Playing With Legos

I’ve had fun with games like Mobile Frame Zero but there’s a lot of dice and a little bit of record keeping that slows the game down. The addition of non-building block parts (dice) means I store my builds and dice seperately. I’m not here to complain about MF0 it’s a good game, I’m just relating my thoughts so you the reader will know where I’m coming from.

My son plays Legos with several other lads. They build cars, spaceships and robots and bases and they’ve constructed a massive hierarcy that says who can do what. They have ranks for individual build and they have a way of telling how powerful a build is. They use translucent parts of various colors to indicate the abilities of their build.

Using this concept, I’ve built a game that uses only building blocks as game pieces. There are two main aspects of strategy and a lot of the game centers on the player’s ability as a builder.

The main move is called a “Force Trade” where an attacker tells his opponent that they must trade parts off their build. Each player has a set of “Spares” that they keep to trade with their opponents. This is used to damage builds but it also gives the player a chance to recoup their build by using the spares to rebuild.

There’s a bit more than that in the core of the system, but not a lot. So far it handles a good deal of the things you could run into in a game except for a few, like a build that carries a giant missile. So far that would be a very costly weapon to use for not a lot of benefit the way the rules are constructed. I need to figure out a side rule that would handle that. Play order has a few hiccups that make it more complicated than it has to be. There’s a gem of a method for resolving it in there but it needs polishing to shine. There was another issue that was brought up, that I can’t remember now, but whatever it was, I’ll have to fix that too.

I’ll post the game as soon as I work some of the kinks out. So far it looks like fun.