Goldberg's Gambit
DESCRIPTION
A Risk-like abstract strategy game for 2-6 players. Play takes place on a 3-dimensional board shaped like a Goldberg polyhedron.
Players aim to expand their domains across the board and build up their energy while both attacking and defending themselves against opponents. The last player standing wins!
MY ROLES
Game Design
Programming
PROJECT TYPE
Personal/Hobbyist
ENGINE
Unity 5
GENRES
Board Game
Abstract Strategy
Mind Game
Background
My primary inspiration for this project was a prototype for a simple abstract strategy game developed by my brother, who was himself inspired by the board game Risk. His game is unofficially titled: 'Not Risk'.
In Not Risk, up to 6 players aim to expand their domains across a square/rectangular board divided into square tiles. Players make moves by either capturing neutral tiles or neutralising opponent tiles. Each player has a certain amount of energy which controls how many moves they can make per turn. They can build energy by capturing bonus territories on the board, but will only retain that energy for as long as they can hold that territory. One last important element is the split mechanic, where dividing an opponent's domain completely neutralises all but the largest division.
Shown below is a screenshot demonstrating the gameplay of Not Risk using 'greedy' bots (programmed to target the closest bonus territory at any time).
In a sense, Not Risk is a simplification of the core concept of Risk without attempting to emulate a 3D network, while also eliminating the disparity of initial territories occupied by each player, and finally introducing some brand-new mechanics such as energy and domain splitting. This makes for quite a different overall experience to the original Risk, forcing players to take formations and weak points into consideration with each decision they make.
For some time, I had envisioned the concept of a strategy game that simulates warfare across an entire planet rather than just a flat 2D area, believing the lack of borders could add an interesting new layer of strategy. Seeing an opportunity to put this concept into practice by using Not Risk as a template, I set myself the objective of redesigning the game for the third dimension.
Redesigning the Formula
A while before beginning this project, I had taken an interest in both 2D hexagon-based tiling systems and complex polyhedrons, especially Goldberg polyhedrons. This is what led to my decision to set my version of the game on a Goldberg polyhedral board, with each face representing a tile. In designing a 3D version of Not Risk, to an extent I was mimicking Risk's usage of a 3D network. However, I consider mine to be much more intuitive and easier to understand than that of Risk. While Risk relied on a 2D world map with lines showing arbitrary connections between regions in order to convey how its network was laid out (which is not easy to visualise for most people), my game's use of a tiling system makes it much more straightforward to work out the most optimal path between any two points on the board.
Due to being set on a 3D board with no borders, Goldberg's Gambit is almost perfectly uniform in terms of adjacent tiles across the board. All hexagonal tiles are adjacent to six other tiles, while all pentagonal tiles are adjacent to five hexagons. For this reason and perhaps others, players are able to reach their opponents' domains much more quickly than in Not Risk. Because of this, I chose to add a lot more barriers around the map compared to Not Risk, which didn't need as many.
Redesigning the Mechanics
While for the most part the core mechanics of Not Risk carry over verbatim to this project, I had to make a few design changes.
Firstly, I knew Goldberg polyhedrons to contain exactly 12 pentagons, with the remaining faces being hexagons. In Not Risk, players must always capture an edge tile first. As there are no 'edges' on a 3D board, I decided that players should only be able to begin on a pentagonal tile. Additionally, each pentagon now serves as a life force for whichever territory contains it. Neutralising a pentagon in an opponent's domain will completely neutralise that domain unless it is connected to at least one other pentagon, while splitting an opponent's domain will neutralise any part of it which is not connected to any pentagons. This naturally led to me dropping the original split mechanic from Not Risk, which had been made redundant. From now on, each player's territory can exist in multiple divisions, as long as each of them is connected to at least one pentagon.
Late into development, I came up with the idea for a brand new mechanic that involves dividing the energy across a player's domain whenever the actual domain is split. From now on, each segment of a split domain only contains the amount of energy from the bonus territories it directly occupies, rather than the total amount occupied by that player. This means splitting an opponent's domain affects their mobility, as the opponent will now only get a certain number of moves per segment. This replaces the previously discarded split mechanic, similarly incentivising players to fragment their opponents' domains like in Not Risk. Players can also reconnect their own domains in order to restore their mobility.
Post-Mortem
Overall, I am pleased with the outcome of this project. The game offers fundamentally the same gameplay experience as Not Risk but with a 3D board and various small mechanical changes to complement the new borderless network and map layout. During development I was able to experiment with different map types, including orders and even classes of Goldberg polyhedrons to use as boards. I achieved this by writing a general algorithm for generating a polyhedron then tweaking certain variables to produce a range of different maps. This demonstrates that the concept is malleable and easy to expand on.
Moreover, I found the development of this game to be a good learning experience, as I gained a new understanding of working in 3D and picked up a number of smaller skills such as building meshes from code.