Zomblobs! is finally in a playable state! It’s a tabletop tactical wargame, played on a map with hexagonal cells, miniatures (folded paper for this version) and six-sided dice. It’s the beta, so it’s not yet precisely balanced or perfectly presentable, but it’s playable! (If you print out the PDF and prepare some paper, anyway.)
Zomblob!
I’ve worked long enough in the game industry to believe that game testers are the last line of defense between a working game and a broken one. There’s definitely more polishing I want to do before I call Zomblobs! an alpha-release-worthy product, but it’s in a state where the game will benefit greatly from playtesting and experimentation.
Polishing can be pretty prickly
If you all have the time to at least read through the rules and give me some feedback, I’d greatly appreciate it. If you have time to print out the game and play it for a while, I’d really love to hear what you think of it.
Many thanks for your interest! I’ll be writing more articles on the game, especially if there’s something important to address that I haven’t yet covered in my previous articles.
Consume or be consumed!
For Science!
UPDATED!
Now, in convenient just-under-19 MB size! It’s a bit JPEGgy, but that’s just how the Zomblob crumbles.
…and, because commenter “ironshield” down there has a very good point on printing, here’s the exact same data split into a “text” file and an “extras” file, just in case you want them that way.
Zomblobs Rules Beta Extras (unit tokens, maps, map widgets, templates, that sort of thing)
Zomblobs! looks like a huge amount of fun, I look forward to trying it out some time soon, though I think I may need a couple more reads through to be confident I’ve understood everything. I’m not really a table top gamer so this is all very new to me, but I’m pretty sure I understand the basics already, so good job on that front.
Just reading through the rules, there was a typo on page 8, LOD instead of LOS.
It might be helpful if it document was broken up into smaller parts. Manual, Units / cards & boards for instance. It would help downloads and be easier to print as you’d want the manual double sided to save paper, but you can’t double side the cards / pieces.
I also had a thought about tracking the Health, Time and Heat of your units. Since there are three cards across the width of a page, you should be able to fit the whole squad of 6 on the long side of one page. As such if you had a bunch of simple B&W pages with six columns (one per unit) and each of these had three columns, one for Health, one for Time and one for Heat. Players could mark them with the starting value for each of their cards, (placed at the bottom of the column) and then cross off used at the beginning and add at the end, then if you ever catch up to the end you are out of that resource.
I look forward to trying this out as soon as I can. It won’t be real soon unfortunately, RL has gotten a little berserk (as my three week blogging gap might hint).
ironshield, thanks for stopping by and for the kind words! I went through and fixed that LOD and a couple of other typos and things I wanted to clarify. Your idea of making graphic design tracks for… er… tracking unit data has merit, but I can’t fit a squad of six on a single page. Not at that size.
It might also be worth noting that none of those three bits of data, Heat, HP and TP, are likely to only move in one direction then reset. Heat and TP will modulate all over the place, and HP can even be “healed”, it doesn’t just deplete. As such, you’d not really have much use for crossing out entries, you’d rather be moving a token/coin/pin as needed up and down the value scales. I’m not really convinced that’s better than using a die or just paper and pen… but it’s certainly another way to track things.
Does that make sense?
Tangentially, this is also why the “HP grid” on the Unit Cards is kinda… unnecessary. I may well use that space for something else. Also, at present, all units have 12 HP… that may change. I do want default HP indicated on the Unit Cards, but it could be a much smaller graphic design element. I’ll tinker with that after I get all the unit portraits done and make better, spiffier cards for the alpha release.
Yeebo, thanks! I hear you on berzerk schedules. Good to hear you didn’t fall off the edge of the world, though. :)
Congratulations Tesh. As someone who only managed to scrape a “D2 in art class at age 14 before dropping it forever I am in awe of your creativity.
Now to see if I can interest one of my family members in a game!
This looks great. A quick gut reaction from reading 1/3rd of the rules, I’d recommend fleshing out the part devoted to time points in the intro page with just a bit more details, as you later refer to them without explaining at least twice, which detracts from readability.
Something along the line of “Units units all have personal clocks, and
they will act when ready. Each game action may add TIME POINTS that speed up or slow down these personal clocks, so that units get ready at
different moments of time, depending on tactical choices of all players. Tracking Time Points and making the most of careful planning is crucial to success.”
Building on Ironshields’ idea for the counter tracker, one approach could be to add a landscape-oriented page that serves as a “dock” for the 6 cards, with the HP, TP and heat scales below it, with slightly bigger fields. That gives you the best of both worlds: more space on your cards, but also fields where to track progression. You could even add a series of right-sized tokens to track these.
Another quick observation: POW is never properly defined, and it took me a couple of seconds to realize why there is a WILL stat but no POW stat on the unit cards. On the section “Unit cards and stats” you could simply add “MDEF and RDEF are used to defend against POW attacks” to spell it out explicitly.
RL calls but I’ll give it some more time later this week.
We have Boy Scouts tonight so I won’t be able to play tonight, but I should be able to playtest it with my son tomorrow night and this week. Once we get the handle on how it plays I’ll see if I can talk my wife into playing a few games with us to get her feedback.
In the meantime, I’ll read through the rules and give my Editor’s eye a workout.
Thanks, everyone! I’ll be making some tweaks to the text when I get a minute, to try to fix these troubles. I appreciate the “editors’ eyes” that you all offer. :)
I’m not quite sold on the “unit channels” for tracking unit information, but I think it’s more a question of how to make it useful instead of unwieldy, rather than discounting the idea. I’ll experiment with it. Thanks!
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