Quirkworthy

Teratons are big and tough and have the disconcerting ability to teleport away from trouble. In some games this will come up a lot; in others it will hardly feature. In all games their ability to smush most opponents easily will be a core feature of play. balancing this is their far lesser ability to score quickly. But then, as with all fighty teams, they can always take the view that dead opponents don’t score well either.

Let me know how you get on with them.

Teraton team Beta v1

The Nameless really do have a name, but for the purposes of this Beta we’ll not fret over that just yet. Let’s focus on the gameplay.

The team has a couple of signature features. The first is very good Strikers. The second is the pairing of the two types of Guard. Used together they can be devastating.

I’ll let you find out the rest for yourself.

Nameless team Beta v1

Well yesterday went so well that I’m going to start putting up the team stats for you to play with today.

Each team will be posted separately so that we can try to keep the attached comments  reasonably on topic. That will help ensure that I don’t miss anything important.

The first two teams will go up today and the other two tomorrow.

Note that these are all still in playtest so do feel free to join in and give them a go yourself. Simply proxy some models and get them on the pitch! Assuming you already know the DreadBall rules you’ll find all the extra information you need for each team in its pdf.

Back from today’s playtest day at Mantic HQ. It was a healthy mixture of both laughter and deep discussion which made for a very entertaining and useful session. The teams are looking very good and each has its own character and tactical challenge as you will see shortly. I won’t tease you with more details as you’ll have the proper rules for each soon enough. What I will tease a bit is the multi-player game we had afterwards.

We had four games running in all, one each of 3, 4, 5 and 6 players. The testers were on their third game of the day by then, each playing with the same new season 3 team they’d had all along. By this stage they were well into the swing of their new side so they were able to cope with the anarchy of a multi-player bash. And what anarchy it was! Zees are bad enough on their own, but when you get two of them together with another four teams it was more than a little busy round the table. Some photos below. Note that almost all models are proxies.

The 6 team game made for a very busy pitch.

Not so much in the 3 team version.

In case you were wondering who to blame. 

The games came in at between 90 and 120 minutes or so play time, which is about right. Obviously it takes longer to play games with many more coaches, though the first game to finish was actually the 4 player one which ended in a landslide.

Overall the multi-player game is a bit more light-hearted than its smaller cousin and several of the testers said it would make an ideal pub game. I’m not sure the non-gaming public is ready for that, but you never know.

In all, a good day 🙂

Tomorrow is another “secret” playtest day, this time for the new teams and multi-player version of DreadBall’s Season 3. It’s always fun to see what folk make of the new stuff for the first time and how much they manage to break in the first half hour. There’s always something 😉

As you can see from the cover art above, it’s an expansion that’s full of alien goodness as well as a new class of absolutely enormous players that I’m calling GIANTS. One of them has tentacles too.

Tomorrow’s closed playtest session will (hopefully) iron out any remaining major bugs in the teams and make a start on the multi-player game. Those are the first two major elements and need to be built on in that order. The GIANTS come last as they need the framework of the other elements to work within. It would be nice to get everything tested at the same time, but the reality is that even doing two elements is a stretch. Brains get fried ever so quickly at these events.

All of which brings me to something I mentioned yesterday, which is a public testing phase. This will start next week once I’ve taken the feedback from tomorrow’s games and written up any changes that are required. We’ll start, as the playtest day does, with the new teams. They’re things you can easily proxy a few models for and get on the table straight away. All you need is the stat sheet and any new abilities that apply – you know the rest 🙂

If the Deadzone alpha/beta was anything to go by I expect to be quite busy once this goes out…

I’ve settled on a set of team rules for our next playtest day, after which I was thinking of throwing them out to you guys for comment. They’ve been tricker to develop than previous teams as they’re getting increasingly subtle and thinky in their tactics. But that was always the intention.

It will be interesting to see how they interact with the very straightforward teams from the core game. I’m thinking in a year’s time, perhaps, when folk are really starting to get their teeth into the subtleties of each team and have evolved individual team tactics and styles. I’ll start this off by including a few more tactical hints in with these ones than I did with earlier teams because their real strengths aren’t necessarily obvious on paper. The real excitement is in developing your own though.

Even so, there will be some initial surprise as always with new teams, though I think things will settle down quickly enough. After all, the game only came out last November and we’ve come a long way with it since then. It’s not even a year old.

So I’m afraid that whilst I’ve been up to my ears in new stuff recently, I can’t really show you any for a few more days. Bear with me though, they’re a fun lot and I think you’ll have a blast testing them out.

One thing I’ve talked about before, but haven’t mentioned much of late is the online DreadBall results tracker.

It’s still there, quietly vacuuming up all the results it can find, and you’re more than welcome to add to the data. The more the merrier, and the more useful it becomes too.

It’s worth having a play about with the tabs at the top too. Changing from the last 100 games to the whole data set and back again allows you to see how things have evolved over time (and continue to). I’m happy to say that my predictions over the dominance of the human team has proven to be broadly correct so far, though we’re not done yet and I’m sure there’s plenty more settling to be had. The bad boys at present are the Judwan, though even they are far from unbeatable.

Also of note is the Forge Fathers who seem to be coping fine now. A last 100 games filter shows them at exactly 50/50 wins and losses. Can’t say fairer than that.

Personally I’m most surprised by the female humans and the Orcs doing so poorly, though my previous analysis of the Orcs still holds true (at least in my head). It’s hard to be certain though, which is why I’d like you all to add your results to the mix if you would. Don’t worry about recalling games you’ve already played, just try to add new ones as you play them. Let’s just keep moving forward.

Currently the data set is still small enough to be skewed by a group of players having trouble or otherwise with an individual team. The more games we can include the more the set becomes useful as an analytical tool and the better this helps us to balance the teams overall.

Also, if you know other people who play DB but don’t post results here, please let them know.

Every little helps 🙂

Season 3, or Ultimate as it’s also known, is the next instalment of the DreadBall range and one that you’ll see some more of over the next couple of weeks. As the public testing for Deadzone was so useful we’ve decided to do a bit more with some of the S3 stuff, notably the new teams.

The new bits in Season 3 break down into three main areas: new teams, GIANTS and multi-player rules.

New teams (and MVPs) are the sort of thing you know already and should be fairly easy for you to take and try out for yourselves when the rules have been tidied a little. Regardless of the weirdness of the teams themselves, the rules for using a team are simple enough. Once you’ve played a couple of teams you won’t have trouble with the new ones. As you may remember, there are four new teams in Season 3: Asterians, “Nameless”, Teratons and Zee.

GIANTS is the collective name for the multi-hex players. They’re a bit like MVPs, but bigger.

Multi-player games is simple enough in concept, though less so in design. The challenge is to keep it playing as simple and quickly as it needs to with all the extra coaches and players involved. I’m getting there.

Anyway, watch this space for beta versions of the new teams, coming soon 🙂