Invisible City Productions

Divine Nuke Wrath · 29 September 07

A quick co-op / competitive game of anarchy and destruction for 3 to 4 demigods.

Divine Nuke Wrath

by Jonathan A. Leistiko and the attendees at ProtoCon 9.

Object

The end of days draws near. The ruler of the Pantheon will be whomever has the most devout followers in Heaven. You’d like it to be you. Be careful, though! The God of the Underworld has always resented his (or her) position, and may try to subvert our followers to meet his own ends.

You Need

A Divine Nuke Wrath board.
A Heaven board.
A Limbo board (with two regions: Step 1, and Step 2).
An Underworld board (with two regions: Styx and Underworld)
A homogeneous pool of neutral people pawns (64).
4 homogeneous pools of follower pawns (50) with one hero token each, each pool distinct from the other.
A deck of Divine Action cards for each player.
A Divine Wrath chart.
A Disaster chart.
A divine favor totem.
A bowl or other opaque container.

Setup

Put the board where everyone can see and reach it. Do the same with Heaven, the Underworld, Styx, Limbo, and the Disaster Chart.
Pick a set of follower pawns with matching hero token.
Select a player to start with the divine favor totem.
Starting with the player with the divine favor totem and passing left, put your avatar in a region.
Distribute the neutral pawns evenly among the players. Starting with the player with the divine favor totem and passing left, take turns placing up to 3 units in one or more regions. You may not place any units in regions adjacent to your avatar.

Play

Play in DNW is simultaneous. Play occurs in three phases:
1) Player Phase
2) Game Phase
3) Cleanup

Player Phase
Secretly select a divine action.
Once all players have selected a divine action, reveal your divine actions simultaneously.
The player with the divine favor avatar chooses the order divine actions resolve in.

Divine Action general rules
Before you resolve your action, you may move your hero to an adjacent region.
Your hero token does not count as a pawn.
If you can not pay the whole cost for the divine action you picked, do not attempt to pay the cost and do not resolve the action
You may perform an action that requires your hero in a region where you only have a pawn. To do this, move one of your pawns from that region to your piece stash and move a neutral piece from the piece stash to the first step of Limbo, then pay the cost for the divine action.

Divine Actions
Recruit
Cost: Move up to 2 neutral people pawns from your hero’s region to the piece stash.
Resolve: Replace them with the same number of your pawns from your piece stash.

Convert
Cost: Move another player’s pawn from your hero’s region to that player’s piece stash.
Resolve: Replace it with one of your pawns from your piece stash.

War!
Cost: Move any pawn that isn’t yours from your hero’s region to Styx.
Resolve: If that pawn’s controller has any pawns left in that region, he or she may pay the cost and resolve this action or choose not to pay the cost. If you remove a neutral pawn, the player on your left acts for the neutral pieces. Neutral pieces go to the first step of Limbo instead of Styx.

Total War!
Cost: Move one of your pawns from your hero’s region to Styx.
Resolve: Move any pawn that isn’t yours from your hero’s region to Styx. If that pawn’s controller has any pawns left in that region, he or she must pay the cost and resolve this action. If you remove a neutral pawn, the player on your left acts for the neutral pieces. Neutral pieces go to the first step of Limbo instead of Styx.

Ascend
Cost: None.
Optional Cost: You may move one of your pawns from your hero’s region to Styx.
Resolve: Move up to 3 of your pawns from your hero’s region to Heaven. If you paid the optional cost, you may move all of your pawns from your hero’s region to Heaven.

Boom!
Cost: Move three of your pawns from the board to your piece stash.
Resolve: Move three neutral pieces from the piece stash to the first step of Limbo. Move all pawns that belong to other players from your hero’s region to Styx. Move all pawns that are yours from your hero’s region to Heaven. Move all remaining pawns to the first step of Limbo.

Influence
Cost: None.
Resolve: Move up to 5 pawns (neutral or yours) from their region to a adjacent region. The pawns do not have to of the same type, and they do not have to start or end in the same region.

Empower
Cost: Remove your avatar from its region. Replace it with one of your pawns from your piece stash.
Resolve: Remove one of your pawns from any region. Replace it with your avatar.

Accelerate
Cost: You must play two divine action cards at the same time you play this card. Move two of your pawns from the board to your stash.
Resolve: Move two neutral pieces from the piece stash to the first step of Limbo. Pay the cost for and resolve one of the action cards you played with this card, then pay for and resolve the other action card.

Double
Cost: You must play another divine action card at the same time you play this card. Move two of your pawns from the board to your stash.
Resolve: Move two neutral pieces from the piece stash to the first step of Limbo. Pay the cost for and resolve the action card you played with this card, then pay for and resolve that card again. If that card has a specific area of influence, you may pick a new target for the second use.

Game Phase
If there is no God of the Underworld, each player secretly conceals a number of tokens in his or her hand. Reveal all tokens simultaneously. The number of tokens is equal to the Disaster chart effect that occurs. Remove this many souls from the Underworld.

If the sum is zero, repeat this step twice.
If the sum is greater than the number of souls in the Underworld, the highest bidder (and only the hight bidder) takes the effect of the highest effect the Underworld could purchase.
If the sum is within the range of souls in the Underworld, the highest bidder is immune to the effect.

If you are the God of the Underworld, you may move any number of souls from the Underworld to their respective piece stashes. Take the Disaster chart effect whose number matches the number of souls you spent..
Resolve the Disaster Chart effect. Any neutral people who die go to the first step of Limbo. Any followers go to the Underworld.

Cleanup
If there is no God of the Underworld and you have the most followers in Styx this turn, put all souls in Styx in the Underworld, then put all souls in the Underworld in a bag and draw one at random. If the follower you draw is one of yours, you are the God of the Underworld! Put all souls back in the Underworld when you’re done.

Move every soul in Limbo up one step. Move all souls who step off the second step of Limbo back to the map. Put them in the least populated space. If there is a tie, the player with the divine favor avatar chooses which space.

Each player may move his or her avatar to an adjacent region. The player with the divine favor avatar chooses the order players move in.

Pass the divine favor avatar to the left.

Ending the Game and Winning

The game ends:

if all players but one have followers on the board (not counting the avatars).
if there are no neutral pawns on the board
when a player has 15 pieces in Heaven

If you have the most pieces in Heaven and more pieces in Heaven than you have in the Underworld, you win.

If you are the God of the Underworld and you have more pieces in Heaven than any other player, you win. You also win if no other player has more pieces in Heaven than they do in the Underworld.

Origin & Credits

I hosted the “Let’s Make a Game” panel at ProtoCon 9 for the second year in a row this year. Last year’s panel resulted in Cetacean Ascension Moonbase 8. This year’s brainstorming session started with the following premises:

Screw other players over, co-operative play, religion theme, quick pace, explosions, diceless, guns, apocalypse.

...and this is the game that came of it.

Why’s the game so rough-looking? I made it in less than a week, so cut me a little slack here! If you want to make a new board and such, I’ll happily link to it.

Hey, there. I tried cobbling together a set and playing this last night. I even got a few turns in before stopping when I realized the game didn’t actually work.

The problems, not necessarily in order of importance:

1) Recruit and Convert totally obsolete War! and Total War!. Versus neutrals, Recruit will give you a +2 pieces, in addition to taking two of theirs. Convert is the same, only half as effective. Meanwhile, War! will rarely be more than zero-sum, and Total War! is more likely than not to give you a net loss. Which would be terrible, if it wasn’t for…

2) There is hardly any reason to fight. Sure, if someone is close to winning you could kill off a few of their guys, but there’s no advantage in taking their territory. You can’t even get rid of their avatar, which is the one thing that you /would/ be concerned about in your territory. There is almost no reason to attack neutrals, because they won’t even do a thing to you. In fact, attacking them is generally counterproductive, as you want as many neutrals in your territory as you can so you can Recruit them.

3) You might not even want to get out of your little corner in the board, as you can just suck hordes of Neutrals in with Influence.

4) The disaster chart is neat. Really, really, neat. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most problematic parts of the game. For example:

a) The descriptions have disastrously (har) mangled spelling, occasionally contradict the rules (Do followers go to the Underworld or Stix?), and are sometimes just unclear.

b) The chart is completely missing a ninth entry, and there’s no explanation of what to do if the Disaster Sum is greater than 10.

c) At the start of the game, when there’s no one in the underworld, no player is going to bid more than 0. Then what? Will they keep doubling disasters infinitely?

d) The disaster chart and the immunity auction don’t seem to be developed with each other in mind. It’s no skin off my back if Limbo Step 2 gets dumped into the underworld, or if 10 neutrals somewhere die. It’s even less so if the guy with the Divine Favor token losses a bunch of pieces. 4 and 5 look more like rewards than disasters.

e) There is no rules on how to select what souls to spend.

f) The God of the Underworld. This deserves its own section, below.

5) The God of the Underworld:

a) The rules are unclear. Do the guys in Styx only get dumped into the Underworld one and only one time, when the Underworld God is crowned? Or does it happen at the end of every turn?

b) There is absolutely no way the other gods can harm the Underworld God. Absolutely none. The Underworld God can just spam 1 or 2 every turn, continually getting a net increase in souls. If he wants to get funky, he can cast a higher level disaster and do even more damage. And what can the others do to stop this? Nothing! They can’t kill his guys, it would only increase his power, and it wouldn’t stop the attacks anyway. They can’t get rid of his avatar. They can’t even prevent themselves from being targeted. So what can they do? Only win first, and that’s hardly a cooperative goal.

c) In fact, now that I look at it, you’d even /want/ to become the God of the Underworld, since it’s only going to help you in the end.

6) Boom! is a far better deal than Total War! and Ascend combined. You can get the maximum effects of both for only a slightly more of a cost.

7) There’s no reason to pay the optional cost of Ascend, unless you’re about to get the Divine Favor token next turn and get nuked by the Underworld God, and that hardly counts. Waiting an extra turn for an additional point is well worth it. Not that you’d ever have the huge piles of followers you’d need, the net fastest you can get them is two a turn.

8) The terminology in the rules is incredibly inconsistent. We have units, people, pawns, followers, tokens, souls, and pieces; and heroes and avatars. Seriously, pick one and stick with it.

Having said all that, I like the /idea/ of the game, which is why I went to the work of making a prototype in the first place. Here, in fact, are some fixes I suggest, and will probably try again with:

1, 2, and 3) Have a new type of resource, Divine Mana tokens. Each player starts with five (or so).
Most powers cost Divine Mana, equal to Cost + (Enemy and Neutral Pawns – Your Pawns), rounded up at 1. Costs I’m currently thinking:

Recruit: X for X new followers.
Convert: X*2 for X new followers.
(Total) War!: Free
Ascend: 3*X for X into Heaven.
Boom!: I’m not even sure how much it would need to cost to be balanced.
Influence: Free for your guys, +1 for every neutral you move. Also, rather than moving five guys, it really should be any number from Territory 1 to Territory 2.
Empower: 1 for the first time you use, +2 for the second, +3 for the third… see below for why this is so.

Accelerate/Double: 2, in addition to any other costs.

Also, instead of sacrificing one of your own pawns, the cost to cast farther away is 1 Mana for every territory away. If you don’t have an avatar on the board, the cost is 3.

How do you get this stuff? Every turn, you get one Mana for every territory you COMPLETELY control, i.e. only you have pawns there.

In addition, there should be Temples, one less than number of players, either drawn on the map itself or added by the non-divine favor players. Temples give +2 additional Mana, and the Power Cost (not any additional costs from distance or an enemy presence) is free. This is where you’ll want to be sending up most of your pawns… if you can get one.

Combat should be completely redone, but that’s not hard. Just snatch the mechanic from Peep War. Put everyone in a bag, mix it up, whoever is drawn wins. Avatars can join the fun by spending X Mana to put X extra pawns in. In a Total War!, neither side can retreat, and any avatars on the losing side are removed from the board. Thus why Empower can reach exorbitant costs, this ought to hurt a little.

4) The disaster chart just needs redone, period. Although most of the entries make sense with a little common sense applied, they need to be in a better order. Some are way too powerful for their number, others are way too weak. I may try just swapping them around and seeing what happens.

In addition, no bidding happens if there are no pawns in the underworld, and if two 0s are summed in a row, the round ends with no disaster.

5) After the God of the Underworld is crowned, every turn Styx is emptied into the Underworld. I think this was your intention, anyway.

In addition, the God of the Underworld no longer gets Mana from land, although he still has the Temple bonus. Instead, any player may offer the God of the Underworld any number of Mana during the Game Phase, after the Disaster is selected. If the God of the Underworld opts to take any player’s bribe, that player is immune. The God of the Underworld is free to take any other “unofficial” bribes as to who to target, but he needn’t obey them.

If this is too hard on the God of the Underworld, he could also use pawns in the Underworld as Mana or alternately still get Mana the normal route. I will play and see.

8) I’d say use pawns and avatars exclusively. Completely clear.

One last miscellaneous rule: If your avatar was killed, but you have no power left, you are eliminated. If you manage to destroy the God of the Underworld this way, the Underworld returns to the auction system.
— Dyslexic Q-Thief Sep 14, 01:24 AM #
And now that I post that, I realize I forgot a few more things:

If the Disaster Sum is greater than any effect on the chart, it just counts as whatever the top one will end up being.

Any choices needed to be made by the God of the Underworld when there isn’t one are either made by the highest bidder or the player to the left of the highest overbidder.

And either the player should start with a load of Mana or a big group of followers in his starting space.
— Dyslexic Q-Thief Sep 14, 01:31 AM #