Entropy City: Making a Wargame

With PAX Australia now behind me and having taken a couple of days to recover from that last minute rush I felt it was time to take a look at how things went. I’ve certainly had a lot of feedback on the direction of the game that’s been constant and there’s been a few things that continue to come up that I know I need to look at but before I get to those I wanted to talk a little about how I actually got into PAX. Truth be told I didn’t initially, when I submitted my application it turned out that I (and a number of others) had been sent the wrong link and told to apply through 2022’s application.

So I paid for my own passes to pax, as I hadn’t gotten in and I was happy with that and looking forward to seeing more this year as the year before Id had an injury and struggling to get around and therefore missed most of it, less than a week before I had a message from one of the TGDA admins asking if I was interested in filling in for one of the drop outs on either Friday evening or Saturday morning, I agreed without question at the time, only realising afterwards that this means I was giving away the time I had paid to see things but I felt it was worth it.

A lot of my prep had already begun because DevCon was on Thursday which is a local game developers conference always run the day before PAX (as far as I know) so my weekend started with me leaving my tape measure behind meaning plenty of people has comments and asked but no game demos happened on Thursday night though ironically if anything I’m shocked at how much I still got from this. Most members of the TGDA are developing board games and card games at different levels of complexity, the highlight for my playtesting being “Nightshift” which was a game set in a strip club that was insanely fun.

Friday was the beginning of PAX and only one I could enjoy until 4pm because of a double booking I had made that evening and it was this day I noticed the first hiccup, long story short I spent most of Friday running around trying to organise the last few hiccups to try and ensure things went smoothly the following day, so occupied doing this that I didn’t take any time for myself at all, that evening I went to a Wrestling event for a meet and greet and a great show and then it was up early to be at the event in time the following morning.

Saturday Morning started with a hiccup Id tried to solve the day earlier, as I had been asked to fill in last minute I hadn’t received what should have been a different type of pass so security wouldn’t let me in, after a few back and forth I was inside and setting up on the smaller tables, given the table only allowed for a 2×4 setup Im somewhat amazed at how good the table looked and given I was the only tabletop miniatures game on display within their set up it helped me stand out a little, there was only a period of maybe 25-30minutes where I didn’t have at least one person in front of me, the smaller table meant action was pretty much immediate, each game starting pretty much the same way as I deliberately set myself up to be attacked by the players and then responding, giving them opportunities to get a grips with the WIP mechanics.

Of the 8 people I had that morning only 2 of them had played miniature games before and even then one of them was many years earlier, in the wee hours the night before Id rushed together a little checklist for feedback and I had every player go through and fill it out, everyone was very positive in their feedback as 3pm rolled around and my rush to pack up for the next people in time had failed I somewhat literally staggered away trying to figure out how I was going to enjoy the rest of the convention with this giant bag, my first answer was food and then I figured I would try and get it checked in at the cloakroom, running into a friend who was asking where my set up reminding me how easy it was to get lost at PAX but I reassured him how busy it was and then enjoyed my meal and then 20minutes later I shocked myself by going home and literally collapsing in exhaustion at home, the week of stress and panic had broken me. But there are two main pieces of advice I wanted to cover and now here they are.

I think you need some traps.

Now this is ironically something Ive wanted to introduce since the earliest days of starting work, its just not something Ive been ready to introduce yet for a number of reasons, I wanted to get the guns implementation done first before I introduced the next big thing but I wanted to talk a little about what I saw.. The first obvious one is a Molitov Cocktail, it’s something that could be thrown at a person or the ground to create a fire trap, explosives they must make sense but how they work is the hard thing, oil slick is another obvious one and a staple of vehicular combat, and finally a spike trap like what the police use on the highway. This is something I am 100% going to be introducing just I need to work on templates for them all and how I intend for them to work.

What about some on foot mechanics, I think you need them.

Now at first I assumed me meant as just an addition to the game which you may know was already in the plans for the future but no this is actually a piece of feedback Id had before in the earliest days of the game. When someone comes off the bike, what if you could just stay on foot and the mechanics allowed for it. In the earliest days of playtesting this was mentioned before and I’m not 100% sure who it was it might have been something Michel asked when reading my rules or it might have been one of the players themselves but my argument at the time had always been that it just wasn’t how I wanted the game to work but at the same time I’ve never been comfortable with a game that would end up requiring two minis for every one character on your army list. But I might need to start considering my options if its something players feel is a hole in the games logic.

In closing I guess I’m going to reflect on PAX, without question a very exciting opportunity to have been given and whilst I can’t say I actually enjoyed PAX in the traditional sense this year I don’t want to give the impression that’s a complain, it was a very fulfilling experience, I think its safe to say though that if Im going to do that next year it wont be at the last minute like I did this year.