to get into melee range, he can stand a little further back and try throwing his plastic ax at the bad guy. In this case he needs to roll two threes for the initial attack and then each additional three adds three more damage. If he loaded up his dumb luck with another five skill points he would throw ten dice. if these were all threes he would do 27 damage, three for the first two threes and then three more for each additional three.
The Game Tiles
WAPLEworlds is made up of game tiles based on the whichever theme you are playing; these could be a city, the jungle, a space station, an alien planet, or Biff Waple’s mamma’s house.
The tiles are 6×6 one-inch squares. Some are blank, some have locations, others have random spots where you may find things. There is also a path that shows the direction in which any bad guys on that tile may move.
When you first start a game, you will place a tile on your regulation-sized WAPLEworlds gaming table¹. You’ll then place your Waple(s) on the START space, and in neighboring spaces if you have a friend to play with. You’ll then roll six 6-sided dice, add them together, pick a BAD GUY from the BAD GUY DECK and place its marker on the number rolled. Note that the picture here doesn’t have numbers added yet, but just imagine them for now, pretty little numbers all over it. Never mind, the fact that numbers weren’t on it was driving me crazy, so I just added them.
You may notice a squiggly line going throughout the tile. That there is the path that the bad guy takes while stomping around his turf. The white arrow with the grey border on the path shows his starting direction of movement. Each turn he will move a certain number of spaces, based on his MOVEMENT score.
You are probably already thinking out your strategy, eh? “I’m going to avoid the Fat Lady in the Electric Shopping Cart by going around the bottom of the map. Well, that’s where you’d be wrong, maybe. Before moving a bad guy, you will roll a 6-sided die and see if she will be passive and continue on her merry way, or if she is going to be aggressive and HEAD RIGHT FOR YOU! AAAHH!!!!
There are also respected establishments for you to enter, and some not so respectable:
- If you are tired you can go to Pepe’s Motor Lodge for some rest.
- Big Al’s Fat Camp is where you’ll want to train up and add skills to your Waple.
- Scam and Save is this neighborhood’s trusted pawn shop.
- When you have explored multiple tiles and want to travel a long distance, go visit Abdul’s Roach Coach. His certain items on his menu give you so much gas that it’ll launch you up and over to other tiles!
- The Dark and Scary Alleys are great places to encounter things… sometimes.
- Cheese dip is the Waple staple. Hey, I’m a poet and didn’t know I was! I haven’t decided if the blank yellowish orange space will be the queso store or if you buy that at the roach coaches. But queso will give you energy. For that case, the motor lodges may not be needed if they do what queso also does. Eh, time will tell.
Oh, one last thing about these tiles. Both Waples and Non-Waples can only move horizontally or vertically, unless they have a special item that says otherwise.
And the arrows on each store indicate the door and the side on which you must enter. You can’t just walk through walls, unless you are certain characters.
Another last thing, those solid black lines are barriers. When you flip over a new tile you cannot walk through those.
¹Not provided. We hear that some people have been able to play on other surfaces but we can’t say for sure.