The Thirteenth Hour Podcast #441 and Like a Hood Ornament #54: A Preview of The Rocketeer vs. the Third Reich Card Game
https://archive.org/download/podcast-441/Podcast%20441.mp3
This week, I’m talking about a Rocketeer card game that is a supplement to the Rocketeer choose your own adventure story that I recently finished, itself the backstory to the game I’ve been working on in GDevelop5. This is my first attempt to make a card game, and it was quite a bit of fun. While the full thing will be released with the story after some more play testing, I wanted to talk about it here a bit first. The story follows the basic premise of the story, where the Rocketeer must traverse a German castle in WW2 to rescue his friend, Peevy, who has been captured by the Third Reich (who wants to make their own rocket troopers). I used the pixelart that I designed for the game as the card art as well as an analog version of some of the game play mechanics that I had not yet worked out, like how to handle health, fuel, and ammunition.
The game is played as the Rocketeer advances one card at a time closer to Peevy, uncovering cards that might contain scalable parts of the castle, enemy soldiers, and powerups.
Some of the cards are parts if the castle wall, and you have the option of climbing or flying to the next vantage point:
How the game starts:
In this case, the next enemy is a German rocket trooper, and you have 3/4 of a tank left, which you can keep track of on paper or by turning the care to match the amount depicted on each side of the card.
The game ends when you have progressed, card by card, to Peevy.
Here are the rules as they stand now:
-Needed: Two 6-sided dice. A piece of paper and pencil to jot down your inventory may also help.
-Start with the Rocketeer and Peevy cards.
-Shuffle the rest of the deck and randomly draw at least 8 cards and place them face down in a line. More cards = a longer game.
-Put the Rocketeer card at the start and Peevy at the other end.
-The rest of the deck will be your draw pile.
-The object of the game is to make it to Peevy. To do so, you as the Rocketeer will climb or fly over the castle to where Peevy is being kept captive while either avoiding or defeating enemy soldiers.
-You start the game with 12 HEALTH (100%), 4 FUEL (100%), & 10 rounds of AMMUNITION.
-Start playing by uncovering the first card in the line.
-If that card is a wall piece, it means you can either climb or fly to it. Roll to see if you can climb. If you roll < 7, you can’t climb. However, you can fly there if you have enough fuel. If you don’t, take your chances by drawing another card and placing it over the first one.
-Each flight or succesful climb advances you one card closer to Peevy.
-Your rocketpack holds enough fuel for 4 turns (unless you use up all your fuel at once, thus advancing 4 spaces).
-While you may encounter extra fuel when you uncover a card, it is best to use your fuel supply wisely. To keep track of how much fuel you have, you can turn the Rocketeer card so that the fuel tank indicating your amount faces Peevy.
-If you encounter an enemy, you can avoid a confrontation by flying away (assuming you have enough fuel), or you can choose to fight.
-Combat is turn based. First, determine enemy health via a dice roll. When your attacks have exceeded half the enemy’s health, you have defeated the enemy. (E.g. if enemy HEALTH = 8, once your attacks exceed 4 damage, you have defeated the enemy and can advance one card up.) Next, roll for both the Rocketeer (and the enemy. The high roller gets to attack first.
-The Rocketeer can use either hand to hand techniques (punches or kicks) or his pistol (which requires AMMUNITION). You can do one unarmed technique or fire one bullet per turn. Unarmed techniques are not as powerful, but are necessary if you have no bullets or wish to conserve them> . Your attacks are considered hits if you roll a 7 or above. Rolling a 6 or below is considered a miss, meaning it’s now the enemy’s turn. If you decide midway through the battle that discretion is the better part of valor, you use your next turn to fly away if you have enough fuel.
-Each time you are hit, subtract the amount of damage (eg -4) from your health. If you get to zero, the game is over unless you a health pack to heal yourself.
-Speaking of which, some cards are power ups, giving you additional bullets or health. There are also a few that add to your luck. Should you encounter any of these cards on your journey, keep them and then advance to the next card. Use them as you see fit.
-When you reach Peevy, you have won the game.
For younger children:
-If you wish to play with younger children, there are a few options to make the game simpler. Although it is designed for one person to play solo, a parent can also function as the game master to help with keep track of stats and rolls.
-If parents wish to remove most of the combat aspects of the game, remove the ammunition cards from the deck prior to playing. Combat now becomes essentially symbolic and the only statistics to keep track of are fuel and health. When the player encounters an enemy, instead of rolling to see who goes first, the high roller is the winner of the confrontation. If the Rocketeer loses (i.e. gets a low roll), then subtract the number of the roll from the Rocketeer’s total health. At zero, the game is over. The player can still choose to avoid combat entirely by flying away.
Thanks for listening!
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– though the Lara animations have come in handy in all the other times I’ve needed something similar, it would nice to finally use them for somewhat of their intended purpose.
– I figured that Lara could get a cloak at some point that would make her less visible, making her less able to be seen by enemies. In the Rocketeer card game, Cliff had a rocket pack he could use to avoid combat and get to places, so what if Lara had some sort of detectability statistic that determined how much noise or visibility she possessed?
– I also wondered if Lara could acquire various weapons as she went through the the journey, just like the video games that inspired it. She would start with pistols, but if she found ones with more abilities, like fully automatic fire, she could use those instead. I could also give each weapon some stats for its use to determine how its handling would affect the likely of it actually hitting what Lara was shooting at, to account for things like recoil. On each card, I could include the instructions of how to roll to account for these differences. For the sake of simplicity, I might assume that all weapons use the same ammunition so there’s one ammo stat to keep track of.
– Lara could start out with her use basic acrobatic abilities, but she could level those abilities up over the game to do additional things, like going from a backflip to a backflip with more height, covering more distance, or adding in a half twist to land in the opposite direction.
– I also wanted Lara to have an unarmed attack that could more silent and not use any ammunition. She might be able to level that up as well to increase its power or cover more distance, e.g. with a jump.
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