Case Study : Arms & Industry
So what do you get when you mash up Settlers of Catan, Axis and Allies, and the desire to keep all of your players continually engaged during a 5 hour game? The answer is Arms & Industry.
First incepted in 2013, A&I has been a longstanding labor of love and probably my longest-running ongoing project. It is a multiplayer geopolitical military strategy game for 2-10 people designed to engage every player on every turn. You gather resources, build armies and infrastructure, negotiate alliances and work your diplomatic chops to ensure you end up with the most powerful empire by the end of the game, all while avoiding defeat, backstabbing and the occasional rogue nuke.
With a randomized hex-based map and dynamic resource distribution, no two game experiences are the same!
I’ve been doing focused playtesting the entire time the game has been in development. Each time we gather to playtest, I take copious notes around things that need to be tweaked or rebalanced. We spend time at the end of each game discussing as a group what was working and what wasn’t, any loopholes or broken mechanics we discovered, and ways we can make the gameplay smoother. My main focus is on fun and smoothness of play, so every design decision has to pass those two criteria.
The board is laser-cut MDF that I then hand-painted to create the different terrain types. The plastic pieces are mostly from other games that I bought in bulk and painted to each team’s colors. I did all of the graphic design on the resource tokens, cards, and player sheets. Since the game is still technically under development, many of the tokens and pieces are temporary designs while we try out new mechanics.
