FTL Is A Board Game
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2012 4:20 am
It took me a while to realize this, but if you consider it FTL is effectively a very complex board game that handles the bookkeeping automatically.
You have land tiles, each providing a different resource like attack strength or oxygen. You have three kinds of pieces you can move around the board, power, crew, and targets. Your money is scrap, missiles, drones, and fuel. On a very basic level, investing scrap in a subsystem has a lot in common with buying hotels in monopoly. You're enhancing a piece of land so that it can sap resources from the opponent. Random events could be viewed as a form of chance and community chest cards.
In fact, what element of FTL could not be recreated in a similar form with paper and dice? All of it I suspect, but the bookkeeping would get too time consuming. It would be easiest if converted to a turn based game, but even a real-time game where both you and someone playing the opponent can call a time-out at any moment to issue new orders could potentially work, and use stopwatches to measure things when things happen like weapon firing , engine spin-up, and health loss from oxygen.
The strength of FTL is that it combines many different kinds of board games together, and based on random chance and player choice draws in elements from different ones. One playthrough of FTL might be a more tactical game, like checkers or chess. Another playthrough might be more luck based, like candyland or chutes & ladders. Many playthroughs rest somewhere between those two extremes, where there's a healthy dose of luck involved but you can make gambles based on calculated risks. The game stays fresh because it's really hundreds of overlapping similar board games and you get a different one each time.
You have land tiles, each providing a different resource like attack strength or oxygen. You have three kinds of pieces you can move around the board, power, crew, and targets. Your money is scrap, missiles, drones, and fuel. On a very basic level, investing scrap in a subsystem has a lot in common with buying hotels in monopoly. You're enhancing a piece of land so that it can sap resources from the opponent. Random events could be viewed as a form of chance and community chest cards.
In fact, what element of FTL could not be recreated in a similar form with paper and dice? All of it I suspect, but the bookkeeping would get too time consuming. It would be easiest if converted to a turn based game, but even a real-time game where both you and someone playing the opponent can call a time-out at any moment to issue new orders could potentially work, and use stopwatches to measure things when things happen like weapon firing , engine spin-up, and health loss from oxygen.
The strength of FTL is that it combines many different kinds of board games together, and based on random chance and player choice draws in elements from different ones. One playthrough of FTL might be a more tactical game, like checkers or chess. Another playthrough might be more luck based, like candyland or chutes & ladders. Many playthroughs rest somewhere between those two extremes, where there's a healthy dose of luck involved but you can make gambles based on calculated risks. The game stays fresh because it's really hundreds of overlapping similar board games and you get a different one each time.